




Two years later, the Russian-American Co., based in Sitka, Alaska, founded Fort Ross, a colony on the rugged Sonoma coast. It hoped to grow food to feed the starving settlers back home, where the soil was poor and the growing season was short.

Russian ships called at San Francisco Bay regularly, and Russia's Fort Ross colony so worried the Mexican authorities who ran California in those days that they founded the town of Sonoma in 1821 as a defensive buffer.

Fort Ross was a failure; the Russians returned to Alaska in 1841. But in the 1850s, San Francisco merchants opened a lively trade with Russian Alaska, shipping vegetables north in exchange for ice - wrapped in straw and shipped by sea - to cool California drinks.

"It was a good trade," said John Whitehead, emeritus history professor at the University of Alaska. "California produce fed Russian America."

Trade possibilities with Alaska seemed so promising that Sen. William Gwin of California was an early advocate of the United States purchasing the territory from the Russians, a deal sealed by Secretary of State William Seward in 1867. The price for what skeptics called "Seward's Folly" was $7.2 million, less than 2 cents an acre.

San Francisco merchants bought the assets of the old Russian-American Co. and obtained a license to hunt fur seals on the Pribilof Islands. The fur trade became highly lucrative.

Now called the Alaska Commercial Co., the firm, whose headquarters were moved to San Francisco's Financial District, also ran trading vessels up and down the Yukon River, supplying hundreds of small towns in rural Alaska with everything from groceries to clothes and medicine.

Many old San Francisco families trace their wealth to the Alaska commercial and fur trade.

By 1900, San Francisco shipping interests and capitalists founded the Alaska Packers Association, which soon had a near monopoly on the salmon fishery in the territory's Bristol Bay.

"Bristol Bay is one of the richest salmon fisheries in the world," said Whitehead.

The Alaska Packers set up a string of canneries to pack the fish in cans. Since no workforce was available in Alaska, the association recruited workers in the Bay Area and shipped them north. Workers from California caught Alaska's fish, canned them on the spot, and shipped the product to markets outside Alaska.

The canneries did not operate during the brutal Alaska winters, and the sailing ships, loaded with tons of canned salmon, sailed back through the Golden Gate every autumn. Two of these ships survive: the Star of India in San Diego and the Balclutha - once called the Star of Alaska - at San Francisco's National Maritime Historical Park.

San Francisco was also one of the main jumping off places for the last great gold rush of the 19th century. On July 16, 1897, the steamship Excelsior landed in San Francisco with a ton of gold from the Yukon aboard. The next day the steamer Portland docked in Seattle with a passenger list of newly rich prospectors and two tons of gold.

The rush was on - more than 100,000 people headed north that year. One of them was Jack London, a sometime sailor and waterfront tough guy from Oakland.

London found his career in the north - his first published stories, about dogs and sourdoughs ran in a San Francisco magazine. His most famous creation was a dog named Buck, the animal hero of "The Call of the Wild." Buck began life on a ranch in the Santa Clara Valley and was sold by dognappers to become an Alaskan sled dog.

San Francisco and Seattle interests controlled much of Alaska - transportation, the fisheries, the commercial life. Both had a lot of clout in the territorial government.

Alaska was like an economic colony.

"Many people thought that," Whitehurst said.

"If it was a colony, it was an expensive one," said Klaus Naske, who taught Alaskan history at the University at Fairbanks for 20 years.

Even into the 20th century, Alaska was run by what Alaskans called "outsiders," who called the shots.

By the 1950s, control of Alaska's economy had shifted to Seattle. Seattle's business community wanted to keep control and opposed Alaska's statehood on the grounds that making Alaska a state would raise taxes on their businesses.

The fishing and cannery industries employed W.C. Arnold, a man so powerful that he was called "Judge Arnold." Arnold was "a skookum lobbyist," said Naske, and he told Congress that business was paying the cost of running the territory.

"We don't propose to pick up the check for statehood," Arnold said.

But Congress made Alaska the 49th state in 1958, and riding a new flood of federal money and an oil boom, Alaska finally grew up.