How Alaska Got Its Name: The "Great Land" Sumner Pitched

When the United States bought Russian America in 1867, Senator Charles Sumner told the Senate its new name should come from the land itself. He had one ready: Alaska, a word the people of the Aleutian Islands had used for the mainland to their east.

“How shall they be called?”

Sumner gave a long speech in the Senate on the treaty with Russia, and it was printed in Washington that same year. Near the end, under the heading “What remains to be done,” he took up the name. The new land, he said, would “naturally receive a new name. They will be no longer Russian America. How shall they be called?”

He didn’t want anything made up. A name “borrowed from classical history or from individual invention,” he said, would be “little better than a misnomer or a nickname.” Even a name from American history would be “of doubtful taste.” His rule was simple: “The name should come from the country itself. It should be indigenous, aboriginal, one of the autochthons of the soil.”

Then he gave his answer. He leaned on the report of Cook, “the illustrious navigator,” whom he’d already cited again and again in the speech. According to Cook, Sumner said, the name already used for the long peninsula that links the mainland to the Aleutian chain had been the only word the islanders used “when speaking of the American continent in general, which they knew perfectly well to be a great land.” So, Sumner said, “following these natives, whose places are now ours, we, too, should call this ‘great land’ Alaska.”

Where the word came from

William H. Dall, who spent more than a year exploring the country and living among its people, explained the word in the glossary of his 1870 book Alaska and Its Resources. When the first Russian traders reached Unalaska, he wrote, the people there told them that to the east lay “a great land or territory.” The islanders’ name for it, in Dall’s spelling, was Al-ak-shak or Al-ay-eksa. Their own island had a name that meant “the land near Alayeksa.”

Over time, Dall says, the word wore down into Alaska. He’s blunt about it: “Alaska is an English corruption; the Russians never used it.” In his book he kept three spellings apart: Alaska for the whole territory, Aliaska for the peninsula, and Unalashka for the island, “all derived from the same root, meaning a great country or continent.”

Henry Gannett’s 1905 government bulletin on American place names is more cautious. Gannett says the name is “possibly” from an Eskimo word he spells alakshak, meaning “peninsula.” That looks a lot like Dall’s first spelling, but the meaning is different. So depending on which book you open, Alaska means “great land” or “peninsula.” Where the older books line up is the basic story: it was the islanders’ name for the mainland to their east, Sumner and Dall both tie it to the peninsula, and in 1867 it got stretched to cover the whole territory.

Sumner or Seward?

Here’s where the story gets a second hero. Sumner proposed the name, but he wasn’t the one who had the final word, at least according to Major H. O. S. Heistand of the U.S. Army. In The Territory of Alaska, compiled in 1898 “from official government records” and other sources, Heistand says that “many names, such as Sitka, Yukon, Aleutia, etc., were suggested for the new Territory.” William H. Seward, the secretary of state who made the deal with Russia, “with whom the final decision rested, chose Alaska as being ‘brief, euphonious and suitable.’”

Those two accounts don’t really clash. Sumner made the case for the name in the Senate, and Heistand says Seward picked it. You could say Alaska got two godfathers.

From territory to state

The U.S. Geological Survey’s notes on the state sum up the rest. Alaska was “purchased from Russia in 1867,” organized as a territory in 1912, and “officially became the 49th State on January 3, 1959.” The same notes say Sir Francis Drake called the area “New Albion,” that sailors told tales of the fabled “Straits of Anian” and a mythical “Gamaland,” and that the Russians called it, of course, “Russian America.”

The name that won was the one Sumner asked for, a word the islanders were already using when the first Russian traders showed up.

Sources & further reading

• Charles Sumner, Speech of Hon. Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, on the Cession of Russian America to the United States (Washington: Congressional Globe Office, 1867), p. 48. “They will naturally receive a new name. They will be no longer Russian America. How shall they be called?”; a name “borrowed from classical history or from individual invention” would be “little better than a misnomer or a nickname”; “of doubtful taste”; “The name should come from the country itself. It should be indigenous, aboriginal, one of the autochthons of the soil”; Cook’s report that the name of the peninsula was the word the islanders used “when speaking of the American continent in general, which they knew perfectly well to be a great land”; “we, too, should call this ‘great land’ Alaska.”
• William H. Dall, Alaska and Its Resources (Boston, 1870), pp. v, 529–530. His “second year’s experience” and “constant intercourse with the natives” (p. v). In the glossary, under “Alaska”: the Russian traders at Unalaska told of “a great land or territory” to the east; the islanders’ name for it; the island’s name, “the land near Alayeksa”; “Alaska is an English corruption; the Russians never used it”; Alaska for the territory, Aliaska for the peninsula, Unalashka for the island, “all derived from the same root, meaning a great country or continent.”
• H. O. S. Heistand, The Territory of Alaska (Kansas City, 1898), pp. 25, 28. The treaty was signed in 1867 “by Hon. William H. Seward, Secretary of State” (p. 25). “Many names, such as Sitka, Yukon, Aleutia, etc., were suggested for the new Territory, but Mr. Seward, with whom the final decision rested, chose Alaska as being ‘brief, euphonious and suitable.’” The word is “a corruption of Al-ay-ek-sa,” the name the islanders gave “to the mainland.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 19. “Alaska; Territory of the United States.” Possibly from an Eskimo word, alakshak, “peninsula.”
• U.S. Geological Survey, GNIS feature 1785533, history note. “Purchased from Russia in 1867 and organized as a territory in 1912, Alaska officially became the 49th State on January 3, 1959”; the name from a word used by the Aleutian islanders “and by them applied to the mainland of the peninsula of Alaska”; “New Albion,” the “fabled” “Straits of Anian” and “mythical” “Gamaland,” and “Russian America.”
• U.S. Census Bureau, state codes (2020). Lists Alaska’s permanent federal place-name record number (GNIS 1785533).