Colonization Alaska

Colonization
Main articles: Russian America, Department of Alaska, District of Alaska, Fairbanks Gold Rush, Kobuk River Stampede, and Nome Gold Rush

Map of Russian America in 1860

The Russian settlement of St. Paul’s Harbor (present-day Kodiak town), Kodiak Island, 1814

Miners and prospectors climb the Chilkoot Trail during the 1898 Klondike Gold Rush
Some researchers believe the first Russian settlement in Alaska was established in the 17th century.[35] According to this hypothesis, in 1648 several koches of Semyon D

ezhnyov’s expedition came ashore in Alaska by storm and founded this settlement. This hypothesis is based on the testimony of Chukchi geographer Nikolai Daurkin, who had visited Alaska in 1764–1765 and who had reported on a village on the Kheuveren River, populated by “bearded men” who “pray to the icons”. Some modern researchers associate Kheuveren with Koyuk River.[36]

The first European vessel to reach Alaska is generally held to be the St. Gabriel under the authority of the surveyor M. S. Gvozdev and assistant navigator I. Fyodorov on August 21, 1732, during an expedition of Siberian cossack A. F. Shestakov and Russian explorer Dmitry Pavlutsky

(1729–1735).[37] Another European contact with Alaska occurred in 1741, when Vitus Bering led an expedition for the Russian Navy aboard the St. Peter. After his crew returned to Russia with sea otter pelts judged to be the finest fur in the world, small associations of fur traders began to sail from the shores of Siberia toward the Aleutian Islands. The first permanent European settlement was founded in 1784.