Alaska

In 1867 the United States bought Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million, about 2 cents an acre. The deal was arranged by Secretary of State William Seward, and some critics called it Seward's Folly. For 30 years it looked like they might be right. Then gold changed everything.

Gold was found in the Klondike in Canada's Yukon Territory in 1896, and when word reached Seattle the next summer, tens of thousands of people set off to get rich. The fastest route ran through Alaska, by steamer to the boomtowns of Skagway and Dyea, then on foot over the Chilkoot or White Pass. Canadian authorities required each stampeder to bring about a year's worth of supplies, so men hauled their gear up the pass in dozens of trips. The photographs of a single file of climbers stretched up the Chilkoot in the snow are some of the most famous of the era. Gold was found on the beaches at Nome in 1899, and another rush followed.

Before the Americans and the Russians, Alaska belonged to its Native peoples, including the Tlingit, Haida, Yup'ik, Iñupiat and Aleut, among many others. Sitka was the capital of Russian America and kept its onion-domed Orthodox cathedral. Photographs of Southeast Alaska often show carved totem poles, clan houses and canoes. In 1899 the railroad man Edward Harriman led a scientific expedition up the coast, and Edward Curtis, then a young Seattle photographer, came along.

Tourism started early too. Steamships carried visitors up the Inside Passage in the 1880s and 1890s to see the glaciers and the towns, and their pictures helped fix the image of Alaska as a land of ice and mountains. Alaska became a territory in 1912 and a state in 1959.

In the glacier pictures, compare the ice to the mountains around it. Many of Alaska's tidewater glaciers have retreated a long way since they were first photographed, and some old views show ice where there is now open water.