The purchase of Alaska, but it will take the people a generation to find out.
—WILLIAM H. SEWARD,
WHEN ASKED THE MOST IMPORTANT MEASURE OF HIS CAREER
Last Guns of the Civil War
The Telegraph Survey and Mr. Dall
Two Cents an Acre
Boston Men in the Pribilofs
John Muir Visits Glacier Bay
Sheldon Jackson’s Missionary Zeal
Untangling the Rivers
The Lewis and Clark of Alaska
Juneau, or Whatever Its Name Is
One for the Duke
As the American Civil War came to a conclusion in 1865, the United States looked up from the carnage of its battlefields and determined to make good its earlier boasts of Manifest Destiny. Two years later, despite cries of “Seward’s folly” and “Seward’s icebox,” U.S. secretary of state William H. Seward negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million—roughly two cents an acre. In the three decades that followed, numerous expeditions—some government sponsored, some commercially motivated, and others just individuals out for a look-see—would crisscross much of those 393,750,000 acres to see just what sort of bargain Seward had struck.