Exploration and
Settlement on the Alaskan Coast

The Earliest
Explorers

The large peninsula we now call
Alaska was first visited by human explorers more than twelve
thousand years ago. These ancestors of modern-day Alaska
Natives traveled eastward from Siberia on the Beringian land
bridge, a broad expanse of temporarily-exposed tundra that
is today under three hundred feet of water. This bridge made
it possible for whole communities to move onto the North
American continent and establish maritime villages. Over the
centuries, encampments evolved into productive hunting and
fishing settlements.

These early explorers and
settlers adapted well to Alaska’s coast line. They designed
skin boats and harpoons for hunting marine mammals, created
arctic dress from skin and fur, and used whale blubber and
oil to light and heat their homes. This kind of adaptation
also took place on the Siberian coast, but archeological
evidence tells us that the maritime peoples living along
Alaska’s coast 6,000 to 8,000 years ago were particularly
skillful in adaptive practices. Thus, when European
explorers came to Alaska in the eighteenth century, they
were visiting a land that had been explored, inhabited and
developed for millennia.

Early Russian
Exploration

In a way, Alaska existed in the
Russian imagination long before it had a place on the
Russian map. Russian fur hunters and traders in Siberia had
heard for centuries from the Yupik, the coastal peoples of
Siberia, about a “Great Land” that lay to the east across
the water. In 1728, Vitus Bering, a Danish-born officer in
the Russian Navy of Tsar Peter the Great, made the first of
his two voyages in the North Pacific Ocean, attempting to
confirm the existence of the land to the east. He sailed
through the narrow waterway that separates the Seward
Peninsula of Alaska from the Chukotsk Peninsula in Siberia.
He came very close to the Alaskan coast, but bad weather
prevented him from making an official sighting. In 1741, on
his second voyage, Bering headed up an expedition of two
ships, both of which sighted land at points between 55
degrees and 59 degrees north latitude. The first sighting
took place on July 15, when the St. Paul, under the command
of Bering’s second-in-command, Aleksei Chirikov, reached
Prince of Wales Island. Bering’s own ship, the St. Peter,
sighted Mt. St. Elias, and Kayak Island the next day. But
the ships by this time had become separated, and the St.
Peter was beached near the Aleutian island now known as
Bering Island. Bering died there, of scurvy, in December of
1741. But the St. Paul returned to Siberia, as did some
survivors from Bering’s own ship. They confirmed that the
“Great Land,” did indeed exist; the fox, fur seal and sea
otter pelts they brought showed this land to be a fur
trader’s paradise.

Russian documents from the time
indicate that Bering’s explorations of Alaska were not made
for the purely scientific purposes of survey and mapping.
Russia wanted a permanent presence in North America, and
hoped to exploit the fur and mineral resources there. They
quickly succeeded in this goal. By 1745, hunting and trading
vessels from Siberia followed Bering’s lead along the
Aleutian chain, obtaining fur pelts from the Aleuts. This
was an important relationship, since the Russians were
entirely unskilled in hunting sea mammals, particularly the
elusive sea otter. The Russian traders used bribery and
outright coercion with the Aleuts, oftentimes taking
hostages and demanding their ransom be paid in fur. The
Aleuts repeatedly resisted. In 1763 Aleuts on Unmak and
Unalaska destroyed four Russian vessels, but the fur traders
effectively quashed that opposition.

European Exploration of the
Coast

The English, Spanish and French
governments were all eager to share in the taking of this
rich territory. The British dispatched Captain James Cook to
Alaska in 1778, where he completed the first systematic
survey of the coastline, from 58 degrees to 70 degrees north
latitude. He established that there was no land connection
between the Asian and North American continents, and his
expedition produced maps that set the navigation standard
for the next century. The Russian Empress Catherine,
unnerved at this intensive British survey of territory she
considered her own, ordered Cook’s journal translated into
Russian as soon as it was published.

The Spanish, anxious to protect
their interests in the New World, sent several expeditions
up the coast during this period, including the 1779 voyage
of the Princesa and Favorita, under the command of Ignacio
Arteaga. At Nuchek Bay, they claimed possession of the
territory in the name of the King of Spain, then sailed back
to California. The French, unwilling to be left out, sent
the explorer Comte de La Perouse north to Lituya Bay.
Perouse claimed possession of the land for France, but
politics and geography distracted Russia’s rivals from fully
engaging in Alaska exploration and settlement. The British
lost the American colonies during this time, the French
faced a revolution at home, and the Spanish found themselves
unable to hold onto their New World holdings in South
America. The Russians, who’d been there first, essentially
won the race to claim Alaska.

