As Trump, Putin meet in Alaska, story of how ‘Russian America' came to US

Indian Express

4 days ago

In the early hours of March 30, 1867, US Secretary of State William H Seward signed a $7.2 million deal to acquire Alaska from the Russians.
The Alaska Purchase was widely criticised at the time. Newspapers famously called the deal 'Seward's Folly' and referred to the frigid Arctic territory as 'Seward's Icebox' and 'Walrussia'.
Yet, when asked by a friend what he considered the most significant act of his career, Seward replied without hesitation: 'The purchase of Alaska… But it will take the people a generation to find it out.' As things turned out, he was right.
As the American and Russian Presidents meet in Anchorage on Friday, here's the story of how the US acquired Russian America, and in the process struck gold (and oil).
Humans have called Alaska home since at least 14,000 BCE when foraging groups crossed over a land bridge that connected the Chukchi and Seward peninsulae.
Then, some 10,000 years ago, sea levels rose and the Americas were cut off from the rest of the world for more than nine millenia. (Scholars have long debated about pre-Columbian contact between the Old and New Worlds, but evidence thus far has been wanting).
There is no clear record of when Europeans first visited Alaska, although it is likely to have been some time in the 17th century. It was in the 18th century, however, that two expeditions funded by St Petersburg and led by Vitus Bering, a Danish-born Russian cartographer, returned after exploring the northwestern coast of Alaska.
Colonisation began soon after, spurred by the fur trade.
'If it had not been for the sea otter and its beautiful fur, the Russians would have been in no hurry to follow up on Bering's discoveries. Within a few years the hunt for fur led to the enslavement of the native Alaskans called Aleuts, and to the virtual extinction of the sea otter in that part of the world,' historian Daniel Cohen wrote in The Alaska Purchase (1996).
The Russian-American Company, Russia's first joint-stock company, officially came into being in 1799 with the mission of establishing new settlements in Alaska and conducting trade.
The Russian American colony was based largely on the coast. Operating out of the island settlement of Novo-Arkhangelsk (now known as Sitka), at its peak, Russian America stretched all the way to Fort Ross in California. (The Company sold Fort Ross in 1841).
By the mid-19th century, the Russians had hunted most of the bear, wolf, and sea otter populations, valuable for their furs and pelts, to near-extinction.
As profits from the once-lucrative fur trade dwindled, Russian America, often referred to in St Petersburg as 'Siberia's Siberia', became an albatross around the neck of the Romanovs, and a drain on state resources.
'The fate of Russian America had become a subject of concern and debate in Russia even before the outbreak of the Crimean War (1853–56),' historian Lee A Farrow wrote in Seward's Folly: A New Look at the Alaska Purchase (2017).
But it was the Crimean War, in which Russia suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of an alliance comprising the French, the British, and the Ottomans, that proved to be a final nail in the coffin for Russian imperial ambitions in America.
'In the spring of 1857, Grand Duke Constantine, brother of the new tsar, Alexander II, wrote to Minister of Foreign Affairs Alexander Gorchakov that Russia should sell its North American territories to the United States,' Farrow wrote.
'The grand duke emphasised the needs of the Russian treasury, the declining value of the colony, and his belief that the Americans were eager to control the whole of North America,' she wrote.
It would take another decade of on-and-off negotiations with the Americans for the deal to materialise.
By all accounts, Seward's enthusiasm was what made the deal happen.
'Seward was an energetic and ambitious man who yearned to be President… He certainly typified the expansionist mood of mid-nineteenth-century America. Seward didn't want just Alaska; he envisioned the US taking over Hawaii and the Philippines, and to the north Greenland, Iceland, and even Canada,' Cohen wrote.
That said, there were some sound economic and geopolitical considerations to make the purchase, even at the time. Many believed that Alaska would help expand commercial relations with Asia, making new ports and routes available for the Pacific trade. Others, like Seward, saw the purchase as a stepping stone to eventually taking over British Columbia.
But the true economic value of the colony would gradually be realised over the next century.
By the 1870s, with the gold fields in California depleting, some prospectors began making their way to Alaska. A couple of them struck gold on Alaska's southeastern coast in 1880. While gold was never a major source of wealth for the economy as a whole, it helped capture people's imagination, sent many flocking to the frigid north, and made some lucky ones extremely rich.
Much more transformative was the discovery of oil — and a lot of it. After a few promising findings in the 1950s, oil prospectors began taking greater interest in Alaska. In 1968, America's largest oil and gas deposit was discovered in Prudhoe Bay, a remote region along Alaska's northernmost coast, profoundly changing Alaska almost overnight.
'Alaska has become established as America's greatest oil province,' Alaska Governor William A Egan said in a 1970 speech, according to an article in NPR. 'Ponder for a moment the promise, the dream, and the touch of destiny.'