Alaska has seen many changes in 58 years of statehood

On Jan. 3, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a proclamation making Alaska the 49th state in the union, putting the Alaska Statehood Act of 1958 officially in effect.

A handful of Alaskans were present in the Cabinet Room during the signing, according to original documents preserved in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, including Robert Atwood, Edward Lewis “Bob” Bartlett, and Ernest Gruening.

In a press release the same day, President Eisenhower said, “To the State itself, to its people, I extend on behalf of all their sister States, best wishes and hope for prosperity and success.”

The State of Alaska is only 58 years young, but a lot has changed in a short time.

In celebration of Alaska’s statehood birthday, the Frontiersman compiled a Top Ten list of Things That Have Changed Since Alaska Became a State:

Population

In a 1958 letter to the president, Secretary of the Interior Fred Seaton noted that the then-population of the territory of Alaska was 220,000. Of that number, roughly 50,000 Alaskans were military personnel. The Alaska Dept. of Labor and Workforce Development estimates the total population was 737,625 as of 2015, and of that number, around nearly 300,000 live in the municipality of Anchorage, and more than 100,000 live in the Mat-Su Valley. Across the state, there are currently 19,436 active-duty military personnel as of May 2016, according to the Defense Manpower Data Center.

Economy

According to then-Secretary of the Interior Fred Seaton, Alaska’s gross product from natural resources was just over $160 million, an 18 percent rise over the previous fiscal year. Where did the money come from? Most came from the territory’s fisheries, valued at around $93 million, with most of the rest coming from timber and minerals. The Pribilof fur seal industry in 1957 weighed in at $5.2 million, an amount calculated separately from the rest of the territory’s resource extraction. Other furs made up a gross total of $1.5. In 2013, Alaska’s gross domestic product was $59.4 billion, according to the Alaska Dept. of Commerce, Community, and Economic Development – the highest per capita in the nation, but the lowest overall compared to other states. Oil and gas is Alaska’s natural gas leader, but fisheries, minerals and timber continue to play an important part. Meanwhile, tourism is a major contributor to the Alaska economy, while the fur industry registers barely a blip. Alaska originally paid back on its investment of $7.2 million for the 1867 purchase from Russia primarily in sales from Pribilof seals, which included at times forced labor of Aleut peoples, including during WWII after the evacuations. Commercial harvests of seal pelts ended in the 1970s and early 1980s in the Pribilof Islands, and an indigenous subsistence hunt exists today under co-management between tribal governments and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries.

State debt

At the dawn of statehood, Alaska had the distinction of being “the only government in the 48 states, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Alaska, which had no outstanding debt at the close of the fiscal year 1957,” according to the June 24, 1958 letter to the president by Secretary of Interior Fred Seaton. Today, Alaska carries approximately $8 billion in debt, or about $11,000 for every citizen. But Alaska is still in good fiscal health compared to other states, according to the Mercatus Center, which ranks states according to their fiscal health based on a variety of factors. Alaska ranked number one in fiscal health in the 2016 edition of the center’s report.

Crime rates

According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Annual Crime Reports, Alaska had 23 murders in 1960, the earliest year numbers are available. For the then-population of 226,167 Alaskans, that’s a per-capita rate of around 11 per 100,000 people. In 2015, the last year for which data is available, there were 59 murders in Alaska out of a population of 738,432, or about a per-capita rate of 8 per 100,000 people. Per-capita violent crime in general has gone up, from 104 per 100,000 in 1960 to 730 per 100,000 in 2015.

Humpback comeback

At the dawn of statehood, centuries of whaling had nearly created an extinction-level event for the world’s humpback whales, wiping out more than 90 percent of the total population for a species that sees most of its members’ habitat ranges in the coastal waters of Alaska. With the state’s population at just over 1,000 in the mid-1960s, a conservation fisheries approach to the animals started yielding significant success in the 2000s. As of 2016, the total population of humpbacks in the North Pacific is estimated at 21,000.

Northern Sea Route

In 1957, Russia launched the first nuclear-powered ice breaker ship, an advance that would later prove to be key in dominating the Northern Sea Route. Shipping cargo through the Arctic Ocean and down Alaska’s west coast through the Bering Sea proved to be a daunting and uneconomical task even then, advanced ice-breaker or no. But with climate change and a rapidly receding ice cover in the Arctic, Russia’s investment in an advanced ice-breaker fleet paid off. By 2012, Russian LNG carriers assisted by icebreakers were making summer-time trips through the Northern Sea Route to bring natural gas from Murmansk in western Russia through waters between the Russian and Alaskan coasts and to Asian markets – all for a shorter trip and lower price than alternate routes. With more shipping lanes developing around Alaska’s coast, the Northern Sea route and its use are expected to shape the future of Alaska and natural gas competition between the U.S. and Russia for decades to come.

Alaska time

At the start of statehood, the massive new state was set in four time zones. In 1983, that changed when the vast majority of the state’s land mass was collapsed into a single time zone, Alaska Time. That puts Alaska four hours behind the U.S. East Coast and one hour behind Washington, Oregon and California. But Alaskans living in the western part of the state also incur an added risk from the change – chronotherapy research now shows that the farther west one lives in a time zone, the higher the risk for seasonal affective disorder, which also disproportionately affects people living in higher latitudes. That’s because the western side of a time zone is nearly an hour off from true solar time. Western Alaskans, who formerly lived under the Bering Sea time zone, are up to two hours off. Alaskans in the western Aleutians work according to Alaska’s little-known time zone, the Hawaii-Aleutian time zone.

Iditarod

The use of the Iditarod Trail predates the world-famous Iditarod Race. But it wasn’t until 1964, when the Wasilla-Knik Centennial Committee got interested in preserving historical assets in the local area, that the idea for the sled-dog race was raised. It was started as a centennial race – with the first one held in 1967 in celebration of the 100 years that had passed since Alaska became a territory. Today, the Iditarod brings mushers and spectators from all around the world to participate. The Iditarod 2017 begins on Saturday, March 4.

Winter recreation

In the 1950s, Westerners were just beginning to use a commercial version of the traditional Quyaq, an agile, easily-controllable craft used by indigenous people for thousands of years to navigate on short trips through Alaska’s icy waters. Sleds were on runners, and – sad to say – fat bikes had not been invented yet. Today, sea kayaking is a popular sport, skiers share Alaska’s slopes with snowboarders, and sleds are mostly plastic affairs. The first Iditabike in 1987 made northern cyclists realize that Alaskans needed a bike made for snow, and the first fatbikes were invented independently of each other in Alaska for snowy rides, and in New Mexico for sandy ones, in the mid-2000s.

Snow and ice

Alaskans lost a beloved landmark in pieces over the last half-century: Portage Glacier. Although once visitors could walk along the shores or Portage Lake near the Portage Visitor Center and hop right on to the glacier, it now stands so far away you have to use a kayak to get to it. The trends of melting and receding glaciers throughout Alaska has led to landslides in some areas, with some, such as the massive landslide in Glacier Bay Park in July 2016, leading to earthquakes that tip into the mid-ranges of the Richter Scale. But snowfall has come and gone and come again: a pre-statehood record in the winter of 1954-55 was toppled in 2012, which saw 133 inches of snowfall in the Anchorage area. But winters since have been plagued by low snowfall, giving Alaskans, perhaps, something to look forward to again in another 50 years.