It's fair time!

July 6th 2:20 pm | Ross Coen

To say that Alaska is economically tied to Seattle is an understatement of the highest order. Our freight is shipped through Seattle. Most of our domestic flights are routed through Seattle. Alaska Airlines itself is based there. Throughout its history, much of Alaska's harvested resources—gold, salmon, timber, coal, oil—have made their way to market via Seattle. Flip through the Seattle Yellow Pages and you will find dozens of companies with "Alaska" in their names, everything from insurance firms to seafood processors to art galleries.

This economic link goes back to the very founding of the two respective locales, but was made manifest over a century ago with the opening of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. A world's fair in everything but name, the AYP Exposition opened on the University of Washington campus on June 1, 1909, and promised to showcase the wonders of the North. Those with monetary value, at least.

Seattle's business community unabashedly promoted the exposition "to exploit the resources of Alaska and the Yukon" and establish their city as the center of the region's commercial development (take that, Portland and San Francisco!). Organizers noted over seven million people lived within a radius of one thousand miles of Seattle, and that opportunities for trade and capital investment appeared everywhere you looked. In recognizing the importance of foreign imports/exports, the exposition added the Pacific to its theme and invited Japan to participate.

When people at the turn of the century thought about Alaska, gold was likely the first thing to come to mind. Accordingly, the exposition's Alaska Hall displayed an impressive array of gold bars and nuggets worth $1.25 million (securely locked within a huge iron cage, no touching allowed). The Arctic Brotherhood, a fraternal organization with chapters in most gold mining districts in Alaska and the Yukon, hosted visitors in what the newspapers called "a novel log building for a meeting place." The exposition further played up arctic stereotypes with an Eskimo Village that featured indigenous peoples from Labrador, Alaska, and Siberia, as well as faux glaciers, dogteams, and igloo-style dwellings made of caribou hide. A statue of William H. Seward, the man who engineered the purchase of Alaska in 1867, rounded out the display.

And that, one might say, was pretty much that. For a fair with the words "Alaska" and "Yukon" in its very title, the Seattle-based exposition offered a surprisingly cursory view of the North in favor of promoting economic growth right there at home. The State of Washington sponsored dozens of exhibits in its Forestry Building, Fisheries Building, Agriculture Building, and Good Roads Building. King County had its own building, as did the states of Oregon, California, Idaho, and Utah. Canada was there. Hawaii and the Philippines too. Even New York State had a building!

The extent to which the AYP Exposition misplaced its northern focus at times bordered on the absurd. Visitors could observe reenactments of Civil War battles, and the official AYP postcard book included images of Custer's Last Stand, stage coaches in Yellowstone Park, and the Arizona desert. The book contained exactly one photograph from Alaska (Front Street in Nome) and none of the Yukon.

The fair infuriated many Alaskans who felt it was just another example of outsiders profiting at their expense. W.F. Thompson, publisher of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, claimed, "If there is a dollar of Alaska money...not being worked for Seattle's benefit, Seattle wants to know it, and to change that condition." Another newspaperman (and future territorial governor), J.F.A. Strong, wrote, "Seattle has grown like Jack's beanstalk upon the outpouring of Alaska's natural wealth, and the industry of the territory's hardy and adventurous citizens, and now she wants to trade upon the Alaskan name. She plans a mighty exposition for her own profit [and] labels it the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition which is somewhat like stealing the livery of heaven to serve the devil in." It surely came as no surprise to Thompson, Strong, and other Alaskans that the Exposition did indeed put Seattle's economic interests first.

But all of that is neither here nor there when you consider the whole point of a fair is to get paying customers moving through the turnstiles—and wow did they. The exposition attracted 80,000 people on opening day alone. By the close of the fair four months later, 3.7 million people had toured the grounds. Not only was the AYP Exposition a runaway financial success, it more than doubled the number of buildings at the University of Washington (a handful of which are still in use today) and transformed the campus from a sleepy outpost in the woods to a landscaped center of community activity.

And the exposition's impact on Alaska? Hard to say. The dream of Seattle's business elite to "exploit the resources of Alaska and the Yukon" certainly came true in the ensuing decades—although those developments likely would have occurred with or without the fair's faux glaciers and fur-clad Eskimos. Nonetheless, the AYP Exposition permanently cemented the economic relationship between Seattle and Alaska, for better or worse.

Ross Coen is an instructor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the author of "The Long View: Dispatches on Alaska History."

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It's fair time!