Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land

by Walter R. Borneman

But if such a broad view is necessary, why is this entire sweep of events—this big picture of Alaska’s history—important, or even insightful? Alaska’s historic themes are surprisingly consistent and reoccurring: new land; new people; new riches—and ever-present competing views over their use. These themes have been played out by many different personalities, events, and responses over the years, but to better appreciate their place in the puzzle—to get one’s hands around the whole story and pick up the puzzle—requires a step backward.

What is without question is that Alaska was the gateway to the Americas. There may have been other avenues of settlement, but the majority of evidence supports a stream of migrations from Asia to Alaska that then spread throughout North and South America. So when did people first make this journey? Pick a date between 30,000 and 15,000 years ago, and there is apt to be an argument to support it. There is little agreement on dates, and some theories suggest that these migrations occurred in several phases, perhaps thousands of years apart.

Long called the Bering Land Bridge, this “bridge” was in fact over 1,000 miles wide at the lowest sea levels. It extended from the general area of the Pribilof Islands to more than 500 miles north of the current Bering Strait. Look at a map of the floors of the Pacific and Arctic Oceans, and the extent of these continental shelves becomes apparent. With lower sea levels, this “bridge” was a huge plain that is now called Beringia.

Changes in sea level occurred gradually over considerable time. Naturally, the “bridge” was also a gateway for land animals as well as a barrier between marine animals in the Pacific and Arctic Oceans. As the plain became exposed, hunters followed game onto it. Whether these first people were “just passing through” or actually settled in Alaska is debatable, but because they were of a hunter-gatherer culture, it is likely that any passage southward was gradual. Evidence of human occupation of Alaska dates from about 11,000 years ago—probably long after these migrations started—and comes in the form of small stone hunting tools, called microblades. Again, how “permanent” this occupation may have been is debatable. When the ice sheets began to melt and the sea level rose, this was also a gradual process. Even after waters formed the Bering Strait, probably about 12,000 years ago, there is evidence that there were cultural exchanges between the two continents, and there may even have been continuing smaller migrations from west to east.

That said, it seems overly simplistic to say that there are four major cultural areas of Alaska Natives: Aleuts throughout the Aleutians; Inupiat and Yup’ik Eskimos along the Arctic coast; Athabascans in the interior; and the Tlingit and Haida of the southeast coast. But it is a place from which to begin.

The much-storied igloo was really used only as an emergency shelter when hunting parties were caught away from their villages.

Disputes among men within local groups were settled by song duels—apparently something akin to a “battle of the bands.” Each of the feuding parties took turns singing songs that sought to set the record straight and belittle their opponent in the process. These were sung before the group, and the group’s laughter and cheering gave praise, bestowed ridicule, and helped determine which of the two crooners ultimately withdrew in shame. When that happened, the duel ended, and the matter was declared resolved.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember about Alaska’s Native peoples is that all believe that at the basis of all life is the land. Their existence, whether searching for a solitary bowhead whale off St. Lawrence Island or casting nets into a rush of thrashing salmon in the Stikine River, depends on nature’s bounty. It has always been a tenuous balance. Alaska Natives took the first steps in this land, and their proud traditions continue.

History’s shorthand has long suggested that the goal of the expedition was to determine whether Asia and North America were connected. In truth, this question had apparently been settled some years before—although both Peter and Bering seem to have been oblivious of that fact. In 1648, Semen Ivanovich Dezhnev, a Siberian cossack, sailed eastward with ninety men in seven small boats from the Kolyma River on the Arctic coast of northeastern Siberia.

For whatever reason, Peter’s orders to Bering strongly implied that the continents were in fact connected. Bering was directed to reach the place where Asia “is joined with America” and then continue along the coast “to any city of European possession.” If possible, he was to hail any European vessels he encountered and learn from their crews the names and mapping information applied to this new land. In other words, Peter wanted to know just how far his European rivals in the west were encroaching on the North American continent, and how long it would be before they were also knocking on his eastern door.1

The immediate impacts of Bering’s and Chirikov’s voyages were few. Russian bureaucracy moved with glacial speed, and, as always, it was difficult to maintain interest—and the funding necessary to act on that interest—in lands thousands of miles to the east. There were always more pressing matters to be addressed at the doors of Europe. Upon the return of the survivors of these voyages, however, a seed was planted that was to grow into the tree of the Russian American Empire. That seed was furs. Bering’s survivors, principally Chirikov’s men, managed to return with a load of rich furs, particularly the pelts of sea otters. These caused a sensation, and slowly but steadily the promyshlenniki began to island-hop their way from Kamchatka to the Komandorskies and then eastward along the Aleutian chain.

