Purchase of Alaska shrewd move by U.S. Published 3:17 pm Wednesday, October 2, 2024 By Editor By Gene Hays MSgt, USMC (Ret) President Eisenhower signed a proclamation admitting Alaska to the Union as the 49th state on January 3, 1959.
Indigenous peoples inhabited the region that would become Alaska for centuries. The European discovery of Alaska came in 1741, when a Russian expedition led by Danish navigator Vitus Bering sighted the Alaskan mainland. In 1784, Grigory Shelikhov established the first permanent Russian colony in Alaska on Kodiak Island.
In the early 19th century, Russian settlements spread down the west coast of North America, with the southernmost fort located near Bodega Bay in California. Russian activity in the Americas declined in the 1820s, and the British and Americans were granted trading rights in Alaska after a few minor diplomatic conflicts. In the 1860s, a bankrupt Russia decided to offer Alaska for sale to the United States, which earlier had expressed interest in such a purchase.
On March 30, 1867, Secretary of State William H. Seward signed a treaty with Russia for the purchase of Alaska for $7.2 million.
Despite the bargain price of two cents an acre, the Alaskan purchase was ridiculed in Congress and in the press as “Seward’s folly,” “Seward’s icebox,” and President Andrew Johnson’s “polar bear garden.” Nevertheless, the Senate ratified purchase of the tremendous landmass, one-fifth the size of the rest of the United States. De.
