Who ruled Anchorage?

Anchorage stands on a triangle of land between two arms of Cook Inlet in south-central Alaska, with the Chugach Mountains at its back. It is one of the youngest large cities in the United States: founded in 1915 as a camp for railway workers, it grew on military spending during World War II and the Cold War, survived one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded, and was then enriched by Alaska's oil.

People lived around the inlet long before any town. Archaeological sites along Turnagain Arm suggest seasonal use by Alutiiq (Sugpiaq) people, and in later centuries Dena'ina Athabaskans moved in from the interior. The Dena'ina fished the streams in summer, hunted inland in winter and traded widely; their villages included Eklutna, to the north-east, which is still inhabited. James Cook's expedition sailed into the inlet in 1778 searching for the Northwest Passage, and George Vancouver charted it more fully in the 1790s.

Russian fur traders set up posts on the upper inlet in the late eighteenth century, and Orthodox missions followed, but the Russian Empire never governed the area closely. The United States bought Alaska from Russia in 1867. For the next half century the upper inlet was a quiet region of trading posts and small gold workings, with the town of Knik as its main landing.

In 1914 Congress authorised a government railway from the coast to the interior, and in 1915 the route was fixed with its construction headquarters at the mouth of Ship Creek. Within weeks some 2,000 job seekers were living there in a tent city. The Alaska Engineering Commission surveyed a townsite on the bluff above the creek and auctioned the lots that July, with clauses meant to keep out saloons. The settlement took its name from the "Knik Anchorage" where ships had moored, and Knik itself soon emptied. Anchorage was incorporated in 1920, and the railway to Fairbanks was finished in 1923.

The town stayed small until the late 1930s. Then the US Army and its air arm built Fort Richardson and Elmendorf Field in 1940 and 1941, and the war against Japan in the Aleutians made Anchorage a strategic base. The population jumped and kept growing through the Cold War, when the bases guarded the closest approach to the Soviet Union. The city also became a refuelling stop for passenger flights over the North Pole between Europe and Asia, and later a major air cargo hub. Alaska became a state in 1959, with Juneau remaining the capital.

On 27 March 1964, Good Friday, a magnitude 9.2 earthquake centred in Prince William Sound shook the city for about four and a half minutes. Landslides tore apart the downtown bluff and the Turnagain Heights neighbourhood, and much of the city had to be rebuilt. The discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay in 1968 and the building of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in the 1970s brought a new boom. Oil companies set up their headquarters in Anchorage, high-rise offices replaced frontier buildings, and in 1975 the city merged with its surrounding borough into a single municipality.

Anchorage today has about 290,000 people, close to two-fifths of Alaska's population, and remains the state's business, transport and military centre, with a sizeable Alaska Native community.