Alaskans could have become Canadians!

[barryqwalsh]

The Russians decided that in any future war with Britain, their hard-to-defend colony might become a prime target, and would be easily captured. Therefore, the Russian emperor,Alexander II, decided to sell the territory. Perhaps in the hope of starting a bidding war, both the British and the Americans were approached. However, the British expressed little interest in buying Alaska. In 1859 the Russians offered to sell the territory to the United States, hoping that its presence in the region would offset the plans of Russia's greatest regional rival, Great Britain. However, no deal was reached, as the risk of anAmerican Civil War was a more pressing concern in Washington.

Grand Duke Konstantin, a younger brother of the Tsar, began to press for the handover of Russian America to the United States in 1857. In a memorandum to Foreign MinisterAlexander Gorchakov he stated that

"we must not deceive ourselves and must foresee that the United States, aiming constantly to round out their possessions and desiring to dominate undividedly the whole of North America will take the afore-mentioned colonies from us and we shall not be able to regain them."


Alaska Purchase - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[barryqwalsh]

Hyder General store


There is another old story of how the Canadians would pull a chain across the border at night, closing it to traffic. One morning the Canadians awoke to find a giant log blocking the American side of the border — and blocking Canadian miners from getting to work at the Granduc mine.

“People around here didn’t like being locked in at night, I guess,” says Mr. Loe, who runs the Hyder General Store, which stocks exclusively American goods flown in twice weekly on the mail plane. “The Canadians stopped locking the border after that.”


Folks living in this tiny outpost on the Alaskan border may use Canadian dollars, but they're still ‘100% American’

 

[Mad Scientist]

That just means Russians would have moved to Florida for the Weather and Tax advantages instead.