Alaska Purchase 1867: A 4 a.m. Treaty, Railway Debts, Seward's Folly Myth

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On October 18, 1867, the Russian flag at Sitka tangled in its rigging, and only a third soldier hoisted in a bosun's chair could cut it free, dropping it onto Russian bayonets. Russia's reasons for selling were economic and military. Only about 700 to 800 Russians ran the territory, the Russian-American Company had hunted some 300,000 sea otters nearly to extinction, and the 1856 defeat in the Crimean War had drained the treasury. Grand Duke Constantine argued that Alaska could not be defended against Britain's navy at Esquimalt, so selling it to the United States would box in British Columbia. After the Civil War, diplomat Eduard de Stoeckl revived talks with Secretary of State William H. Seward.

Stoeckl found Seward playing whist on the night of March 29, 1867, and the two had clerks draft the treaty overnight, signing at 4 a.m. for 7.2 million dollars, about two cents an acre. Some 50,000 Inuit, Yup'ik, Tlingit and other Alaska Natives lived outside Russian control and had no say. Seward's Folly was largely a jab from Horace Greeley, a foe of Andrew Johnson, while most of the press backed the deal. Sitka emptied after General Jefferson C. Davis moved into the governor's house, and seal skins later repaid the price. Economists still argue over whether the federal government ever profited.

• About 6.5 million rubles of the purchase money reportedly went to Thomas and William Winans, Baltimore contractors owed for Russian railway work.
• A review of 48 major newspapers of the time found nearly all supported the purchase.
• Finnish blacksmith Thomas Ahllund's diary describes the drunken crew of the Winged Arrow on a near year-long voyage via Hawaii, Tahiti, Brazil and London to Kronstadt.
• Sitka's population fell from 2,500 to a few hundred by 1873.
• In the Bering Sea dispute the United States seized more than 150 British sealing ships before an 1893 tribunal ruled against it.