An Alaska Anthology

Cover

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Title Page, Copyright

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Contents

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pp. v-viii

Preface

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pp. ix-

This anthology is a revised and expanded version of a volume edited by Professors Stephen Haycox and Mary Mangusso that first appeared in 1989. Five successive printings of that collection have demonstrated the continuing need for a selection of articles that complements the narrative histories...

Acknowledgments

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pp. x-

This anthology is a tribute to all those who pursue a scholarly interest in Alaska history. We have tried to explain its purpose and context in the Introduction. The editors wish to express here their appreciation to all those who helped to make the work possible and without whose generous assistance...

Introduction

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pp. xi-xvi

History is at once a scientific attempt to reconstruct the events of the past and an individual human attempt to understand their meaning. Historians, professional and amateur, constantly pursue both enterprises, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes separately. But the second aspect of writing...

Alaska History: An Outline

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pp. xvii-xxx

ftt.aska has long been inhabited. Its preliterate history extends back at least 10,000 years, and some scholars believe that humans migrated from Asia to the Americas across the Bering Sea Land Bridge 27,000 or 28,000 years ago. Whenever they came, these travelers included the ancestors of today's...

Finding America

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pp. 3-20

Finding America-that was the intention behind the two voyages of Vitus Bering, often referred to as the First and Second Kamchatka expeditions. The first voyage in the summer of 1728, carried Bering, captain in the Russian Imperial Navy, through the strait later named after him, but he did not find...

Russian Dependence on the Natives of Alaska

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pp. 21-42

In the literature on the early relations between the Native occupants and the European colonizers of North America, the former have commonly been seen as rather helpless dupes who were manipulated almost at will by the latter; many observers have held, moreover, that the Natives soon became dependent upon European trade goods, particularly guns, liquor, tobacco, metalware...

Ivan Pan'kov: Architect of Aleut Literacy

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pp. 43-65

This paper is about an Aleut chief who lived over 150 years ago, at a time when his people faced one of the most difficult periods in their history: adjustment to a new social, economic, and ideological order imposed by invading Russians. Soon after Russian entry into the Aleut area, the Aleuts became

Astor and Baranov: Partners in Empire

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pp. 66-75

The name John Jacob Astor has come to symbolize the single-minded pursuit of profit. Astor seems to us the archetypal moneygrubber whose life was defined by ledger lines and the bottom line. Alexander Baranov, governor of the Russian empire in America, suffers an even worse fate. He has simply become...

Two Missions to Alaska

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pp. 76-88

She ldonJackson is a name well known in the history of education in Alaska, which is as it should be. But how about John Veniaminov, Archbishop (now Saint) Innocent. Metropolitan of Moscow? Hardly a household word, but in fact Veniaminov also deserves to be well known as a missionary to Alaska, a...

The Sale of Alaska in the Context of Russian American Relations in the Nineteenth Century

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pp. 89-101

The sale of Russian America has attracted the attention of both Soviet and foreign researchers for a long time. In 1939, the now deceased Professor S. B. Okun' published a monograph in which he gave, for the first time in Soviet literature, an adequately detailed and documented account of...

American Public Opinions and the Purchase of Russian America

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pp. 102-117

The American purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 is often cited today as an example of providential intervention in behalf of America's national security. Commentators shudder at the thought of Soviet air bases in what was once Russian America and praise the nearmiraculous foresight of...

"Hemmed In": Reactions in British Columbia to the Purchase of Russian America

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pp. 118-133

The cession of Russian America to the United States in 1867 placed British Columbia in a precarious position. Flanked by Washington Territory to the south and Alaska to the north, the colony blocked direct land access between the U.S. and its new possession. The American republic, which...

The Early Ministry of S. Hall Young, 1878-1888

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pp. 134-155

The survival and durability of the Puritan tradition into nineteenthand even twentieth-century America is a remarkable phenomenon. A splendid example of this legacy in action is the career of Samuel Hall Young. An evaluation of his early Christian labor in and for Alaska is particularly valuab...

Female Native Teachers in Southeast Alaska: Sarah Dickinson, Tillie Paul, and Frances Willard

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pp. 156-175

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Tlingit and Haida Indians in Southeast Alaska faced tremendous challenges as non-Native settlers moved into their region. Even more than the Russians who had previously occupied Native lands...

Chief Sesui and Lieutenant Herron: A Story of Who Controls the Bacon /

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pp. 176-190

In 1899 Joseph Herron, a First Lieutenant in the 8th Cavalry, United States Army, led a small detachment of soldiers through the Alaska Range into the Upper Kuskokwim drainage. Enroute to the Yukon, this party became lost in the broad flatlands of the Upper Kuskokwim and was rescued by the Athabascan Chief Sesui (Shesoie or She sui e) and his followers. The soldiers were...

