At 4 a.m. after an all-night negotiating session, U.S. Secretary of State William Seward and Russian minister Eduard de Stoeckl signed a treaty transferring Alaska to the United States for $7.2 million, roughly two cents an acre. Critics derided the purchase as a frozen wasteland, but the discovery of gold and later oil made it one of history's great real-estate bargains.
The negotiation happened fast and late. Eduard de Stoeckl, the Russian minister to Washington, had spent years quietly sounding out American officials about Russia's desire to unload its increasingly costly North American colony, fearful that Britain might simply seize it in a future war. When Secretary of State William Seward got word that Stoeckl was finally ready to deal, he pushed to close before Congress could organize opposition, and the two men signed the treaty at four in the morning on March 30, 1867.
The price, $7.2 million, worked out to about two cents an acre for 586,000 square miles. American newspapers ridiculed the purchase as 'Seward's Icebox' and 'Seward's Folly,' certain the U.S. had bought a useless tundra. Seward, however, saw strategic value in Pacific expansion and access to fur and fishing resources.
The mockery didn't last. Gold turned up in the Klondike and later on Alaskan soil itself, and in the twentieth century oil reserves at Prudhoe Bay proved staggeringly valuable, as did the territory's strategic position during the Cold War, staring across the Bering Strait at the Soviet Union. Alaska became the 49th U.S. state in 1959.