My wife and I just booked a trip to Alaska next year, and it got me curious about how the place actually became a state. This is what I found.
Alaska was discovered by Europeans in the 18th century. It was purchased by the United States in the 19th. It didn’t become a state until the 20th. The time between wasn’t a steady march toward statehood: it was a Russian land claim, followed by a 75-year stretch of being an almost entirely ignored U.S. territory, followed by a 17-year sprint once a single event made ignoring the place impossible.
Fourteen thousand years before any of that
Long before any of this, Alaska already had people in it. During the last Ice Age, sea levels dropped low enough to expose a stretch of land connecting Siberia to Alaska, in places nearly a thousand miles wide. Exactly when the first people crossed it remains genuinely disputed among archaeologists, with estimates ranging anywhere from 40,000 to 13,000 years ago, but the clearest, least-contested evidence places the earliest confirmed human presence in Alaska at around 14,000 to 13,500 years ago, coinciding with a documented warming period that would have made the region far more habitable. The land bridge itself disappeared beneath rising seas roughly 11,000 to 10,000 years ago, closing the route as suddenly, in geological terms, as it had opened.
The descendants of those earliest arrivals didn’t remain one people. Over the thousands of years that followed, distinct cultures took shape across Alaska’s enormously varied geography — Iñupiat and Yupik peoples across the Arctic and western coasts, Unangax̂ (Aleut) communities along the storm-battered Aleutian chain, Athabascan peoples through the vast interior, and Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian nations along the temperate southeastern coast. By the time European ships finally arrived, Alaska wasn’t an empty frontier waiting to be found. It was a place other people had already spent more than a hundred centuries learning to live in.1
Four voyages, and a Russian fur-trading colony
Alaska’s discovery by Westerners didn’t happen once — it happened, arguably, three separate times, a century apart, with history mostly forgetting the first two.
A Russian named Semyon Dezhnev sailed through the strait separating Asia from America in 1648, nearly eighty years before anyone else on record. It didn’t matter. His report sat unread until 1736, by which point the discovery had effectively already been made twice more, without any help from him.2
Vitus Bering, a Danish navigator sailing for the Russian crown, gets the credit today, but even his own record is split in two. His 1728 voyage passed through the strait that now carries his name and proved Asia and America weren’t joined — but fog kept him from ever actually seeing Alaska itself. The first Europeans to really lay eyes on it were two Russian navigators on a separate, far less celebrated expedition: in 1732, Ivan Fedorov and Mikhail Gvozdev sailed a leftover ship from Bering’s own voyage to the American coast near present-day Cape Prince of Wales, charted what they found, and then largely vanished from the story — their report didn’t even reach Russian naval authorities until 1743.
Bering’s own second voyage, in 1741, is the one that actually stuck. He sighted the Alaskan mainland that July and landed on Kayak Island a few days later,3 and this time it led somewhere: real maps, a real fur-trading economy, and eventually the Russian-American Company, chartered in 1799 to extract sea otter pelts from a coastline most of its own investors never saw. Three discoveries, over the better part of a century — and only the last is the one history remembers.
The purchase, and the indifference that followed
By the 1860s, Russia wanted out, and not primarily for the money. The Crimean War had just shown how exposed Russia’s overseas holdings were to a hostile British navy, and Alaska — remote, thinly garrisoned, indefensible in any real conflict — looked less like an asset than a liability waiting to be seized for free in the next war. Selling it to the United States, a country Russia had no particular quarrel with, was a way to get something for a territory Russia suspected it might simply lose.
Secretary of State William Seward closed the deal in March 1867: $7.2 million, roughly two cents an acre, for a landmass twice the size of Texas.4 The U.S. government mostly ignored what it had just bought. For decades, Alaska had barely any formal civil government at all — no organized territorial status, minimal federal presence, an enormous landmass administered as an afterthought. It stayed that way until gold changed the math.
Gold, and finally, a territory
The Klondike Gold Rush, beginning in 1896, technically struck gold across the border in Canada’s Yukon Territory — but its stampede of prospectors flooded through Alaska’s port towns to get there, and by 1899 many of those same prospectors, having found little in the Klondike, turned to a real gold strike within Alaska itself: the beaches of Nome. Between them, the two rushes did what four decades of Russian fur trading and American indifference hadn’t: they put Americans there. Real population, real infrastructure, real reason for Washington to pay attention. Alaska finally became an organized U.S. territory under the Organic Act of 1912 — forty-five years after the purchase, and only because enough people had shown up wanting government services that ignoring the place any longer stopped being an option.
