{"id":2230,"date":"2011-12-31T01:00:33","date_gmt":"2011-12-31T05:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dontow.com\/?p=2230"},"modified":"2012-04-11T02:01:27","modified_gmt":"2012-04-11T06:01:27","slug":"how-alaska-left-russia-and-became-part-of-the-u-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dontow.com\/2011\/12\/how-alaska-left-russia-and-became-part-of-the-u-s\/","title":{"rendered":"How Alaska Left Russia and Became Part of the U.S.?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This summer my family and I took a two-week cruise\/land-tour of Alaska.\u00a0 While we were immersed in enjoying the tranquil beauty of Alaska, we were also fascinated by the history of Alaska, in particular, how did Alaska leave Russia and become part of the U.S., which is the topic of this article.<\/p>\n

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Early History of Alaska:<\/strong> As we all know, for a long time in the distant past Alaska in North America and Siberia in Asia were connected by land.\u00a0 So wanderers from Asia traveled across the land connection from Asia into North America.\u00a0 These early Asian explorers and settlers were the ancestors of today’s Native Americans.\u00a0 There are three major groups of Native Americans in Alaska:\u00a0\u00a0 (1) Aleuts who live mostly in the Aleutian Islands, (2) Inuit (or Eskimos) who live mostly in the northern part of Alaska, and (3) Tlingit who live mostly in the southeastern part of Alaska.<\/p>\n

Approximately 10,000 years ago, due to some major geological shift involving sea level changes, the land connection between Asia and North America was broken, and water, now known as the Bering Strait, separated the two continents.<\/p>\n

Russian Occupation and Control of Alaska: <\/strong>The origin of European settlers to Alaska is not very clear, but many believe that the first European settlers to Alaska were Russians around the mid-17th century.\u00a0 The recorded history of European contacts with Alaska began almost a century later.\u00a0 Shortly before his death in 1725, the czar of Russia, Peter the Great, commissioned Vitus Bering, a Dane who served with the Russian navy, to conduct an expedition going north along the coast of Siberia to try to find where it is joined to America.\u00a0 Men and material had to be transported 5,000 miles from St. Petersburg to the Pacific Coast of Siberia, and a ship (St. Gabriel) had to be built.\u00a0 So this expedition didn’t take place until three years later in 1728.\u00a0 Although this expedition never landed in North America, they did find out that Asia and America were not connected, and named the sea separating the two continents the Bering Strait.<\/p>\n

In 1741, Bering launched a second and more ambitious expedition, called the Great Northern Expedition, with the intention to reach America and open trade between the two continents.\u00a0 The Great Northern Expedition did not achieve its objective of opening trade between the two continents, and many of the expedition members including Bering, did not survive.\u00a0 However, the expedition did discover large populations of sea otter in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska.\u00a0 In the face of starvation, sea otters provided food to the sailors, even though they disliked the taste and texture of otter flesh.\u00a0 More importantly, the sea otter pelts could keep them warm.\u00a0 The Russian fur traders, known as promyshlenniki, knew that the sea otter furs could command enormous prices in the Chinese fur market.\u00a0 As a matter of fact, they were considered to be so valuable that they were called “soft gold.”\u00a0 Since the sea otter in Siberia had essentially been decimated, they were overjoyed to hear from the expedition members about the large number and ease of catching them.\u00a0 This began a flourishing trade by the promyshlenniki.<\/p>\n

Although not necessarily reflecting the attitude of the Russian government in St. Petersburg,\u00a0 the promyshlenniki treated the native Aleuts as barely human, and slaughtered the Aleut men without provocation and enslaved the Aleut women and girls.\u00a0 Even though the Aleuts tried to fight back, especially in 1762, they had no weapons to match the Russian muskets, and it triggered a reign of terror in the Aleutian Islands so that over the next four years, 3,000 Aleuts (men, women, and children), which was about 10-30% (depending on which estimate is used) of the total Aleut population at that time, were slaughtered.<\/p>\n

It took about 20 years until 1784 before the first Russian permanent colony was established on Kodiak Island in Alaska, and it took about another 20 more years until 1804 before Russia set up a Russian-American Company to control all Russian activities in Alaska.\u00a0 Since there was no attempt at conservation, as the sea otter population got decimated in one locality, the fur traders would move to another locality, thus moving farther east and south in Alaska.\u00a0 Finally the Russian-American Company transferred its headquarter from Kodiak on Kodiak Island to Sitka (between Juneau and Ketchikan).<\/p>\n

Since the main problem for the Russian settlers was a reliable supply of food, as it was very expensive to send supplies from Siberia to Sitka.\u00a0 One solution was to trade with American traders.\u00a0 Because the Russians didn’t want to become too dependent on the Americans as they were rivals to become a power in the Pacific coast, an interesting fact of history was that Russia tried to establish a Russian agricultural colony in Northern California.\u00a0 In 1812, they constructed a fortified settlement, named Fort Ross (an old form of a word for Russia), just north of San Francisco.\u00a0 The plan was to raise crops and animals that would be shipped to Sitka or other parts of Russian Alaska.\u00a0 However, the Russian settlers and their native Alaska workers (Aleuts) were not good in raising crops or cattle.\u00a0 As a matter of fact, the Aleuts, being sea hunters, had never even seen cattle.\u00a0 Fort Ross was a total\u00a0 failure to provide food for Russian Alaska, as it barely produced enough food to feed itself.<\/p>\n

Economic Decline of Russian Alaska:<\/strong> The two problems of rapidly declining sea otter population due to over-killing and the huge cost of providing supplies to Russian Alaska and the failure of Fort Ross no longer made economic sense, at least in the short term, for Russia to continue its interest in Alaska.\u00a0 Another interesting piece of history is that in 1841 Russia sold Fort Ross for $30,000 to the American John Sutter, the owner of Sutter’s Mill about 120 miles east of Fort Ross where gold was discovered in 1848.\u00a0 Adding to these two problems was the fear that Russia was in no position to defend Alaska if another foreign power (e.g., Great Britain) wanted to seize the Alaskan territory.\u00a0 So around the 1850s, Russia began looking to sell its unprofitable Alaska territory. [1] \u00a0 This desire was enhanced when Russia was decisively defeated by the British and the French in the Crimea War (1853-1856). [2]\u00a0 The U.S. was interested, and talks between the two sides continued until 1860 when the U.S. was immersed in its bloody and costly Civil War.<\/p>\n

The Alaska Purchase:<\/strong> When the Civil War ended in 1865, the U.S. renewed its interest in purchasing Alaska.\u00a0 There were several reasons for this interest:<\/p>\n