ALASKA: Canceled Check

Since 1867 Alaska has produced roughly $1,000,000,000 in gold, silver and copper. Its salmon shipments have been worth as much as $42,000,000 in a single year. . Alaska cost precisely $7,200,000* ($12 per sq. mi.) when the U. S. Government bought it from Russia, since the Muscovites considered it not much better than a huge, bear-infested snowdrift. Last week, this colossal real-estate coup—engineered by Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Henry Seward—was somewhat inappropriately commemorated in Washington, D. C. Payment of the $7,200,000 was made by a check on the Treasury signed by Treasurer of the U. S. Francis Elias Spinner, drawn to the order of Russian Minister Edward de Stoeckl and dated Aug. 1, 1868. When Alaska’s voteless Delegate to Congress, Anthony Dimond, last week asked permission to transfer the check to Juneau for permanent display in that capital’s Historical Library and Museum, General Accounting Office authorities were forced shamefacedly to announce that the historic draft —long since canceled and filed in the U. S. archives—had been unaccountably mislaid.

Fortunately, in the U. S. treasury, as in an old-fashioned attic, valuable relics may be misplaced but rarely lost. Last week, after three days’ frantic search, the Alaskan check turned up in a musty drawer of the General” Accounting Office where it had reposed since 1921. By this time, the House had passed Delegate Dimond’s bill and it had gone to the Senate Committee on Territories and Insular Affairs. The Senate Committee decided that, since the check, a piece of national property, was so easily lost, it would be better to send a photostatic copy to Juneau and dispatch the draft itself, for safekeeping, to the brand-new National Archives Building.

*To Massachusetts’ late Senator Henry Laurens Dawes (1816-1903) can be traced an interesting and plausible historical theory which holds that the cost of Alaska was actually even less. In his collected letters, Franklin K. Lane, Interstate Commerce Commissioner under Theodore Roosevelt, relates being told by Senator Dawes that when negotiations for the purchase of Alaska were quietly started before the Civil War, $1,400,000 was the tentative price agreed on. During the War, when the Confederacy was trying to get British and French recognition, Secretary Seward persuaded Russia, as a demonstration of friendship, to have its warships cruise along both Atlantic and Pacific Coasts, with the secret understanding that the U. S. would pay for the maneuver. After the war and Lincoln’s assassination, a new administration made secret payment for Russia’s aid impossible. The cost of the naval maneuvers—$5,800,000—was therefore added to the price of the new territory.