under the forms of the Orthodox Greek or other churches. The
rapid exhaustion in late years of the caribou, seals and other
animals, once the food or stockin-trade of the Aleuts and other
races, threatens more and more the swift depletion of the
natives. They have also felt the fatal influence of the liquor
traffic. From 1893 to 1895 the United States expended $55,000
to support the natives of the Fur Seal Islands. This policy
threatens to become a continued necessity throughout much of
Alaska. There is a small government Indian reservation
on Afognak Island, near Kodiak. The white population is
extremely mobile, and few towns have an assured or definite
future. The prosperity of the mining towns of the interior
is dependent on the fickle fortune of the gold-fields,
for which they are the distributing points. Sitka, Juneau
(the capital) and Douglas, both centres of a rich mining
district, Skagway, shipping point for freight for the Klondike
country (see these titles), and St Michael, the ocean port
for freighting up the Yukon, are the only towns apparently
assured of a prosperous future. Wrangell (formerly Fort
St Dionysius, Fort Stikine and Fort Wrangell), founded in
1833, is a dilapidated and torpid little village, of some
interest in Alaskan history, and of temporary importance from
1874 to 1877 as the gateway to the Cassiar mines in British
Columbia. Its inhabitants are chiefly Thlinkit Indians.
Government.---Alaska, by an act of Congress approved the
7th of May 1906, received the power to elect a delegate to
Congress. Before this act and the elections of August 1906
Alaska was a governmental district of the United States without
a delegate in Congress. Its administration rests in the hands
of the various executive departments, and is partly exercised
by a governor and other resident officials appointed by the
president. It is a military district, a customs district (since
1868), is organized into a land district, and constitutes
three judicial divisions. In 1867-1877 the government was
in the hands of the department of war, although the customs
were from the beginning collected by the department of the
treasury, with which the effective control rested from 1877
until the passage of the so-called Organic Act of 17th May
1884. This act extended over Alaska the laws of the state
of Oregon so far as they should be applicable, created the
judicial district and a land district, put in force the
mining laws of the United States, and in general gave the
administrative system the organization it retained up to the
reforms of 1899-1900. The history of government and political
agitation has centred since then in the demand for general
land legislation and for an adequate civil and criminal law,
in protests against the enforcement of a liquor prohibition
law, and in agitation for an efficiently centralized
administration. As the general land laws of the United States
were not extended to Alaska in 1884, there was no means,
generally speaking, of gaining title to any land other than
a mining claim, and so far as any method did exist its cost
was absolutely prohibitive. After partial and inadequate
legislation in 1891 and 1898, the regular system of land
surveys was made applicable to Alaska in 1899, and a generous
homestead law was provided in 1903. An adequate code of civil
and criminal law and provisions for civil government under
improved conditions were provided by Congress in 1899 and
1900. The agitation over prohibition dates from 1868; the
act of that year organizing a customs district forbade the
importation and sale of firearms, ammunition and distilled
spirits; the Organic Act of 1884 extended this prohibition
to all intoxicating liquors. The coast of Alaska offers
exceptional facilities for smuggling, and liquor bas always
been very plentiful; juries have steadily refused to convict
offenders, and treasury officials have regularly collected
revenue from saloons existing in defiance of law. The
prohibition law is still upon the statute-books. The chief
weaknesses in the colonial administration of the territory,
particularly prior to 1900---but only to a slightly less
extent since---have been decentralization and a lax civil
service. The concomitants of these have been irresponsibility
and inefficiency. The governor has represented the president
without possessing much power; the department of war has had
illdefined duties; the department of justice has, in theory,
had charge of the general law; the department of the interior
has administered the land law; the agents of the bureau of
education have superintended the stocking of Alaska with
reindeer; the United States Fish Commission has investigated
the condition of marine life without having powers to protect
it. The treasury department has charted the coasts, sought
to enforce the prohibition law, controlled and protected
the fur seals and fisheries, and incidentally collected the
customs. Since the creation of the department of commerce
and labour (1903), it has taken over from other departments
some of these scattered functions. All in all, the
government has proved itself without power to protect the
most valuable industries of the district, and for many years
there has been talk of a regular territorial government.
The paucity of permanent residents and the poverty of the
local treasury seem to make such a solution an impossibleone.