During the half century after Bering, these efforts were largely private. The Russian government dispatched an occasional survey and kept a wary eye on reports of what the Spanish were up to along the North American coast, but by and large this was a fur rush of private entrepreneurs bent on individual fortune. What a contrast there was to be between this capitalistic approach, especially as championed under the laissez-faire policies of Catherine the Great from 1762 to 1796, and the strong involvement of both church and state in the later affairs of the Russian-American Company.

In 1774 as part of this overall plan, Antonio Bucareli, viceroy of New Spain, ordered Juan Josef Perez, a veteran captain who had been ferrying colonists and supplies to the California missions since the founding of San Diego five years earlier, to sail north from Mexico and show the Spanish flag. Perez was to sail the Santiago to a latitude of sixty degrees north and land here and there, claiming the best locations for Spanish settlements. This course would have brought him all the way to Steller’s Kayak Island. But scurvy, as Steller well knew, was more of an enemy in those days than the unknown. Its outbreak and the North Pacific’s typical weather conspired to turn Perez southward well short of his goal. His farthest northerly landfall was somewhere off the western shores of Prince of Wales Island, near what would later be named Bucareli Bay.

Perez returned to Mexico but was ordered to take the Santiago north again the following year, this time under the command of his superior officer, Bruno Heceta. With the Santiago sailed a minuscule thirty-six-foot schooner, the Sonora, under the command of Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra. Somewhere off the coast of present-day Washington, a landing party was dispatched from each ship. Heceta’s party took formal possession of the Pacific Northwest for Spain. The party sent ashore by Bodega to fill water casks was massacred by Natives.

Meanwhile, Perez’s earnest lieutenant, Estévan Martinez, was busy supplying the California missions. Martinez happened to be in Monterey in 1786 when he lent a hand and piloted two French ships into the harbor. The Frenchman La Pérouse brought news from the north that the Russians were far from sleeping. Spain, it seemed, must continue to look to its northern borders. Consequently, the Spanish viceroy ordered Martinez north for another reconnaissance. In 1788, in command of the Princesa, Martinez reached Kodiak Island and Unalaska in the Aleutians. There he learned of Russian plans to establish a post at the quiet little inlet that he had first visited with Perez on Vancouver Island fourteen years before. Returning to Mexico, Martinez proposed a bold move to check the Russians: establish a Spanish outpost there before the Russians could do so themselves. The viceroy concurred, and on May 5, 1789, Martinez sailed into Nootka Sound. But the neighborhood was already getting crowded. The Russians were not there, but an English ship was, along with a small schooner from that upstart nation of thirteen former colonies on the Atlantic coast. Martinez was not pleased.

When news of this confrontation in a once-quiet Northwest cove reached the governments of Europe, all rattled their swords and threatened war. At issue was far more than Nootka Sound as a base for lucrative fur-trading operations. The underlying international law principle was whether any nation—in this case Spain—could hold exclusive title to land by virtue of discovery alone. In a turn of events ominously predictive of the tangling alliances that later led to the First World War, Spain looked to aid from France, while England sought alliances with Prussia and the Netherlands. In the fledgling United States, President George Washington and his secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, agonized over the prospect of England and Spain waging a global war centered upon the very landscape that they hoped to claim for themselves in due course. In the end, tensions cooled when England and Spain signed the Nootka Sound Convention on October 28, 1790. The Nootka Sound Convention was another of those treaties to which Russia was not a party, but which nonetheless cast a shadow over its future moves. In effect, Spain gave up its exclusive claim by right of discovery to the Pacific Northwest, and Spain and Great Britain mutually agreed that each country was entitled to trade and build settlements on those parts of the coast not previously occupied.

Some writers have tended to downplay the importance of the Spanish to the exploration of Alaska, citing as evidence the lack of permanent settlements and only a handful of remaining Spanish place-names scattered across the map. Yet it was the Spanish reach north from Mexico into the North Pacific that concerned Russia from the time of Peter the Great. Yes, the English would sail these waters and interject themselves into the fray, and somewhere, far, far away over the rugged Coast Range, there were English colonies, but for the better part of a century, it was the Spanish who were on the most direct collision course with Russian America. In retrospect, the Spanish threat to Russian America proved more imagined than real, but Spanish and Russian interests stood face-to-face at Fort Ross in northern California as late as 1841. That open warfare never developed between Spain and Russia was more because each had overextended its respective empire and was worn out, rather than that Alaska was not worth winning.