The Russian Era in Alaska

The connection between Russian
exploration and Alaska Native exploitation that began in
1745 continued as Russia took firm hold of the coast. In
1783, the Russian merchant Grigorii Shelikhov equipped three
vessels for a voyage to the Aleutian Islands, hoping to gain
a monopoly on the fur trade of the region. In 1784, when the
ships arrived at Kodiak Island, they were met by a force of
4,000 Koniag Natives who demanded that the Russians leave
immediately. After negotiations failed, the Russians fired
cannons on Koniag homes, destroying them. By subduing the
Alaska Natives with fire power, Russian control grew
stronger. Shelikhov extended his authority by setting up
political districts in the Kodiak region, and by a building
a fur-harvesting labor force of Alaska Natives. His methods
were sometimes so brutal that the Russian government
actually conducted an inquiry, although Shelikhov was never
charged with any crime.

A 1794
drawing of the Russian fur trading settlement on
Kodiak.
Click
image for a larger view

In 1799, the Russian American Company was granted an
imperial charter that gave the company sole economic and
governmental powers in the Russian’s Alaskan territories.
Conditions for Alaska Natives improved, but they were still
seen as workers without rights. In 1810, 200 Aleuts from
Unalaska were sent to the Pribilofs Islands in the Bering
Sea for to establish a permanent seal harvesting community
there. Soon after, sea otter and seal populations dropped
precipitously, and by 1828, the Russian American Company was
compelled to put limits on the number of otter pelts that
could be purchased in each district.

Although resource exploitation
was their top priority, the Russians did not entirely
abandon exploration for its own sake. Russian Navy ships
surveyed Alaska’s Bering and Pacific coasts, reporting on
Native communities, resources and natural features. Between
1800 and 1860, parties were sent along the coast and into
the interior by the Russian American Company. In 1818, one
party charted the coast between the Kuskokwim and Nushagak
Rivers, and, in 1819, Andrei Ustiugov, an Aleut from
Unalaska, charted Bristol Bay. In the 1830s, explorers
traveled through the Yukon and explored Alaska’s polar coast
as far as Point Barrow.

U.S. Exploration in Alaska

By the mid-eighteenth century,
several factors converged to set the stage for a new age in
Alaskan exploration. Expeditions focused on geographical
exploration and ethnographic inquiry, as well as resource
exploitation. One significant factor contributing to this
trend was the declining Asian fur market, and the
near-extinction of the sea otter. As the Russian American
Company found profits from fur sales dropping, the Russian
government, embroiled in a number of conflicts in Europe,
lost interest in Alaska. In 1859, the government authorized
Edoard de Stoeckl, a Russian diplomat in the U.S.
delegation, to broach the subject of selling Alaska to the
United States.

To Spencer F. Baird, assistant
secretary of the recently-founded Smithsonian Institution,
the prospect of an impending Alaska sale was good news
indeed. Baird was building the Smithsonian’s natural history
collection, and hoped to include all parts of the North
American continent. Now, with an expanding American interest
in the territory, he recruited collectors from the
commercial and government survey teams that were headed to
document Alaska’s resources.

George Kennicott, a seasoned
naturalist and explorer, led the Smithsonian’s first Arctic
expedition. Kennicott spent the years 1859 to 1863 in the
Yukon, and eventually sent forty boxes, loaded with natural
and ethnographic materials, to Washington, D.C. Kennicott’s
second expedition, in 1865, was financed by the Western
Union Telegraph Company. Kennicott and his team were charged
with surveying a route for a trans-Alaskan, trans-Siberian
cable route, and with collecting ethnographic and natural
history specimens along the way. When Kennicott died
unexpectedly on this trip, his assistant, the young William
Healey Dall, took over as leader. But a rival company laid
the Atlantic telegraph cable first, and Western Union
canceled the expedition in July 27, 1866. Dall stayed on,and
over the next decades he made more than a dozen trips to
Alaska. He worked for the Smithsonian, collecting and
organizing specimens. He worked for the U.S. Coast Survey,
charting the coastal features along the Aleutian chain, and,
in 1880, the Bering Strait and the Arctic Ocean. He worked
for the U.S. Geological Survey as a paleontologist, and
during his stays in Washington wrote books and reports, and
organized the collections from the field. When C. Hart
Merriam set out to assemble a team for the 1899 Harriman
Alaska Expedition, William Healey Dall was one of the first
men he contacted.

