Alaska travel guide

The first European settlement came courtesy of Russia, whose troops and traders set up shop near Kodiak in 1784. The Russian-American Company made a sort of peace with the Aleuts and Yupiks (unlike the rogue fur traders); many Russian men married local women, who were converted – or ‘civilised’ – to the Russian Orthodox Church.

As the Russian governor pushed for new settlement, things came to a bloody head. The Battle of Sitka kicked off in 1804 – the last major armed battle between Russians and Alaska Natives. The Russians retreated; the British fur traders (whose Hudson’s Bay Company was said to have armed the aboriginal villages with muskets and gunpowder) moved in.

The mid-1850s saw jostling between the British and American fur traders, who were in a tug of war over trading boundaries. The Crimean War and a dwindling sea otter population prompted Russia to auction off Alaska to the highest bidder: US Secretary of State William Seward. The USA paid a whopping $7.2 million for what was seen as unfertile tundra and a sinking fur trade. Nationally, it was decried as a terrible deal – or ‘Seward’s Folly’. But Seward was counting on something else: gold. A glimmer had been detected in the Sitka River in 1861. Then in Fortymile Creek, and then in Nome, Fairbanks and the Tanana River Valley. Seward set up courts and schools in 1884 – the first steps towards the US state we recognise today.

Right next door, the Canadian Yukon was having a gold rush of its own. Between 1897 and 1900, US goldminers flooded into the Alaskan city of Skagway, camping as close to the gold-rich Canadian border as they could. They scored a train line through White Pass, and with this new transport came a stampede of prospectors and settlers hoping to strike it lucky. A tussle over the US-Canadian border had both governments hammering out the details, inspiring the USA to make Alaska an official territory in 1912. The promise of riches drew in more than just goldminers. The Alaska Railroad started work on a track between Seward and Anchorage. And the government tempted in more settlers with a farming project that kickstarted a phase of crop and dairy farming in the 1920s.

During World War II, the Japanese bagsied two of the Aleutian Islands for 15 months and bombed Dutch Harbour. This spurred on the US government to build the 2,400km Alaska Highway. Stretching from Dawson Creek in British Columbia to Fairfield in Alaska, it was a vital transport route for Allied troops through tough wilderness. The native Aleut communities weren’t so lucky. They were uprooted from their islands and sent to work in canneries, sawmills, schools and hospitals, or confined to internment camps. It was a permanent forced migration for many Aleuts, who never returned to their home islands.

Reeling from the war, Alaska jumped on another kind of rush in the 1950s: oil and natural gas. Not-so-coincidentally, the USA speedily incorporated this northern territory as a state in 1959. And in 1968, prospectors discovered oil on the North Slope, starting the construction of the massive Trans-Alaska Pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez.

Other industries sprang up in the latter decades of the 20th century. Once again, it was all about the natural resources – paper pulp from wood mills and salmon canneries that were the twinkle in the eye of what would become the largest salmon industry in the world. But these extractive industries have not exclusively brought benefits to Alaska. The Exxon Valdez tanker ran aground in 1989, causing an oil spill that spread over 2,100km of coastline. It remains one of the worst manmade environmental disasters in history. Then in 2004 a vessel broke apart in the Aleutian Islands, spilling over one million litres of oil into the sea. And yet the oil debate still rumbles on. Today, it’s about the recently signed-off expansion into the far-northern Arctic National Reserve. What impact this will have on Alaska’s northern communities, rare wildlife and fragile Arctic landscapes remains to be seen.