Over the course of the next five months, Cook cruised northward along the Alaskan coast, mapping key features but finding no continental passage. With Cook were two Englishmen who would later captain their own ships and leave their own names on Pacific charts, Midshipman George Vancouver and Master William Bligh. Together they cruised the Alexander Archipelago and made the entire circuit around the Gulf of Alaska, naming Cross Sound, Mount Fairweather, and Prince William Sound in the process. Around the Kenai Peninsula they sailed before encountering a broad bay that Vancouver would later name Cook Inlet. It ended disappointingly in vast mud flats, but another, narrower estuary leading back eastward looked promising.

The Aleuts watched in horror as the natural cycle upon which their survival depended was first abused and then threatened with extinction. For a time, the Aleuts fought this onslaught, but resistance eventually became futile in the face of Russian guns. Many Aleut men were enslaved and made to hunt, sometimes far away from their villages. Meanwhile, the promyshlenniki engaged in drunken revelry with the Aleut women. Warfare, disease, and starvation quickly took their toll on the Aleuts and led to social disintegration. By some estimates, only 20 percent of the Aleut population of between 15,000 and 18,000 people survived the first quarter of a century of contact with the Russians.17 Others suggest that it was bad, but not that bad. Regardless, this period of initial interaction between Russian promyshlenniki and the Aleuts was the most disastrous and destructive that any group of Alaska Natives was to experience at the hands of outsiders.

The first government-sponsored expedition to the Aleutians was led by Peter Krentizin in 1768. Leaving the mouth of the Kamchatka River with two ships, Krentizin surveyed the islands of Umnak, Unalaska, Unimak, and the western shores of the Alaska Peninsula. He returned to Kamchatka in 1769 and drowned in the Kamchatka River shortly thereafter. His journals and charts, however, eventually reached St. Petersburg, and they formed the basis for the first reliable map of the Aleutians.

By the 1780s, the barbaric chaos of the promyshlenniki had given way to the relatively organized exploitation of six trading companies. Named for their founders, all of the companies were privately funded. They controlled individual territories—private hunting grounds almost—stretching across the Aleutians and eastward to Prince William Sound. The largest were the Lebedev-Lastochikin Company operating from the Kenai Peninsula and the Shelikhov-Golikov Company headquartered on Kodiak Island. As each company trapped out its own territory, it looked covetously on its neighbors’, and rivalries among these Russian companies were as fierce as any among Alaska Natives.

One of the principals of the Shelikhov-Golikov Company was Grigory Ivanovich Shelikhov, a Siberian fur merchant. On August 3, 1784, Shelikhov arrived in Three Saints Bay on the southeast coast of Kodiak Island with his wife and a party of 192 men and proceeded to construct the first permanent Russian settlement in North America. Shelikhov’s wife, Natalya Alexyevna, was likely the first European woman in Alaska.

Catherine, admirer of the Enlightenment that she was, embraced its laissez-faire policies of government toward business. Perhaps she declined Shelikhov’s request on philosophy alone. Perhaps she had more pragmatic concerns and feared that a Russian trading monolith might heighten, rather than reduce, tensions with Britain, Spain, or others and serve only to involve Russia far more deeply in North American affairs than she cared to be. Whatever Catherine’s reasons, Shelikhov left without his monopoly. He and Golikov had to be content with gold medals, silver sabers, and imperial citations, expressing the empress’s undying gratitude to them for discovering “new lands and peoples for the benefit of the state.” So far, the state had not done much, but the seed of future governmental involvement had been planted.

Czar Paul had never been fond of his mother, disdaining her politically for her enthusiasm for European philosophies and personally for her alleged role in the murder of his father. Paul decided that it was time to exert the role of the Russian government in the affairs of Russian America. Rezanov was a minor noble with some access to the court, and he was all too willing to lobby for the same solution that Shelikhov had proposed almost a decade before.