A sample page
from one of Dall’s field notebooks showing Eskimo
clothing details.
Click
image for a larger view

During the last decades of the 19th century, a growing
interest in Native cultures led to a number of field studies
among the Alaska Natives. One such venture the Jessup
Expedition, begun in 1897, was sponsored by the American
Museum of Natural History. The project involved six years of
fieldwork among Native communities in northeastern Asia and
northwestern North America, and resulted in extensive
reports on Native life, language, and culture, and
contributed almost 17,000 artifacts to the Smithsonian’s
collections.

The Harriman
Expedition

E. H. Harriman was not an
ethnographer or a map-maker. He was a business man, a stock
broker turned railroad owner, but he did not come to Alaska
on a business trip. He knew, of course, that there was money
to be made in Alaska, and he, along with any number of
entrepreneurs were eager to use the developing technologies
of rail and cable to capitalize on the business
opportunities that might arise. But Harriman’s motive for
coming to Alaska stemmed from his well-documented love of
the outdoors. His decision to turn a wilderness trip into a
serious exploration of the coast speaks to his undeniable
ability to do things on a grand scale, and the results
reflect this as well. The expedition returned with more than
one hundred trunks of specimens and more than five thousand
photographs and colored illustrations. The scientists
produced thirteen volumes of data that took twelve years to
compile. There were two major discoveries, a new fjord and
glacier, and a sweeping survey of an environment in flux.
The expedition arrived when Alaska’s patina of pure
wilderness was beginning to show wear and tear from resource
exploitation. The Gold Rush was in full swing, salmon
canneries were working round the clock, and fur seal
rookeries exported thousands of skins every year. The Native
cultures were contending with a growing tourist community,
and subsistence practices were giving way to a new economy
of gold, fish and fur. The Harriman scholars of 1899
observed and catalogued what they saw: a gloriously
beautiful land on the cusp of inevitable and sometime
devastating change.

Members of
the Harriman Expedition camping at Point
Gustavus
Click
image for a larger view

(top)

Tlingit
Canoe

Tlingit canoe designed
for seal hunting
Click image for a
larger view
 

“St. Petersburg. 16
March, 1730. On February 28 past Fleet Captain
Bering arrived back here from Kamchatka. He was
sent there on the personal order of Emperor Peter
the Great… to explore the northeastern limits of
this land and to ascertain whether this land, as
several think, is jointed to the northern part of
America.”

From the first public
notice of Bering’s 1828 voyage, published in the
Sanktpeterburgskiia Vedomosti.

“Of all hunts, the sea
otter hunt requires the most experience, skill, and
patience. Fur seals, sea lions, and walruses,
despite their strength and size, are caught more
easily and more quickly.”

Ferdinand Von Wrangell,
1835

“The Russian-American
colonies, seeing the opportunity for marketing in
various places furs, fats, fish, and other natural
products, would attract people of all kinds, tries
in the sciences and arts, and would set about
establishing mills and factories … Cities would
finally arise out of villages.”

N. P. Rumyantsev,
Russian Minister of Commerce, reporting in 1803 on
the prospects for Russian growth in Alaska.

“I have traveled on
snow shoes, with the thermometer from 8 to 40 below
zero. I have paddled in open canoes up stream six
hundred and fifty miles, and down, 1,300 miles. I
have obtained 4,450 specimens, including a set of
the rocks from Fort Yukon to the sea.”

William Healey Dall,
reporting on his explorations in Alaska, 1867

“I soon saw that he was
uncommon. He was taking a trip for rest, and at the
same time managing his exploring guests as if we
were a grateful, soothing, essential part of his
rest cure, though scientific explorers are not
easily managed, and in large mixed lots are rather
inflammable and explosive, especially when
compressed on a ship.”

John Muir, writing
about E. H. Harriman in Harriman the Man,
1911.