The northwest coast of this part of America was discovered and explored by a Russian expedition under Behring in 1741, and at subsequent periods settlements were made by the Russians at various places, chiefly by the prosecution of the fur trade. In 1799 the territory was granted to a Russo-American fur company by the Emperor Paul VIII, and in 1839 the charter of the company was renewed. New Archangel, in the Island of Sitka, was the principal settlement, but the company had about forty stations. They exported annually 25,000 skins of the seal, seaotter, beaver, etc., besides about 20,000 sea-horse teeth. The privilege of the company expired in 1863, and in 1867 the whole Russian possessions in America were ceded to the United States for a money payment of $7,200,000. The treaty was signed March 30 and ratified on June 20, 1867, and on October 9 following the possession of the country was formerly made over to a military force of the United States at New Archangel (now Sitka). Portions of Alaska were explored in 1859 by the employes of the Russo-American Telegraph Company in surveying a route for a line of telegraph which was destined to cross from America to Asia near Behring Strait-a project

which was abandoned, after an expenditure of $3,000,000, on communication with Europe being secured by the Atlantic cable.

The government of Alaska lies in a Governor, who is appointed by the President. It has not yet a full territorial form of government.

The climate of the Alaskan coast regions is much milder, even in the higher latitudes, than it is in the interior, or in corresponding latitudes on the Atlantic coast. This is easily explained and understood when the natural forces productive of this milder temperature are contemplated.

The most important among them is a thermal current resembling tht Gulf Stream in the Atlantic. This current, known as the Japanese or Kuro Siwo, has its origin under the equator near the Molucca and Philippine Islands, passing northward along the coast of Japan, and crosses the Pacific to the southward of the Aleutian Islands, after throwing a branch through Bering Sea, in the direction of Bering Strait. The main current strikes the coast of British Columbia, where it divides again, one branch turning northward toward Sitka, and thence westward to the Kadiak and Shumagim Islands.

The comparatively warm waters of these currents affect the temperatures of the superjacent atmosphere, which, absorbing the latent heat, carries it to the coast with all its mollifying effect. Thus the oceanic and atmospheric currents combine in mitigating the coast climate of Alaska, and this process is greatly aided by the configuration of the extreme northwestern shores of the Pacific, backed as they are with an almost impenetrable barrier of lofty mountains, which holds back from the interior the warm, moist atmospheric currents coming in from the ocean, deflecting at the same time the ice-laden northern gale from the coast to the interior.

To Hon. A. P. Swineford, who was Governor of Alaska in 1886, belongs the distinction of having early and strongly called the attention of the United States Government to the splendid possibilities of Alaskan development. In the very first report which he made to the Secretary of the Interior in October, 1885, he declared that the natural resources of Alaska, as yet in the infancy of their development, were such as might be made, in the near future, a most important addition to the aggregate wealth of the nation.