When the dust settled in 1799, the Shelikhov-Golikov Company was left standing and had been granted an exclusive trading monopoly in Russian America. The other companies were given a choice: merge their operations with the new Russian-American Company or liquidate their assets. If it was seen by some as Paul thumbing his nose at his mother’s laissez-faire policies, the action readily recognized the economic realities of doing business so far away in North America. Baranov’s experiences had made it clear that if the British and Americans were to be bested, or at least kept at bay, it would take a powerhouse with both deep pockets and government backing.

In the spring of 1806, Rezanov sailed south for California. Shelikhov’s daughter was now dead, leaving him a widower, but he had certainly learned the lesson of marrying well. Seeking to extend Russia’s reach well down the Pacific coast, Rezanov called at San Francisco and promptly wooed the daughter of the commandant of the Spanish presidio there. By all accounts, she was striking, a lovely senorita half Rezanov’s age. Rezanov traded furs for supplies and then returned with them to Novo-Arkhangel’sk. Then he sailed west across the Pacific for Okhotsk, determined to ask the czar’s permission to marry a Catholic and to make plans for a broader colonial empire. While en route to St. Petersburg, he fell from his horse somewhere in Siberia and died from the resulting complications. With him died his plans for furthering Russia’s colonial empire, but his admonishment that the nation that controls Alaska is the one that controls the Pacific would reverberate in the years ahead.

Interestingly enough, if Schaffer had taken things more slowly, he may have been able to establish an independent trading relationship with Kaumualii that would have complemented what Baranov was already doing with Kamehameha. That might have resulted in a Russian presence in the Hawaiian Islands that would have greatly strengthened a trading triangle between the islands, Sitka, and the California coast, and put Russian America more at the center of the Cantonese trade. Ironically, the United States finally acquired the Hawaiian Islands in 1893 by exploiting native unrest much as Schaffer had done.

Four years later, the priest was summoned to return to Moscow and St. Petersburg for consultation. It was clear to the hierarchies of both the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian government that Father Veniaminov had single-handedly done more to colonize Russian America through conversions than the Russian-American Company had managed through conquests. There was only one thing to do. Promote him and send him back.

When the Russian-American Company’s charter was up for renewal a second time in 1841, it was evident that Bishop Innocent and his church were playing an important role in the continuing transition of Russian America from a commercial venture to a settled colony. Many of the provisions pertaining to Natives in the third charter seem to have come from Bishop Innocent’s influence, if not outright from his pen. Force was not to be used upon Natives except as a last resort to keep the peace. Outposts were not to be established among Natives classified as “independent” without their consent. Missionaries were given explicit instructions on how to conduct themselves toward the Natives.

Clauses in the charter provided that Natives who did not profess the Christian faith would be permitted to carry on their devotions according to their own rites. In making converts among the Natives, the Russian clergy was to use only conciliatory and persuasive measures, in no case resorting to coercion. The company was charged with seeing that the Natives were not embarrassed under the pretext of conversion to the Christian faith. And Natives professing the Christian faith who, through ignorance, transgressed ecclesiastical regulations, were to be given remedial training rather than be subjected to fines and punishment. Most important, Bishop Innocent received permission to open a seminary and begin training a local clergy.24 Perhaps all of this was a long overdue apology for the actions of the promyshlenniki a century before.

Twenty years after the sale of Alaska to the United States, the Russian Orthodox Church was annually spending more for schooling in the territory than was the United States.

Then in 1868, he was called back to Russia and appointed metropolitan of Moscow, the ecclesiastical head of the entire Russian Orthodox Church. To this day, long after the transfer of Russian America to the United States and the demise of the Russian-American Company, Russian Orthodoxy continues to thrive in Alaska. It is the most durable legacy of Alaska’s Russian past.

Further, Czar Alexander I issued a ukase (an imperial decree) prohibiting foreign vessels from coming within 100 miles of Russian territory, including all of the islands of the Aleutians. The results were predictable. Internationally, Great Britain and the United States screamed bloody murder over their exclusion from the fur trade and Russia’s arbitrary extension of the internationally recognized three-mile territorial limit. Locally, Sitka and the company’s other outposts—deprived of the reliable supply of British and American trade goods that Baranov had labored so long to develop—went hungry. It was still an impossible mission to supply all of the colony’s needs from Russia.

