Alaska.
The Last
Frontier.

Alaska has been inhabited for at least 15,000 years — some estimates push that to 30,000 — by peoples who crossed from Asia when the Bering Land Bridge connected the continents during the last ice age. The Athabascan, Yup’ik, Inupiaq, Aleut, Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian peoples developed distinct cultures precisely adapted to the most extreme environments on the continent. When Vitus Bering, sailing for Russia, sighted the Alaskan coast in 1741, he encountered a land already thoroughly known by its inhabitants.

Russia’s American enterprise lasted 126 years. The Russian-American Company harvested sea otters to the edge of extinction, established settlements at Sitka and Kodiak, and ran the territory as a commercial monopoly. By the 1860s, the fur trade was exhausted and the territory was a financial burden. Secretary of State William Seward negotiated the purchase from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million — about two cents per acre. The American press mocked it as “Seward’s Folly” and “Seward’s Icebox.” Within 30 years, the Klondike Gold Rush would make fools of the mockers.

The gold rush of 1896-99 transformed Alaska overnight. Stampeders poured through Skagway and Dyea, climbed the Chilkoot Pass, and floated down the Yukon River to the Klondike fields just across the Canadian border. Dawson City boomed. Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Nome grew to supply the interior. Jack London wrote his most famous stories from this crucible. The Alaska Railroad, completed in 1923, connected the coast to the Interior and opened the territory for the first time to something resembling normal commerce.

World War II made Alaska strategic. Japan bombed Dutch Harbor in June 1942 and occupied Attu and Kiska — the only American territory seized by a foreign power since the War of 1812. The Alaska Highway was built in eight months by the Army Corps of Engineers, pushing 1,390 miles of road through wilderness that had never seen a machine. After the war, Alaska’s strategic importance in the Cold War was obvious: it sat directly across the Bering Strait from the Soviet Union. Statehood followed in 1959.

The 1968 discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope transformed Alaska’s economy again. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline, completed in 1977, carries oil 800 miles from the Arctic to the ice-free port of Valdez, and oil revenue funded the Alaska Permanent Fund — a sovereign wealth fund that pays an annual dividend to every Alaska resident. The 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound was one of the worst environmental disasters in American history and permanently changed the debate about Arctic development. Alaska remains a place where enormous natural wealth and profound fragility exist in the same landscape.