Alaska's History, Revised Edition: The People, Land, and Events of the North Country

By Harry Ritter

This newly revised edition includes up-to-date information and historical photographs on everything you need to know about the Last Frontier, all in one travel-friendly package.

Alaska’s rich and cultural history comes to life in this vivid, take-along account. Travel to the Far North and discover the origins of Russian America and the effects of the fur trade, Native lifestyles before and after European contact, John Muir’s visit to Glacier Bay, the Klondike gold rush, exploits of Alaska Bush pilots, big game hunting in the North Country and famous fisheries, and more. Five new chapters cast light on more modern subjects, such as the strengthening stance of Alaska Natives in politics, the impact of a changing climate on the fish and wildlife, the future of coastal villages by the sea, and the state of Alaska looking forward today. A history book that's fun to read, Alaska’s History provides a look into the deep story behind the United States’ 49th state, from its glorious past to its challenging present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alaska Northwest Books
• Release date: Mar 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781513262741

Harry Ritter

Harry Ritter is Emeritus Professor of History at Western Washington University, where he taught from 1969 to 2010. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, he received his doctorate in history from the University of Virginia. He is also the author of Alaska’s History: The People, Land, and Events of the North Country. He lives in Bellingham, Washington.

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Snug Corner Cove, Prince William Sound. Drawing by John Webber, 1778.

ALASKA: THE GREAT LAND

ALASKA, PAST AND PRESENT

Gold and silver doors, St. Michael’s Cathedral, Sitka, late 1800s.

Alaska’s human history—from the prehistoric arrival of the earliest Siberian hunters to today’s Arctic Slope oil exploration—is unified by one simple but grand theme: people’s efforts to wrest a living from the region’s vast natural riches despite its extreme conditions.

Nature endowed the Great Land with wealth, scenery, and a scope surpassed by few regions of the earth. Alaska is a virtual subcontinent: Twice the size of Texas, it contains 16 percent of the United States’ land area. But its population remains small. At the time of the U.S. purchase in 1867, Alaska had about 30,000 people, more than 29,000 of them Native American. By 2018, despite statehood and the oil boom, its population had grown to an estimated 738,000.

Over the past 275 years, Alaska has seen a series of boom-and-bust rushes to exploit the land: rushes for fur, gold, copper, salmon, and oil. Some people came and stayed, simply because Alaska is like nowhere else—wild, extreme, and amazing. Still, the aim often has been to take the rewards of the land and sea, then enjoy them somewhere else. Many Alaskans see a recurring theme of neglect by federal authorities and exploitation by outside interests. While the notion is easily exaggerated, the fact remains that today, decades after becoming a state, much of Alaska’s economic fate remains under control of the Lower 48. Much of the Alaska fishing fleet, for example, is based not in Alaska, but in Washington state.

Over the past six decades, the development of a modern tourism industry has brought millions of visitors to the once-remote frontier in a veritable tourist rush. The more daring travelers motor north via the Alaska Highway, built during World War II. But most come by air or sea. The state-owned ferry system, the Alaska Marine Highway, has linked southeastern Alaska to British Columbia and Washington state since the 1960s. Each year, thousands of ferry travelers experience the stunning sea and landscapes of the Inside Passage. In the 1970s, the cruise ship industry met that same growing tourist demand by offering summertime excursions to the icy spectacles of Glacier Bay National Park and the Gulf of Alaska.

Visitors are drawn to Alaska by the region’s wild beauty and storied past. Alaska’s history has not always been happy. For traditional Native cultures as well as for some animal species, it is no exaggeration to say that at times it has been catastrophic. Yet to ignore the past denies us the chance to learn for the future. This book aims to supply a concise, informative, and entertaining account of Alaska’s history: at times heroic and surprising, foolish and sad, but always colorful and often downright thrilling.

Aleut baskets. Photo by Edward Curtis, 1899.

NATIVE TRADITIONS

ALASKA’S FIRST PEOPLES

Eskimo village, Plover Bay (Siberia). Photo by Edward Curtis, 1899.

Alaska’s original discoverers, most authorities believe, were prehistoric hunters from Siberia. In a series of periodic migrations they followed game onto a now-vanished Bering Sea land bridge that—depending on changing sea levels—sometimes connected Asia and North America to create an ancient landmass known as Beringia. The timing and details of these events are matters of robust debate and conjecture, fueled by ongoing climate research, language studies, archaeological discoveries, and DNA analysis.

Around 14–12,000 years ago the last ice age ended, sea levels rose, and the land bridge was permanently submerged. Alaska and Siberia were severed by the Bering Strait, 56 miles wide. As rising temperatures opened ice-free corridors in the continental interior, some hunters moved south to become ancestors of today’s lower North and South American Indians. Even earlier, recent excavations suggest, some migrants may have traveled in boats along the coast, as glaciers receded into fjords. Some later waves of land-bridge migrants stayed north, however, to become ancestors of today’s distinctive, broadly-defined Alaska Native cultures: Indian, Unangâx/ Aleut, Eskimo, and Alutiiq/Sugpiaq.

Each of these groups created its own rich spirit world and unique ways of surviving, and even prospering, in the often-harsh North. For hunters, aided by snowshoes, dogsleds, and a deep knowledge of weather patterns, the frozen landscape was a highway rather than a frightening barrier. Likewise, for coastal kayakers and canoeists, the cold ocean straits and passages became trade and communication arteries. And despite the northern latitude, the land could be generous, especially along the coasts where fish, waterfowl, and marine mammals made leisure, and even high culture, possible.

