Alaska

Russian America, bought for two cents an acre and mocked for a generation afterwards. Russia's presence was a fur company operating from Sitka, which enslaved and coerced Aleut hunters and never numbered more than a few hundred Russians; by the 1860s the sea otters were hunted out and St Petersburg feared losing the territory to Britain in any future war without compensation. The sale in 1867 for $7.2 million was pushed through by Secretary of State William Seward and derided as Seward's Folly, a judgement that survived the Klondike gold rush of 1898 and did not survive the Prudhoe Bay oil strike of 1968. The territory was governed with little attention for decades; Japanese forces occupied Attu and Kiska in 1942, the only American soil held by an enemy in the war, and the Aleut population was interned by their own government in poor conditions. Statehood came in 1959. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 resolved land claims by creating regional corporations owning forty-four million acres, an arrangement used nowhere else. The trans-Alaska pipeline opened in 1977. The Permanent Fund pays residents an annual dividend from oil revenue. It is larger than the next three states combined. Juneau is the capital and is not reachable by road. Anchorage holds about forty per cent of the population. Denali is the highest peak in North America. The state has more coastline than all the others combined. It recorded the second largest earthquake ever measured, in 1964. Russian Orthodox churches still stand in villages across the southwest.

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