Recent History of Alaska.
Vitus
Bering, a Dane working for the Russians, and Alexei Chirikov
discovered the Alaskan mainland and the Aleutian Islands in 1741.
The tremendous land mass of Alaska—equal to one-fifth of
the continental U.S.—was unexplored in 1867 when Secretary
of State William Seward arranged for its purchase from the Russians
for $7,200,000. The transfer of the territory took place on Oct.
18, 1867. Despite a price of about two cents an acre, the purchase
was widely ridiculed as “Seward's Folly.” The first
official census (1880) reported a total of 33,426 Alaskans, all
but 430 being of aboriginal stock. The Gold Rush of 1898 resulted
in a mass influx of more than 30,000 people. Since then, Alaska
has contributed billions of dollars' worth of products to the U.S.
economy.
In 1968, a large oil and gas reservoir near Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Coast was
found. The Prudhoe Bay reservoir, with an estimated recoverable 10 billion barrels
of oil and 27 trillion cubic feet of gas, is twice as large as any other oil
field in North America. The Trans-Alaska pipeline was completed in 1977 at a
cost of $7.7 billion. Oil flows through the 800-mile-long pipeline from Prudhoe
Bay to the port of Valdez. |