Excerpt from “The Spirit of Alaska” by Bill Harris 1992
With addendum from my friend, Jim who's been all over Alaska
In light of recent history, it’s hard to believe that Russia and the United States were ever as closely allied as they were in the 19th century. Russia was the only European power that provided help for the North in the Civil Was., while all the others sided with the Confederacy; and when the Union was restored, Washington felt a debt of gratitude to the Tsar. Most of Russia’s trade was handled by American ships, which had special status in Russian pots except, ironically, in Alaska, where the American penchant for delivering guns and rum to the Indians had made them unwelcome. The 1849 gold rush in California was a boon to the Russian-American Company, which made almost as much money delivering picks and shovels to prospectors as shipping furs to China. And as much as the Russians loved Americans, they weren’t too fond of the English. When it became apparent that British interests in Canada were in a position to take over Alaska, the proposition that there was no great love between the United States and the Mother country moved the Tsar’s advisors to push for ceding the peninsula to Washington, to blunt the English threat of expanding its empire into Siberia. When gold was discovered in western Canada in 1861, and thousands of Americans rushed in to claim it even though their country itself had no claims there, the Russians saw it as a golden opportunity, and their ambassador began canvassing influential American senators to find out what they’d be willing to pay for Alaska. The question became moot when Southern states began seceding from the Union and by the time the Civil War was over, the Tsar seemed to have made up his mind to keep his North American colony after all. But William Seward, the American Secretary of State, had already made up his mind that he wanted the territory and offered $7.2 million for it. To everyone’s surprise, the offer was accepted.
Seward negotiated the deal in complete secrecy, and when his proposal went to the Senate for approval the lawmakers were so full of resentment they nearly let the treaty die in Committee. When they finally did vote on it, they passed it with just a single vote. And they weren’t finished yet. A month after the sale was approved, President Andrew Johnson sent a message to Congress asking them to come up with the money to pay for it. They referred the matter to the appropriations committee and then turned their attention to impeachment proceedings against the president. [Jim’s Comment – Seems like a familiar story.] When Johnson was acquitted, his enemies began attacking the deal his Administration had made with Russia, and the debate over the appropriation, which did not begin until the following June, was the most heated Washington had ever seen.
The American flag had been flying over Sitka for eight months by then, which helped make some of the rhetoric ridiculous, but they made their speeches anyway, and when the issue finally came to a vote the appropriations bill was passed by a huge margin. Tsar Alexander II finally got his $7.2 million, more than a year late,, but Alaska itself came away that summer with a tarnished image that still survives. Some Americans even today believe that it is a bargain place unfit for human habitation, but nobody believes it wasn’t one of the greatest bargains in American history, far better than Peter Minuit’s purchase of Manhattan Island for twenty-four dollars.
But it would be a long, long time before Alaska became American territory in anything but name According to the terms of the treaty, people living there, with the exception of “uncivilized native tribes”, of course, would automatically have all rights of American citizenship. They would also keep ownership of their land and their houses. And if they decided they’d rather go back home to Russia, they had three years to make up their mind and the Americans would provide their transportation. But, like a lot of treaties, what’s on paper doesn’t always square with reality.
The Russians had been in North America for more than a hundred and twenty years by the time the sale was made, and Sitka itself was nearly sixty years old. They had established nearly fifty communities, and a high percentage of the families living in them had been in America for several generations. They had established schools, churches, parks, libraries, hospitals, a theater and even a college. The harbor at Sitka was one of the best developed in North America and ships based there called at ports all over the world It even had a lighthouse, one of the first on the West Coast. The city was far more sophisticated the San Francisco, and was well known as the Paris of the Pacific. At the time the sale was negotiated, the Russian-American Company was beginning to expand from fur trading into mining and it had never been more prosperous. It seemed absurd that the Tsar would sell it all out from under them. But the terms of the deal seemed fair enough, and they were generally ready to make the best of a bad thing. As it turned out, it was worse than anyone could have predicted.
Williams Seward was a man in a hurry. He wanted to take possession of the new territory right away, and knowing that Congress had other things on its mind, he arranged to have it placed under the control of the War Department as though it had been taken in battle. And what that meant was Alaska would be occupied and controlled by the military. Even though Seward had been a Senator himself, and knew the ways of Congress, he was sure it wouldn’t take more than a few weeks or months for them to set up a formal government with its own set of laws and a governor to enforce them.
But the summer of 1868, when they talked about little else, Congress became silent on the subject of Alaska. Soon after they got around to paying for it, they made it a special customs district to make sure they could start collecting a return on their investment with duties on imports and exports. But it was not given the status of a territory as was traditional for all other areas opened for settlement, and over the next seventeen years, eight different Congresses and four different Presidents pretended Alaska didn’t exist.
