At some time between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago, the ancestors of all of America's aboriginal peoples trekked over a land bridge that connected northeastern Siberia with northwestern America. These early hunter-gatherers dispersed, eventually becoming three distinct groups: Aleut, Eskimo, and Indian.
Ages passed before overseas voyagers rediscovered Alaska. Separate Russian parties led by Aleksei Chirikov and Vitas Bering (who had sailed in 1728 through the strait that now bears his name) landed in Alaska in 1741. Within a few years, the discoverers were followed by the exploiters, who hunted the region's fur-bearing animals. In 1784, the first permanent Russian settlement was established on Kodiak Island: 15 years later, the Russian American Company was granted a monopoly over the region. Its manager, Aleksandr Baranov, established Sitka as the company's headquarters. In 1802, the Tlingit Indians captured Sitka, but two years later lost the town and the war with the Russian colonizers. Fluctuations in the fur trade, depletion of the sea otter, and the Russians' inability to make their settlements self-sustaining limited their development of the region. Increasingly, the czarist government viewed the colonies as a drain on the treasury. In 1867, as a result of the persistence of Secretary of State William H. Seward, a devoted American expansionist, Russia agreed to sell its American territories to the US for $7,200,000. From 1867 until the first Organic Act of 1884, which provided for a federally appointed governor, Alaska was administered first by the US Army, then by the US Customs Service.
The pace of economic development quickened after the discovery of gold in 1880 at Juneau. Prospectors began moving into the eastern interior after this success, leading to gold strikes on Forty Mile River in 1886 and at Circle in 1893. But it was the major strike in Canada's Klondike region in 1896 that sparked a mass stampede to the Yukon Valley and other regions of Alaska, including the Arctic. The gold rush led to the establishment of permanent towns in the interior for the first time.
Subsequent development of the fishing and timber industries increased Alaska's prosperity and prospects, although the region suffered from a lack of transportation facilities. A significant achievement came in 1914, when construction started on the Alaska Railroad connecting Seward, a new town with an ice-free port, with Anchorage and Fairbanks. Politically there were advances as well. In 1906, Alaskans were allowed to elect a nonvoting delegate to Congress for the first time. Congress granted territorial status to the region in 1912, and the first statehood bill was introduced in Congress four years later.
Mineral production declined sharply after 1914. Population declined too, and conditions remained depressed through the 1920s, although gold mining was helped by a rise in gold prices in 1934. World War II (1939–45) provided the next great economic impetus for Alaska; the Aleutian campaign that followed the Japanese invasion of the islands, though not as pivotal as the combat in other areas of the Pacific, did show American policymakers that Alaska's geography was in itself an important resource. Thus the spurt of federal construction and movement of military personnel continued even after the war ended, this time directed at the Soviet Union—only 40 mi (64 km) across the Bering Strait—rather than Japan.
The US government built the Alaska Highway and many other facilities, including docks, airfields, and an extension of the Alaska Railroad. Population soared as thousands of civilian workers and military personnel moved to the territory. The newcomers added impetus to a new movement for statehood, and the Alaska Statehood Act was adopted by Congress in June 1958 and ratified by Alaska voters that August. On 3 January 1959, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the proclamation that made Alaska the 49th state.
In 1971, the Native Claims Settlement Act provided an extensive grant to the state's natives but also precipitated a long federal-state controversy over land allocations. A major oil field was discovered in 1968, and in 1974, over the opposition of many environmentalists, construction began on the 789-mi (1,270-km) Trans-Alaska Pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez. The oil that began flowing through the pipeline in 1977 made Alaska almost immediately one of the nation's leading energy producers.
Alaska's extraordinary oil wealth enabled it to embark on a heavy program of state services and to abolish the state income tax. However, state spending failed to stimulate the private sector to the degree expected. Further, the state's dependence on oil—82% of its revenue came from oil industry taxes and royalties—became a disadvantage when overproduction in the Middle East drove the price of oil down from $36 a barrel at the peak of Alaska's oil boom in 1980–81 to $13.50 a barrel in 1988. In 1986, the state's revenues had declined by two-thirds. Alaska lost 20,000 jobs between 1985 and 1989. The economy's collapse forced 10,000 properties into foreclosure in those years. At the same time, the state rapidly depleted its oil reserves. In 1981, the Interior Department estimated that 83 billion barrels of undiscovered oil existed. By 1989, that estimate had dropped to 49 barrels.
On 24 March 1989, the Exxon Valdez , a 987-ft (300-m) oil tanker, hit a reef and ran aground. The tanker spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil. The oil eventually contaminated 1,285 mi (2,068 km) of shoreline, fouling Prince William Sound and its wildlife sanctuary, the Gulf of Alaska, and the Alaska Peninsula. In the settlement of the largest environmental suit in US history brought by the state and federal governments, Exxon was fined $1.025 billion in civil and criminal penalties. By 1992, Exxon had spent some $2 billion cleaning up Prince William Sound and paid another $300 million in compensation for losses. Ten years after the spill, a $100-million response system was in place to prevent future disasters and every tanker that departed the Valdez terminal in Prince William Sound was escorted by tugboats.
In the early 1990s, oil production in Prudhoe Bay was declining, a development that forced Governor Tony Knowles to implement cutbacks in state spending and brought a renewal of proposals to open areas of the nearly 20-million-acre (8,097,000-hectare) Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to commercial development. A Congressional bill introduced in October 1999 by Alaskan Senator Frank Murkowski and backed by the state's other Congressmen, would allow oil and gas, tourism, and residential development in the refuge, which is often called "America's Serengeti" for its wealth and diversity of wildlife. As the Republican-dominated Congress considered the bill in 2000 and after, conservationists rallied against it. In November 2002, Murkowski was elected governor of Alaska, and continued his support for oil drilling in ANWR. In March 2003, the US Senate voted 52–48 to reject a proposal to add Arctic oil drilling to the US budget. On 10 April 2003, however, the US House of Representatives voted in favor of drilling in ANWR. Nonetheless, on 11 April, the full Congress adopted a budget resolution that was clear of any instruction to authorizing committees to begin Arctic drilling.