At Sitka, the eagle flag comes down and the stars and stripes go up over Alaska
Six months after the Senate ratified a treaty few Americans understood, the paperwork finally took physical form. On October 18, 1867, Russian and American troops paraded before the governor's house in Sitka as Captain Aleksei Peshchurov told General Lovell Rousseau, "I transfer to the United States the territory of Alaska." The Russian double eagle snagged on the flagpole spar and took three soldiers to free before the American flag went up amid artillery fire from shore and ship. By nightfall, American soldiers stood guard at the gates of the Tlingit village where Russians had stood the day before.
The transfer made the United States a two-ocean, two-hemisphere power for a fraction of the federal budget. Critics mocked Secretary Seward's deal as "Seward's Folly" and "Walrussia," a joke that held for three decades until Klondike gold, and later oil, proved the price absurdly low.
QHow many people actually lived in Alaska when the United States took possession of it?
Roughly 60,000 people, and the vast majority were not Russian. The territory held about 8,000 indigenous residents and 2,500 of Russian or mixed descent clustered around 23 trading posts, with Sitka (called New Archangel) and St. Paul in the Pribilof Islands as the largest outposts. Outside Russian jurisdiction entirely lived an estimated 50,000 Inuit and Alaska Native people who had no part in the sale and no say in the ceremony at Sitka. Washington had effectively bought sovereignty over a population it barely counted and a land it had not surveyed.
QWhat turned the seal-hunting grounds of Alaska into steady money for the federal government?
Fur seals. From 1870 to 1890, the Pribilof Islands rookeries that Russia handed over yielded 100,000 seal skins a year, a harvest that became one of the first reliable revenue streams to justify the $7.2 million purchase price before gold or oil ever entered the picture. The harvest mattered politically: critics who mocked the deal as a frozen wasteland had to reckon with a commodity market generating steady income within three years of the flag-raising. It came three decades before the Klondike rush, but it was the first hard evidence the purchase might pay for itself.
QWhy do some Alaska Native communities treat October 18 as a day of mourning rather than celebration?
Because the holiday marks a transaction they were never party to. Alaska Day became an official observance in 1917 when the territorial legislature declared it, but the sale it commemorates was negotiated entirely between St. Petersburg and Washington, with no Tlingit or other indigenous representatives at the table. Some Alaska Native communities today view the holiday as commemorating the erosion of their sovereignty rather than a transfer worth celebrating, since the deal rearranged control over their homeland without their consent nearly a century before Alaska became a state. The anniversary carries two opposite meanings depending on who is marking it.