Like most other Americans at the time, the military authorities believed that Russian America had an Indian problem similar to the ones they themselves had faced in every other new territory they had settled. The fact was that the Russians and the natives had gotten along remarkably well almost from the beginning, but the force of 250 men sent to claim Alaska, and their commanding general, Jefferson Davis, were all seasoned Indian fighters. Once the American flag was raised on October 18, 1967, they began a rampage of raping and looting and terrorizing the natives and Russians alike, all of whom began wondering about that clause in the treaty that gave them the rights and privilege of American citizens. Before long more soldiers arrived, and within a few months the newly made American citizens began moving out, and within a few years the only Russian presence in Alaska was the Orthodox Church and is missionary priests.
But there were plenty of Americans to replace them. Hundreds arrived from California and the Northwest looking for new opportunities on the Last Frontier. It was a mixed bag of real estate operators, gamblers, businessmen, prostitutes and others, but they were all determined to make Alaska the last stop in their search for opportunity. But with no real government, no one in Alaska could buy or sell property. It wasn’t possible to get married, or divorced, for that matter. Wills couldn’t be enforced, and with no courts, laws couldn’t be enforced either, even though the citizens of Sitka had created their own government with rules everyone followed as best they could. Alaska had been touted as a land of endless bounty, but homesteaders couldn’t mark out farms or independent trappers were forbidden to collect fur. The person in charge of the mess, General Davis, had problems of his own keeping peace among the peacekeepers, who had brought syphilis and drunkenness to the Indians and fear from the whites who never felt safe from them. He was visibly relieved when, after ten years of occupation, he and his troops were reassigned to Idaho to put the cantankerous Nez Perce Indians in their place.
The government in Washington wasn’t completely insensitive to the problem, and not long after the purchase it gave some San Francisco entrepreneurs the exclusive right to exploit the fur resources of the Pribilof Islands. The idea, they said with perfectly straight faces, was to protect the coastline against poachers. Eventually the company expanded its interests to all of the Aleutians and part of the mainland. It was good business for them to promote law and order, and in the areas where they operated, they did the government job far better than the government itself. When the army was pulled out, the job of keeping the peace fell to the next highest American official, the collector of customs. But the job of governing such a huge territory without a code of laws wasn’t exactly in his job description, which may explain why he went to Canada for urgent medical attention a few days after the responsibility was dumped on his shoulders. The hospital in Sitka had long since closed, along with the schools and other institutions, and the city hd become a virtual ghost town during the years of the military rampage. Except for the areas controlled by the Alaska Commercial Company, complete anarchy had come to Alaska. In the wildest days of the Wild West, America had never experienced anything quite like it.
The government lurched forward to solve the problem, but once again its solution was almost ludicrous. The Treasury Department was put in charge because it already had people stationed in Alaska. Most of them were customs collectors, but some had experience in stopping the illegal flow of liquor, and if that wasn’t exactly peacekeeping, it was as close as Washington felt it had to go. The Treasury agents followed the lead of Congress and the President and decided to do nothing at all. They probably felt quite justified because all of them were relatively new in their jobs and weren’t too confident that their future in Alaska was very bright. Since establishing the Alaska Customs District, Washington had neglected to pay its employees there, which naturally resulted in a rather high turnover. In his annual report for his first year in charge, the department’s secretary made a strong recommendation to shut down the Alaska Customs District, in fact. The revenues they collected fell far short of the expense, if the expenses should ever happen to be paid, and the length of the coast and the Canadian border made it impossible for them to do the job anyway, he said. It was predictable that his request was ignored. It was said that in those days any mail received at the Treasury Department from anywhere in Alaska was usually thrown away unopened. Of course, that was thirty-five years before citizens were required to mail in their income taxes.
The customs agents had petitioned the department for a warship to patrol the Alaskan waters to help ward off the very real threat of an Indian uprising, but like every other plea from the North, it was lost in the shuffle. Finally, in desperation, they sent an SOS to a British task force stationed on Vancouver Island, and the Royal Navy responded by stationing one of its vessels in Sitka harbor for a month, until an American ship finally arrived. But the ship was just passing through. When its captain said that he had no orders to stay there, yet another petition was fired off to Washington, but this time it was sent to President Rutherford B. Hayes himself. The President responded by sending an even bigger ship, whose captain’s orders were quite clear. His command was to include all of Alaska until Congress could get around to establishing a permanent government A procession of vessels came and went after that and for the next five years Alaska was governed from the bridge of a ship. And during those years, the command ship was virtually alone in Sitka harbor, which had once been one of the busiest in North America.