Controlling the Periphery: The Territorial Administration of the Yukon-Alaska, 1867-1959

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pp. 191-205

Historians of the Canadian and American Northwest have been mesmerized by the image of the Mounties. Standing tall and straight at their border posts, serge-coated and honest to a fault, the men of the North West Mounted Police symbolize Canada's active involvement in the governance of its northern territories. In contrast, the famous Skagway duo...

Gold Rushers North: A Census Study of the Yukon and Alaska Gold Rushes, 1896-1900

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pp. 206-221

OnJUlY 15, 1897, the Excelsior steamed into San Francisco. Two days later, the Portland reached Seattle. The two ships, fresh from Alaskan waters, carried the first miners returning from an obscure northern river called the Klondike. There had been rumors of a gold strike in the Far...

Sourdough Radicalism: Labor and Socialism in Alaska, 1905-1920

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pp. 222-237

For many Americans, mention of the Socialist Party of America conjures up images of a brief, eccentric movement among urban ethnic industrial workers alienated from the mainstream of American values by the avarice of plutocratic employers. One reason cited to explain why American socialism...

The Pacific Salmon Fisheries: A Study of Irrational Conservation

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pp. 238-245

When the sixth session of the Alaska legislature convened in March 1923, a squabble concerning selection of a permanent secretary delayed organization of the Senate. Anthony J. (Tony) Dimond and his fellow senator from the Third Judicial Division (southcentral Alaska), backed...

Anthony J. Dimond and the Politics of Integrity

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pp. 246-266

On April 21, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed John Collier commissioner of Indian affairs. During the previous decade Collier had been executive secretary of the American Indian Defense Association, an organization that opposed the Dawes General Allotment Act of...

The New Deal and Alaskan Natives, 1936-1945

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pp. 267-286

In May of 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt by executive order created a new agency in the Department of the Interior, the Division of Territories and Island Possessions. This agency would supervise federal relations with outlying and dependent areas and also assist them in every possible way to compensate...

Governor Ernest Gruening's Struggle for Territorial Status: Personal or Political? / Claus-M. Naske

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pp. 287-300

In May of 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt by executive order created a new agency in the Department of the Interior, the Division of Territories and Island Possessions. This agency would supervise federal relations with outlying and dependent areas and also assist them in every possible way to compensate...

The Realities of Strategic Planning: The Decision to Build the Alaska Highway

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pp. 301-313

For many years prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, various Canadians and Americans advocated construction of a road to Alaska. They stressed economic and developmental advantages but also noted the possible value of such a road for defense. 1 In response, the United States War Department repeatedly examined these suggestions and rejected them...

Jim Crow in Alaska: The Passage of Alaska Equal Rights Act of 1945

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pp. 314-335

/Stericans have long believed that the western frontier offered more freedom, justice, and equality than the overcrowded, classconscious cities of the East. This familiar theme of an egalitarian western society expressed by Frederick Jackson Turner and his followers has been sounded repeatedly in American history and literature. Though the Turner Thesis may...

Economic Development and Indian Land Rights in Modern Alaska: The 1947 Tongass Timber Act

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pp. 336-363

Between 1933 and 1945 Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and Indian Commissioner John Collier attempted to extend the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, the Indian New Deal, to Alaska. With other administration officials, Ickes was determined to protect Native land title and help Natives...

The Governor Who Opposed Statehood: The Legacy of Jay Hammond

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pp. 364-377

When Alaska became the forty-ninth state in 1959, one might have concluded that the political advocates of statehood, or the statehooders as they were known, had been the principal apostles of environmentalism and responsible management of the new state's natural resources...

Project Chariot: Alaskan Roots of Enivornmentalism

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pp. 378-406

Ever since the wartime Manhattan Project, the potential for virtuous and constructive applications of the most destructive force in history has enthralled the emerging American nuclear establishment. Most scientists and officials thought about "taming the atom" in terms of generating vast quantities of...

Corruption: Alaska Size

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pp. 407-432

Abright glow from the Prudhoe Bay oil-pumping stations lights up much of Alaska's North Slope during the winter darkness, but it runs out well before you get to Barrow.! That's when ice fog generally takes over, as it does on this day late in November 1990, while our MarkAir pilot hunts for the...

The End of Wilderness

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pp. 433-447

Abright glow from the Prudhoe Bay oil-pumping stations lights up much of Alaska's North Slope during the winter darkness, but it runs out well before you get to Barrow.! That's when ice fog generally takes over, as it does on this day late in November 1990, while our MarkAir pilot hunts...