History.---The region now known as Alaska was first explored
by the Russian officers Captain Vitus Bering and Chirikov
in I 741 They visited parts of the coast between Dixon
Entrance and Cape St Elias, and returned along the line of the
Aleutians. Their expedition was followed by many private
vessels manned by traders and trappers. Kodiak was discovered
in 1763 and a settlement effected in 1784. Spanish expeditions
in 1774 and 1775 visited the south-eastern coast and laid a
foundation for subsequent territorial claims, one incident of
which were the Nootka Sound seizures of 1789. Captain James
Cook in 1778 made surveys from which the first approximately
accurate chart of the coast was published; but it was reserved
for Vancouver in 1793-1794 to make the first charts in the
modern sense of the intricate south-eastern coast, which only
in recent years have been superseded by new survel's. Owing
to excesses committed by private traders and companies, who
robbed, massacred and hideously abused the native Indians,
the trade and regulation of the Russian possessions were
in 1799 confided to a semi-official corporation called the
Russian-American Company for a term of twenty years, afterwards
twice renewed for similar periods. A monopoly of the American
trade had previously been granted in 1788 to another private
company, the Shohkof. Alexander Baranov (1747--1819); chief
resident director of the American companies (1790-1819), one
of the early administrators of the new company, became famous
through the successes he achieved as governor. He founded
Sitka (q.v.) in 1804 after the massacre by the natives of
the inhabitants of an eadier settlement (1799) at an adjacent
point. The headquarters of the company were at Kodiak until
1805, and thereafter at Sitka. In 1821 Russia attempted by
ukase to exclude navigators from Bering Sea and the Pacific
coast of her possessions, which led to immediate protest from
the United States and Great Britain. This led to a treaty
with the United States in 1824 and one with Great Britain in
1825, by which the excessive demands of Russia were relinquished
and the boundaries of the Russian possessions were permanently
fixed. The last charter of the Russian-American Company expired
on the 31st of December 1861, and Prince Maksutov, an imperial
governor, was appointed to administer the affairs of the
territory. In 1864 authority was granted to an American
company to make explorations for a proposed Russo-American
company's telegraph line overland from the Amur river in
Siberia to Bering Strait, and through Alaska to British
Columbia. Work was begun on this scheme in 1865 and continued
for nearly three years, when the success of the Atlantic
cable rendered the construction of the lme unnecessary and
it was given up, but not until important explorations had been
made. In 1854 a Californian company began importing ice from
Alaska. Very soon thereafter the first Official overtures
by the United States for the purchase of Russian America were
made during the presidency of James Buchanan. In 1867, by a
treaty signed on the 30th of March, the purchase was consummated
for the sum of $7,200,o00, and on the 18th of October 1867
the formal transfer of the territory was made at Sitka.
Since its acquisition by the United States the history of Alaska
has been mainly that of the evolution of its administrative
system described above, and the varying fortunes of its
fisheries and sealing industries. Since the gold discoveries
a wonderful advance has been made in the exploration of the
country. A military reservation has been created with Fort
Michael as a centre. The two events of greatest general interest
have been the Fur Seal Arbitration of 1893 (see BERING SEA
ARBITRATION), and the . Alaska-Canadian boundary dispute,
settled by an international tribunal of British and American
jurists in London in 1903. The boundary dispute involved the
interpretation of the words, quoted above, in the treaties
of 1825 and 1867 defining the boundary of the Russian (later
American) possessions, and also the determining of the location
of Portland Canal, and the question whether the coastal girdle
should cross or pass around the heads of the fjords of the
coast. The tribunal was an ad-)udication board and not an
actual court of arbitration, since its function was not to decide
the boundary but to settle the meaning of the Anglo-Russian
treaty, which provided for an ideal (and not a physical)
boundary. This boundary did not fit in with geographical
facts; hence the adjudication was based upon the motive of
the treaty and not upon the literal interpretation of such
elastic terms as ``ocean,', ``shore'' and ``coast-line.''
The award of the tribunal made in October 1903 was arrived
at by the favourable vote of the three commissioners of
the United States and of Lord Alverstone, whose action
was bitterly resented by the two Canadian commissioners;
it sustained in the main the claims of the United States.
AUTHORITIES.---W. H. Dall and M. Baker, ``List of Charts,
Maps, and Publications relating to Alaska'', in United States
Pacific Coast Pilot, 1879; Monthly Catalogue United
States Public Documents, No. 37 (1898), and Bulletin
227, United States Geological Surve8' (1904), for official
documents; H. H. Bancroft, Alaska 1710--f8&5) pp. 595-609;
and various other bibliographies in titles mentioned below,
especially in Brooke's The Geography and Geology of Alaska.
General.--United States Monthly Summary of Commerce Finance,
July 1903, ``Commercial Alaska, 1867-1903. Area, Popula
tion, Productions, Commerce . . .''; W. H. Dall, Alaska
and its Resources (Boston, 1870); C. Sumner, Speech on
``Cession of Russian-America to the United States,'' in
Works, vol. xi. (Boston, 1875): C. H. Merriam, editor,
Halrriman Alaska Expedition (New York, 1901-1904, 3 vols.).
Physiography and Climate.---United States Department of
War, Explorations in Alaska, 1864-1900 (Washington, 1901);
United States Geological Survey, Annual Reports since
1897---``The Geography and Geology of Alaska: A Summary of
Existing Knowledge,'' by Alfred H. Brooks (Washington, 1905;
