At Sitka, Russian and American officers lowered the Russian flag and raised the Stars and Stripes, formalizing the $7.2 million purchase Secretary of State William Seward had negotiated months earlier. Critics mocked the deal as "Seward's Folly," seeing only ice and seals; within decades gold strikes and, later, oil would prove the bargain absurdly cheap.
The ceremony itself nearly went wrong: as the Russian flag was lowered, it snagged on the flagpole and had to be cut free by a soldier who climbed up to retrieve it, an accident some superstitious witnesses took as an ill omen. General Lovell Rousseau accepted the territory on behalf of the United States, and October 18 became known in Alaska as "Alaska Day," still celebrated as a state holiday.
The $7.2 million price, about two cents an acre, seemed a fortune wasted to many contemporaries who saw only a frozen wilderness of dubious value. Newspapers derided the purchase, and Seward endured years of ridicule. That mockery evaporated after the 1896 Klondike gold rush and, decisively, after oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay in 1968, transforming what was once dismissed as a folly into one of the most consequential land deals in American history.
Key people: Lovell Rousseau, Aleksei Peschurov