adequate code of civil and criminal law and provisions for civil government under improved conditions were provided by Congress in 1899 and 1900. The agitation over prohibition dates from 1868; the act of that year organizing a customs district forbade the importation and sale of firearms, ammunition and distilled spirits; the Organic Act of 1884 extended this prohibition to all intoxicating liquors. The coast of Alaska offers exceptional facilities for smuggling, and liquor has always been very plentiful; juries have steadily refused to convict offenders, and treasury officials have regularly collected revenue from saloons existing in defiance of law. The prohibition law is still upon the statute-books. The chief weaknesses in the colonial administration of the territory, particularly prior to 1900—but only to a slightly less extent since—have been decentralization and a lax civil service. The concomitants of these have been irresponsibility and inefficiency. The governor has represented the president without possessing much power; the department of war has had ill-defined duties; the department of justice has, in theory, had charge of the general law; the department of the interior has administered the land law; the agents of the bureau of education have superintended the stocking of Alaska with reindeer; the United States Fish Commission has investigated the condition of marine life without having powers to protect it. The treasury department has charted the coasts, sought to enforce the prohibition law, controlled and protected the fur seals and fisheries, and incidentally collected the customs. Since the creation of the department of commerce and labour (1903), it has taken over from other departments some of these scattered functions. All in all, the government has proved itself without power to protect the most valuable industries of the district, and for many years there has been talk of a regular territorial government. The paucity of permanent residents and the poverty of the local treasury seem to make such a solution an impossible one.
History.—The region now known as Alaska was first explored by the Russian officers Captain Vitus Bering and Chirikov in 1741 They visited parts of the coast between Dixon Entrance and Cape St Elias, and returned along the line of the Aleutians. Their expedition was followed by many private vessels manned by traders and trappers. Kodiak was discovered in 1763 and a settlement effected in 1784. Spanish expeditions in 1774 and 1775 visited the south-eastern coast and laid a foundation for subsequent territorial claims, one incident of which were the Nootka Sound seizures of 1789. Captain James Cook in 1778 made surveys from which the first approximately accurate chart of the coast was published; but it was reserved for Vancouver in 1793–1794 to make the first charts in the modern sense of the intricate south-eastern coast, which only in recent years have been superseded by new surveys. Owing to excesses committed by private traders and companies, who robbed, massacred and hideously abused the native Indians, the trade and regulation of the Russian possessions were in 1799 confided to a semi-official corporation called the Russian-American Company for a term of twenty years, afterwards twice renewed for similar periods. A monopoly of the American trade had previously been granted in 1788 to another private company, the Sholikof. Alexander Baranov (1747–1819); chief resident director of the American companies (1790–1819), one of the early administrators of the new company, became famous through the successes he achieved as governor. He founded Sitka (q.v.) in 1804 after the massacre by the natives of the inhabitants of an earlier settlement (1799) at an adjacent point. The headquarters of the company were at Kodiak until 1805, and thereafter at Sitka. In 1821 Russia attempted by ukase to exclude navigators from Bering Sea and the Pacific coast of her possessions, which led to immediate protest from the United States and Great Britain. This led to a treaty with the United States in 1824 and one with Great Britain in 1825, by which the excessive demands of Russia were relinquished and the boundaries of the Russian possessions were permanently fixed. The last charter of the Russian-American Company expired on the 31st of December 1861, and Prince Maksutov, an imperial governor, was appointed to administer the affairs of the territory. In 1864 authority was granted to an American company to make explorations for a proposed Russo-American company’s telegraph line overland from the Amur river in Siberia to Bering Strait, and through Alaska to British Columbia. Work was begun on this scheme in 1865 and continued for nearly three years, when the success of the Atlantic cable rendered the construction of the line unnecessary and it was given up, but not until important explorations had been made. In 1854 a Californian company began importing ice from Alaska. Very soon thereafter the first official overtures by the United States for the purchase of Russian America were made during the presidency of James Buchanan. In 1867, by a treaty signed on the 30th of March, the purchase was consummated for the sum of $7,200,000, and on the 18th of October 1867 the formal transfer of the territory was made at Sitka.