With the American position unequivocal and Great Britain equally adamant, Russia belatedly realized that it had flexed its muscles just a little too much. Unwilling to risk war and divert military resources from his European commitments to enforce his edict, Czar Alexander backed down on his Pacific threats. In 1824, Russia signed an agreement with the United States that recognized the southern boundary of Russian America at 54?40' north latitude and restored the traditional three-mile territorial limit and all trading rights. (Fort Ross in California was conveniently ignored, both because it was an established colony and because the United States correctly assumed that it would soon whither on the vine and drop into its lap.)

As part of this horse-trading, the Russians agreed almost as an afterthought to move the long north-south boundary westward two degrees of longitude to the 141st meridian. It seemed relatively unimportant at the time, but by coincidence, the 139th meridian runs smack through the course of a little stream that would later be called the Klondike. Great Britain also got navigation rights on the rivers flowing through the narrow southeast strip and its desired trading rights, the issue it considered most important at the time.

The 1830s proved to be the glory days of Russian America. Recognizing that Baranov’s tenure as chief manager had gone on and on, the directors of the Russian-American Company fixed five-year terms for the navy men who followed him. The only one to rival Baranov in accomplishment was Ferdinand Petrovich von Wrangell, “governor”—as the chief manager was by then being called—from 1830 to 1835. As governor of Russian America, Wrangell oversaw a far-flung realm that extended from the Pribilof Islands to Fort Ross. With a population of more than 1,000, Sitka was the busiest port in the eastern North Pacific. At least one writer waxed eloquently and termed it “the Paris of the Pacific.” Such accolades were relative, of course, and even Wrangell did not get to enjoy the comforts of the “castle” many had accused Baranov of maintaining.

Unfortunately, Rezanov’s long-term goals for Fort Ross were never realized. Decades of hunting had greatly reduced sea otter populations all along the Pacific coast, and revenues from the fur trade dropped steadily after the post was established.

With apparently little thought that he was turning his back on Peter’s dream of an empire encircling the North Pacific, Czar Nicholas I gave the order to abandon Fort Ross on April 15, 1839. The post’s manager, Alexander Rotchev, was charged with liquidating Russian interests there. Rotchev first approached the Hudson’s Bay Company and then the French. When neither expressed interest—perhaps because they recognized that any future operation of the post was likely to put them on a collision course with the United States—Rotchev turned to the Spanish, technically now Californios or Mexicans, Mexico having declared its independence from Spain in 1821. But the Spanish were hardly willing to buy what they still claimed was theirs by right. Besides, the handwriting was on the wall. The Russians were likely to abandon Fort Ross soon whether they received value for it or not.

This agreement in itself was very telling, and it set the tone for the exit of the Russian-American Company from the Alaskan scene. With sea otter populations declining, the Russians were clearly looking to obtain furs from sources farther inland, and they were willing to weaken their control over the mainland in exchange for a remedy to their perennial supply problems. Much of the foodstuffs were to come from farming operations in the Oregon country. In the early 1840s, this agreement worked very well, and operations were so productive that an additional 10,000 bushels of wheat were available. Ironically, Russian America finally had all the food it needed—just as things were winding down.

A few years after Zagoskin’s travels, the panhandle lease to the Hudson’s Bay Company expired in 1849. It was renewed for another ten years but with two significant changes in its terms. The Hudson’s Bay Company was not required to ship foodstuffs because many of its most productive Oregon farms had been lost to the United States with the 1846 division of the Oregon country. Those that were still in operation above the forty-ninth parallel were suffering from a shortage of workers. Gold, it seems, had been discovered in California. The other significant change was that there was no requirement that the company sell surplus furs to the Russian-American Company. By then, there was no surplus of anything. Russia realized that times were changing and that it was indeed fortunate to make any deal that gave its colony some measure of income.

The years of cordiality between Russia and Great Britain in Alaska came to an end with the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854. Precipitated by Russia’s designs over the Black Sea, the war was fought in Europe, but it would have lasting ramifications for Alaska. Both the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Russian-American Company pleaded with their respective governments to declare Alaska a neutral zone. Both parties agreed to this. Doubtless Great Britain could have easily seized Sitka and other key points during the conflict, but to do so would have raised the ire of the United States at a time when Britain was summarily occupied elsewhere. So an uneasy truce hung over Alaska’s islands like a fog, but the bitterness that remained between the two rivals kindled Russian hopes that the United States, and not the more geographically logical choice of Great Britain, would someday acquire Alaska from the exhausted Russian Empire.27

By the late 1850s, Russia’s enthusiasm for Alaska was clearly waning. Russian America had become an ever-increasing drain on the czarist government. In large part, this was because Russia’s devastation of the fur trade and its inability to diversify into other enterprises had resulted in dwindling economic returns. On its western front, Russia was worn out financially and emotionally by its losing efforts in the Crimean War. The ill-fated “Charge of the Light Brigade” notwithstanding, Great Britain and its allies had managed to keep the Black Sea from becoming a Russian lake. The last thing the czar wanted now was for Alaska to fall into British hands.

