Alaska Day

Photo credit ~ the interwebs

Below is the forward from the DICTIONARY OF ALASKA PLACE NAMES By Donald J. Orth GEOLOGICAL SURVEY PROFESSIONAL PAPER (first printing 1967 and reprinted in 1971 with minor revisions)

“At 3:30 in the afternoon of October 18, 1867, on the parade ground near Baranov's Castle in Sitka, an area of about 580,000 square miles of Russian territory was formally transferred to the United States; 92 years later this territory, Alaska, became the 49th State of the Union.

Alaska extends over an area one-fifth as large as that of the conterminous United States and is unbelievably rich in landscape and other natural resources, but it has comparatively few inhabitants. This, the largest State, also contains other extremes in geography; the highest point (Mount McKinley-20,320 ft.), the northernmost point (Point Barrow-71 "23' N), and relative to the Greenwich meridian, the westernmost point (Amatignak Island-1 79" 10' W), and the easternmost point (Pochnoi Point-179'46' E) in the United States.

The discovery of gold in Alaska in the 1890's caused the Geological Survey to undertake geographical exploration and geological and mineral-resource investigations in that remote territory. As the work progressed, the need was recognized for a names dictionary as an aid in preparing and publishing maps and reports on Alaska. In June 1900 Marcus Baker undertook the completion of a dictionary begun in 1892 by the Board on Geographic Names. The first "Geographic Dictionary of Alaska" was published in 1902 as Geological Survey Bulletin 187. A second edition, prepared by James McCormick, was published in 1906 as Bulletin 299.

Six decades have passed since the geographic names dictionaries of Baker and McCormick were published. Alaska has now been completely mapped at the scale of 1 : 250,000 and extensively mapped at the scale of 1 : 63,360. These maps provide a wealth of geographic-names information. Names in current use, as well as many names formerly in use, have been assembled by Donald J. Orth and his colleagues into a new and greatly enlarged edition of the geographic names dictionary. “

Written by W. T. PECORA, Director.