Russian fur merchants began to arrive in the 1740s. The coming of the Europeans, as elsewhere in North and South America, had a drastic impact on the Native population. Europeans unwittingly introduced measles, smallpox, and other maladies for which the Natives had no immunity. The introduction of liquor and firearms also speeded the erosion of Natives’ traditional lives. In 1741, the year Vitus Bering claimed Alaska for Russia, the Aleut population is thought to have been between 12,000 and 15,000. By 1800 it had dwindled to 2,000. A similar fate befell some other Native groups, such as the Tlingit and Haida of Alaska’s Southeast.

There were notable cases of harmony between Natives and newcomers. Contacts with outsiders, at least temporarily, actually enriched the indigenous cultures. On the Southeast coast, for example, the ready availability of iron tools encouraged an expansion of Native woodworking traditions. New wealth created by the fur trade made more frequent and lavish ceremonial feasts, or potlatches, possible.

But the sometimes-violent struggle for control of the region led inevitably to non-Native dominance. Some Russian Orthodox priests and Anglo-American missionaries made sincere, though sometimes misguided, efforts to protect and educate the Natives. Yet in Russian America, as in the Canadian and American West, the commercial drive usually won out. A favorite saying of the rough-and-ready promyshlenniki (Russian fur traders) could just as easily describe the unrestrained conduct of many of Alaska’s other foreign visitors: God is in his heaven, and the tsar is far away.

BAIDARKA: THE UNANGÂX WAY

Aleut kayaker of Unalaska. Drawing by John Webber, 1778.

Today’s 8,000 Aleut people descend from hunters who moved from the Alaska mainland into the Aleutian Chain some 4,500 years ago. The volcanic peaks of the Aleutian Islands sweep in a 1,200-mile arc from the western tip of the Alaska Peninsula toward Kamchatka in Siberia along the top of the Pacific Rim. The name Alaska itself may derive from the Aleut word alaxsxag or agunalaksh, meaning either great land, or more poetically shores where the sea breaks its back.

Aleutian temperatures are surprisingly mild—the most southerly island lies just north of Seattle’s latitude—but violent 125-knot winds, heavy rain, and dense fog are typical. Yet below uninviting skies the ocean abounds with life. This natural wealth drew the Aleuts toward the sea and a seafaring life.

Knowledge of pre-Russian contact Aleut life is sparse, though archaeologists are unearthing more evidence. The word Aleut is actually a Russian label. The people called themselves Unangâx (oo-NUNG-ah, original people), but under Russian rule they accepted the term Aleut—and Orthodox Christianity, a hallmark of their post-contact identity. In today’s climate of heritage revival, Unangâx (sing. Unangan) is increasingly used, though Aleut remains common. In many ways the best authority on Aleut folkways is Father Ivan Veniaminov, who worked as a Russian Orthodox priest among the Aleuts in the 1820s and 1830s, leaving detailed and enlightening notes on their culture. The people lived in earthen lodges (called barabaras by the Russians) and mummified and entombed some of their elite dead in caves where volcanic heat aided preservation. Aleut women were remarkable basket makers and seamstresses, weaving elegant watertight containers from island grasses and fashioning all-weather clothing from the skins of birds and marine animals. The men were consummate masters of maritime hunting, perfectly adapted to their marine world. In this they exemplified the qualities that strike us today as so remarkable about Alaska’s Native peoples: their ingenious, creative use of the environment and their harmonious adjustment to nature’s rhythms.

Using harpoons and wearing steam-bent visors made of carved and painted driftwood and fitted with amulets designed to ensure hunting success, Aleut paddlers traveled hundreds of miles in skin-covered kayaks that the Russians called baidarkas. Early visitors marveled at the seaworthiness and sheer grace of these boats, which Aleut boys learned to make and maneuver from the age of six or seven. If perfect symmetry, smoothness, and proportion constitute beauty, they are beautiful, wrote 18th-century traveler Martin Sauer. Russian naval officer Gavriil Davydov observed, The one-man Aleut baidarka is so narrow and light that hardly anyone else would dare to put to sea in them, although the Aleuts fear no storm when in them.

Aleuts made their boats watertight by fastening their gutskin parkas to the gunwales of their vessels—a method still used by modern kayakers. Their quarry were Steller’s sea lions, seals, sea otters, the now-extinct Steller’s sea cow, and (using poisoned harpoon points) small whales. And they harvested salmon, halibut, and other marine life.

Aleut hunter with bentwood visor. Drawing by John Webber, 1778.

Ironically, the hunters’ prowess worked to their disadvantage after Russian discovery. Siberian fur traders used them as forced labor to do their hunting for them, holding their families hostage. Aleut warriors resisted, but arrows and amulets couldn’t prevail against firearms. The three-hatch baidarka was devised to enhance control over the hunters: an armed Russian overseer occupied the lead kayak’s middle seat in every hunting party. By the 1830s, Aleut paddlers—aided by transport on ships—traveled as far afield as California in relentless pursuit of the sea otter. Some hunters were also resettled north to the Pribilof Islands to harvest fur seals for their Russian overlords.

INUA: THE ESKIMO WORLD

Eskimos of the Gulf of Kotzebue. Drawing by Louis Choris, 1816–17.

Eskimos, the last of Alaska’s Native people to migrate from Siberia, belong to a hunting culture spanning the Arctic from Siberia to Greenland. They occupy, in

Reviews for Alaska's History, Revised Edition

[mfurlow_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Quick, thorough guide to Alaskan history. I read this book quickly when traveling through Alaska, as an attempt to better appreciate the history while I was there. While fairly brief, it was easy to read quickly & introduce topics I know I could look more into should I desire.