The war that changed Alaska’s reputation
Alaska might have stayed a remote, half-forgotten territory indefinitely if the Japanese hadn’t invaded it. In June 1942, Japanese forces occupied the islands of Attu and Kiska in the Aleutian chain — the first seizure of U.S. territory by a foreign power since the War of 1812. It took nearly a year for the U.S. to respond. When it did, in May 1943, the fight for Attu became the only World War II land battle fought on incorporated U.S. soil, and one of the deadliest of the entire Pacific theater relative to its size: of roughly 2,500 Japanese defenders, fewer than 30 survived to be taken prisoner, while American forces lost close to 1,000 dead out of 15,000 troops committed.5
The strategic reassessment that followed was immediate and lasting. A territory that had spent seventy-five years as a curiosity, a fur outpost, a punchline, was suddenly recognized as exactly what its geography had always made it: the closest American ground to a hostile Pacific power. Cold War military investment poured in over the following decade, and with it came the population, infrastructure, and political weight statehood arguments actually run on.
Statehood, tangled with Hawaii
The final push took the rest of the 1950s, and it moved in tandem with an unlikely partner: Hawaii, pursuing statehood through the exact same years. The pairing wasn’t really about the merits of either territory’s case — it was about the U.S. Senate. Each new state adds two senators, and 1950s Alaska was expected to lean Democratic while Hawaii was expected to lean Republican. Democrats in Congress pushed to admit Alaska first; Republicans preferred Hawaii admitted alone, or first. The standoff dragged on for years before both territories were ultimately admitted within the same year.
Alaska went first. Congress passed its statehood act on July 7, 1958, and after a series of required votes in Alaska itself, President Eisenhower signed the formal proclamation admitting it as the 49th state on January 3, 1959. Hawaii followed just over seven months later, becoming the 50th state on August 21, 1959.
None of this is really where the story starts, of course — that’s fourteen thousand years earlier. But starting with Bering’s first voyage in 1728, the arc runs three centuries to the present: Russian exploration, a fur colony nobody defended, a bargain-basement purchase, a gold rush that interrupted seventy-five years of national indifference without really ending it, a war that finally did, and, in a rush, the paperwork to make statehood official.
The federal government that eventually took over never quite figured out what to do with any of them either — no treaties were ever signed, no reservation system was ever built, and U.S. citizenship didn’t arrive until 1924.
Dezhnev’s report was found by Gerhard Friedrich Müller, a historian doing archival research in Yakutsk, Siberia, as part of preparations for the same Great Northern Expedition that included Bering’s own second voyage — meaning Dezhnev’s discovery was only unearthed because of research being done for the man who’d eventually get credit for it instead. Müller didn’t actually publish an account of it until 1758, by which point Bering had been dead for seventeen years. Had Dezhnev’s report simply been found a few decades sooner, there’s a decent chance the strait would carry his name today instead.
Even this, the version of the story that actually stuck, has its own asterisk. Bering’s 1741 expedition sailed as two separate ships, and his second-in-command, Aleksei Chirikov, commanding the St. Paul, is often credited with sighting land slightly before Bering’s own ship did. The two vessels were separated by a storm early in the voyage and never reunited; Chirikov made it home, while Bering did not, dying on the return trip on the island that now bears his name. History still gave the expedition, and the coastline, Bering’s name anyway.
The popular story is that Americans mocked it as “Seward’s Folly” — a frozen wasteland nobody wanted. That’s mostly myth: newspapers in spring 1867 were largely enthusiastic, and a 2019 peer-reviewed study argues the “unpopular purchase” narrative is a later invention taught as settled fact. But not entirely myth — the phrase itself really was used in 1867 and 1868, in a handful of papers, before later retellings quietly promoted that minority opinion into the story everybody thinks they already know.
Kiska, the other occupied island, saw no real battle at all — the Japanese secretly evacuated weeks before the Allied landing in August 1943, leaving American and Canadian troops to suffer roughly 200 casualties from friendly fire and abandoned mines against an enemy that was no longer there.