Since its acquisition by the United States the history of Alaska has been mainly that of the evolution of its administrative system described above, and the varying fortunes of its fisheries and sealing industries. Since the gold discoveries a wonderful advance has been made in the exploration of the country. A military reservation has been created with Fort Michael as a centre. The two events of greatest general interest have been the Fur Seal Arbitration of 1893 (see Bering Sea Arbitration), and the Alaska-Canadian boundary dispute, settled by an international tribunal of British and American jurists in London in 1903. The boundary dispute involved the interpretation of the words, quoted above, in the treaties of 1825 and 1867 defining the boundary of the Russian (later American) possessions, and also the determining of the location of Portland Canal, and the question whether the coastal girdle should cross or pass around the heads of the fjords of the coast. The tribunal was an adjudication board and not an actual court of arbitration, since its function was not to decide the boundary but to settle the meaning of the Anglo-Russian treaty, which provided for an ideal (and not a physical) boundary. This boundary did not fit in with geographical facts; hence the adjudication was based upon the motive of the treaty and not upon the literal interpretation of such elastic terms as “ocean,” “shore” and “coast-line.” The award of the tribunal made in October 1903 was arrived at by the favourable vote of the three commissioners of the United States and of Lord Alverstone, whose action was bitterly resented by the two Canadian commissioners; it sustained in the main the claims of the United States.
Authorities.—W. H. Dall and M. Baker, “List of Charts, Maps, and Publications relating to Alaska”, in United States Pacific Coast Pilot, 1879; Monthly Catalogue United States Public Documents, No. 37 (1898), and Bulletin 227, United States Geological Survey (1904), for official documents; H. H. Bancroft, Alaska 1730–1885, pp. 595-609; and various other bibliographies in titles mentioned below, especially in Brooke’s The Geography and Geology of Alaska.
General.—United States Monthly Summary of Commerce and Finance, July 1903, “Commercial Alaska, 1867–1903. Area, Population, Productions, Commerce . . . ”; W. H. Dall, Alaska and its Resources (Boston, 1870); C. Sumner, Speech on “Cession of Russian-America to the United States,” in Works, vol. xi. (Boston, 1875); C. H. Merriam, editor, Harriman Alaska Expedition (New York, 1901–1904, 3 vols.).
Physiography and Climate.—United States Department of War, Explorations in Alaska, 1869–1900 (Washington, 1901); United States Geological Survey, Annual Reports since 1897—“The Geography and Geology of Alaska: A Summary of Existing Knowledge,” by Alfred H. Brooks (Washington, 1906; Professional Paper, No. 45), with various maps (see National Geographic Mag., May 1904, for a map embodying all knowledge then known); “Altitudes in Alaska” (Bulletin 169, by H. Gannett); “Geographic Dictionary of Alaska” (Bulletin 299, Washington, 1906), by M. Baker; United States Post Office, “Map of Alaska” (1901); United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, Bulletins and maps; Bulletin American Geographical Society, February 1902, F. S. Schrader, “Work of the United States Geological Survey in Alaska”; Journal of Franklin Institute, October and November 1904, W. R. Abercrombie—“The Copper River Country of Alaska”; I. C. Russell, Glaciers of North America.
Industries.—United States Census, 1880, Ivan Petroff, Report on the Population, Industries and Resources of Alaska; United States Census, 1890 and 1900; on reindeer, Fifteenth Annual Report on Introduction of Domestic Reindeer into Alaska, by Sheldon Jackson (Washington, 1906); on agriculture, United States Department of Agriculture, Experiment Stations, Bulletin Nos. 48, 62, 82 . . . (1898–1900); Seal and Salmon Fisheries and General Industries of