Finally, in 1884, Congress got its act together and passed a bill that gave Alaska its first governor and the set of laws that were in effect at the time in Oregon. It still wasn’t perfect, but it was an improvement And it was a clue to the attitude of the United States Congress that had debated, but not acted upon, more than twenty-0fivce different proposals for Alaska’s government, only to settle in the end for an idea to simply copy the laws of another state, which had little more in common with Alaska than it was a long way from Washington. And at that, the congressmen casually added that the laws of Oregon would be in effect “so far as they are applicable”. The bill gave Alaska courts, but the judges weren’t given a clue about what parts of the law applied. It gave them a law enforcement structure, but no funds for jails, or to transport lawbreakers from the scene of the crime to a court. It gave them guidelines for establishing county governments, but no means of creating the counties themselves. The governor was given the responsibility of reporting on conditions in the entire territory, but no funds to staff or move around it. In fact, although the new law specified salaries for officials, it didn’t allow taxing of Alaskan citizens, and ordered that federal revenues collected there should not remain in Alaska, except to maintain the courts. The law, in its wisdom, stipulated that no one who wasn’t a taxpayer could serve on a jury, and without taxation, Alaskans were denied the right of trial by jury. The act also failed to provide for a territorial legislature, or for a representative in Congress. And while it pretended to promote the establishment of schools, it appropriated just $25,00 for education, even though the population of the district at the time was estimates to be about thirty thousand. Governors grumbled, of course, but like the Treasury men before them, they hardly had Washington’s ear. In those days, it took about three months to get a reply to a letter sent to the East Coast, assuming it was answered the same day it was received. But when more frequent steamship service began in the late ‘80s, the Postmaster General rules it “inadvisable” to carry mail on every ship, and even when the ship owners offered to handle it free, the Post Office still refused to extend its service beyond one ship a month, and only the summer months at that.
Most Americans really did not think too much about Alaska in those days, and the only pressure on official Washington came in the pitiful trickle of mail from the territory itself. The old myths still existed that it was only a worthless frozen wasteland, even though tourists began arriving in 1882, when passengers were carried on steamers and given short tours of the port cities while the freight was being unloaded. Many of them were also treated to cruises of Glacier Bay, one of the most incredibly beautiful bodies of water on the planet, but their numbers were limited, and except for the reports of scientific expeditions there was almost no way for average Americans to know what a treasure their government had bought for them, or to care their representatives had turned their back on it. But apparently there were some who cared very much. In one of his annual reports, the governor charged that the Alaska Commercial Company, which had been given the monopoly on seal hunting, had lobbyists in Washington who routinely gave testimony to Congressional committees that Alaska was worthless and commissioned newspaper and magazine articles with the same message. They were also monopolizing the salmon fisheries, he claimed, and both industries were earning millions for outsiders, whose profits would be severely curtailed if they were subject to government controls. It goes without saying that a congressional committee held hearing into the matter and concluded the company had not “used its political connections to obtain favors,” although it did not pretend that the company was without political connections. [Jims comment – Of course not. Why would they find themselves guilty of illegal activity and so it goes on until now?] The same kind of lobbying had also apparently resulted in a complicated law that prevented Alaskans from cutting trees on public lands which, according to the same law, was nearly all of Alaska. Average citizens were restricted to town sites, and only corporations were allowed to claim land beyond their borders. The result was that any timber used for buildings, or even for containers to ship produce out of the territory, had to be imported from Oregon or Washington.
It was not surprising that in its first quarter century as an American possession, Alaska’s population hardly changed, although it wasn’t easy to tell. The district as excluded from the 1870 census, and when the national population was counted ten years later, only one census-taker was hired to cover all of Alaska. By 1890, the official estimate was that there were slightly more than 32,000 Alaskans. But ten years after that number was almost exactly doubled, and Alaska seemed to have a future at last.
The reason was as old as the story of America itself; there was gold up there.
[Jim’s Comment - Fast forward 150 years and on a motorcycle trip around Australia, for a short time I traveled with two other motorcyclists after a trip into the sands of the Northern Territory desert. It turned out they were Mormons and lawyers from the Big Smoke of Sydney. During a coffee stop at one of the roadhouses between Three Corners in the NT and Mt. Isa in Queensland, I was asked what I thought of America’s “broken government?” It reminded me of a similar conversation I had 50 years before, when on an overnight stay in Athens, Greece I visited a small pub under the watchful Acropolis. It was there I first heard the term “Imperialist America”. I reacted to that one and it only took me 30 to 40 years to admit they were right. America is an Imperialist nation.
Now to hear my countries government was broken was first matched by the same reaction, but the more I thought about it………….
So a couple of days ago I pulled this book out of my library and started to review it only to find that 150 years ago, our government was a messed up as it is now. While it looks like a mess today, naively I thought it must have worked at one time in the past. It only took a few paragraphs in the book’s introduction to show me, this nation has been paying those leaches in Washington a lot of money for a lot of years and for that have gotten little out of it of any fairness or substance all the while those individuals have misused their position to enrich themselves and their friends and family.
Why? Obviously over the years there is no real accountability so they get away with what they want. With the ignorance in America that voted in the current rubbish government and its leaders, I see little hope that in the future, the will do anything different.]