Finally, with much of Europe united against it, Russia badly needed an ally, or at the very least a casual friend who would largely ignore it. The United States filled the bill and had already pushed British influence out of the Oregon country. As early as 1853, Nicholas Muraviev, governor general of eastern Siberia, urged the czar to rid himself of his North American possessions and predicted that one way or the other, sooner or later, the Americans would control all of North America. But the United States, for all of its bold talk of Manifest Destiny, was now well down the road that would lead it to civil war. Russia would have to sit in Alaska and patiently bide its time until the conclusion of the American Civil War.

After flirting with thoughts of Australia, Waddell hurried south for Cape Horn, rounding it well south of the normal shipping lanes, and then beat a cautious path back to Liverpool. On November 6, 1865, the Shenandoah sailed into port there under the Stars and Bars and surrendered. In just over a year, she had circled the globe, covered some 58,000 miles, captured thirty-eight ships, sinking thirty-two and releasing six on bond, and taken more than 1,000 prisoners—all without taking or losing a life.

Alaska, the Aleut word meaning “a great country or land,” had originally been applied only to the Alaska Peninsula, first by the Russians and later by Captain Cook.

Senator Sumner, also the Republican majority leader, was at first reticent about the purchase, but he warmed to it quickly and delivered an impassioned three-hour speech in support of the treaty’s ratification. One of his arguments, as well as a major one used by Seward, was that its ratification was a significant sign of Russian-American friendship—not just to Russia but, perhaps more important, to the European powers. Just as Russia was seeking a friend, so too was the United States. Seward was well aware that much of Europe, particularly Great Britain, had not been judiciously neutral during the recent war. In Great Britain’s case the Alabama claims would drag on for years, and then there was the little matter of the Shenandoah. Let the British worry a little about U.S.-Russian cooperation.

Other arguments advanced by Sumner were from a text approved, if not in fact prepared, by Seward. Wrapped snugly in the cloak of Manifest Destiny, these included extending America’s sphere of commerce and settlement on the Pacific coast and widening its base of commerce with China and Japan. It was a good thing that Sumner was not counting on Great Britain as much of a friend, because he went on to argue that “more than the extension of domain is the extension of republican institutions…. The present treaty is a visible step in the occupation of the whole North American continent…. By it we dismiss one more monarch from this continent. One by one they ha...

Sumner was not alone in his pronouncements. Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota predicted that “the British dominion will be inevitably pressed out of western British America.” William Mungen of Ohio declared that “by accepting this treaty we cage the British lion on the Pacific coast,” and then went on to predict the decline of the British Empire, the appropriation of its Asiatic possessions by Russia and of its American possessions by the United States, and the coming of a day when “the two great Powers on earth will be Russia and the United States.”10

It still remained to define the bargain, but in the end it became clear that those who had cried “Seward’s folly” really had no vision of the bigger picture. And in fact those cries against the purchase of Alaska were not nearly as unanimous as historical shorthand frequently suggests. The truth of the matter is that most of the shrill opposition in the press came from one source, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. It was Greeley’s acerbic pen that championed the monikers of “Seward’s Icebox,” “Icebergia,” and “Walrussia,” and belittled the value of any of Alaska’s resources, going so far as to advise other European governments with unwanted wasteland to contact Seward.

So Seward’s purchase of Alaska was not universally ridiculed. Nor was it a whimsical or isolated event—far from it. Rather, it was but one piece of Seward’s global strategy that took the doctrine of Manifest Destiny to its fullest and extended it from the continental United States to embrace the Pacific rim. Many of Seward’s visions did not come to pass for decades—or, in the case of the Panama Canal, half a century. But the foundation for the United States as the world power that emerged from the Spanish-American War was laid by Seward thirty-some years before, and the purchase of Alaska was both a key building block in that foundation and one of Seward’s most shining successes. Seward himself would visit Alaska in 1869 after leaving office and come away quite satisfied with his bargain.