If Russia Had Found Alaskan Gold Might They Have Kept Alaska?

Yeah, but if Japan still goes for the Russo-Japanese War (irrelated to Alaska), why wouldn't America honor their alliance and with British financial aid (for both US and Japan) help make the loss of Russia + plus OTL's Russo-Japanese War result the best result Russia can hope for? I mean, the US could purchase it to begin with, especially since the value's a bit more evident than in Seward's time, but if the British can stoke a war between the US + Japan and Russia, wouldn't that be in their interests? Plus in the US's interests (US gains Alaska) and of course in Japan's interests. Presumably also the US would have some building up in the few years beforehand to counter the obvious weakness of OTL's US military at that time. Or perhaps not.
Japan wasn't allied with the US.The UK was.If the UK enters however,France might be forced to join Russia.Messy stuff.
 
I don't see it happening.Russia isn't Mexico.Even after the Russo-Japanese war,people still saw it as the unbeatable steamroller.Even if Murcia or Britain win,the costs would be quite high--at least in their imagination.Britain in particular was quite scared of the notion of Russian troops pouring into India.

But the big difference is that Siberia is contiguous. All Britain has to do is sail a few ships into the Bering Strait and now Alaska is totally isolated from Russia.

If gold is discovered Britain will take a much harder line in the panhandle dispute and probably push for the British Columbia maximum claim.
 
While it's true that it's cold and sparsely populated overall, the coastal regions and the panhandle aren't that bad compared to Russia proper. I did a comparison with Nome (the coastal gold rush zone that still has the active gold mining) with Yekaterinaburg (a major west Siberian city with a population of about 1.3 million) and during the winter Nome doesn't really get more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit below Yekaterinaburg in terms of daily mean temperature. Juneau is actually even better during the winter with the daily mean temperature in deep winter being just below freezing. Of course it starts to diverge for both in spring and summer since Nome and Juneau don't really ever climb out of the 50's that often but considering that the Nome deposits are placer deposits that you can just sift through the sediment to get the gold then not as much work would be needed in setting up mining towns compared to hard rock mining.

On another note, has anybody thought about how the discovery could change priorities regarding far-eastern settlement? There might be some more development along Russia's Pacific coast as a result of this,

Russia first needs to get a better port than Okhotsk (and those other ports along the stretch of coast). Thanks to some nice treaties with China, they finally got those nice ports.

Contrary to popular belief, Alaska is actually a decent place for agriculture, although not heavily profitable agriculture. Unfortunately, the mid-19th century is when Russian peasants first started growing potatoes (probably Alaska's best crop besides exotic crops like quinoa) on a wide scale. But there's still agriculture to be had.

Japan wasn't allied with the US.The UK was.If the UK enters however,France might be forced to join Russia.Messy stuff.

Yeah, but the existence of Alaska and presumably building tensions between the US and Russia over American citizens there could cause a change in alliances. Will the US start the war? I doubt it, but say Japan and Russia are at war, another incident happens with American miners and the Russians in charge, what's America to do? Not that America won't have a large faction against another imperialist adventure, this one against a country far worse than Spain.

We're working with different relations between Britain, the US, Japan, and Russia compared to OTL thanks to the existence of a successful Russian Alaska.
 
But the big difference is that Siberia is contiguous. All Britain has to do is sail a few ships into the Bering Strait and now Alaska is totally isolated from Russia.

If gold is discovered Britain will take a much harder line in the panhandle dispute and probably push for the British Columbia maximum claim.
Point is that Britain's scared as hell that Russia's gonna send troops into India for some crazy reason.

Besides that,if Britain is the type of country that attacks another great power simply because a particular great power has a rich colony or one it wants,why hasn't it attacked countries like Belgium and France yet?They have places like Congo and Indochina that's quite rich--and actually provides things like rubber which is beneficial to British industry. Point is that during the period,countries rarely go to war another European power simply because of colonies.There are greater factors than that.

As for the Bering Straits,I don't think it could be fully blockaded.Considering those are some rather rough seas.Russians will probably still be able to get through one way or another.
Russia first needs to get a better port than Okhotsk (and those other ports along the stretch of coast). Thanks to some nice treaties with China, they finally got those nice ports.

Contrary to popular belief, Alaska is actually a decent place for agriculture, although not heavily profitable agriculture. Unfortunately, the mid-19th century is when Russian peasants first started growing potatoes (probably Alaska's best crop besides exotic crops like quinoa) on a wide scale. But there's still agriculture to be had.


Yeah, but the existence of Alaska and presumably building tensions between the US and Russia over American citizens there could cause a change in alliances. Will the US start the war? I doubt it, but say Japan and Russia are at war, another incident happens with American miners and the Russians in charge, what's America to do? Not that America won't have a large faction against another imperialist adventure, this one against a country far worse than Spain.

We're working with different relations between Britain, the US, Japan, and Russia compared to OTL thanks to the existence of a successful Russian Alaska.
If there's gold and it's a decent place for agriculture,then chances are that it will be populated by a lot of eastern Europeans.Batshit racist Murica most likely don't want a province full of eastern Europeans.

Alaska doesn't even border the US.It's rather unlikely there's gonna be another tension between the US and Russia based on Alaska.It's we are talking about tensions between the US and Russia based on some incident with some American miner,we may as well talk about tension between the US and Britain based on some incident with some American worker in Canada.
 
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If there's gold and it's a decent place for agriculture,then chances are that it will be populated by a lot of eastern Europeans.Batshit racist Murica most likely don't want a province full of eastern Europeans.

Alaska doesn't even border the US.It's rather unlikely there's gonna be another tension between the US and Russia based on Alaska.It's we are talking about tensions between the US and Russia based on some incident with some American miner,we may as well talk about tension between the US and Britain based on some incident with some American worker in Canada.

I've been working off the assumption that there would be a decent minority (not on the levels of Americans in Hawaii, but still many) of American miners (and associated American businesses, let that not be forgotten), with several things going wrong for them.

Of course, the issue with offering Russians land in Alaska is that one, they have the whole of Siberia as theirs, much of which has better climate for agriculture and much of which is empty, two, it's easier to reach Alaska by going from European Russia and sailing to Cape Horn than it is crossing Siberia since there's no Trans-Siberian Railroad yet. There's still the issue of why stay (once you can't get much gold anymore) and eke it out in Alaska when you can get a better crop in the new territories seized from China?

Plus this is the same time America seized Hawaii with all the Pacific Islanders and Asians. And of course Puerto Rico. It isn't like it needs to become a state if the Americans grab it.
 
Would they really have had the ability to enforce that though? It took the combined forces of the French, British, and Ottomans to force the Russians to basically just give back the territory they'd taken and limit their Black Sea navy, they didn't really lose any territory over the war. To this day the combined populations of Yukon and the Northwest Territories amount to about 100,000, and around the time of the Crimean War there were about 50,000 people living in British Columbia. Considering that the Nome deposits are still making the U.S money to this day, would Russia really give it up?

Crimea was on the Russian empire doorstep. Alaska is at the terminus of a long Russia sea voyage. The Brits hold the winning cards for this one.
 
Your POD would need to be Napoleon wins against Britain (somehow), but then gets defeated by Russia. Russia then dismantles his empire in its favor. They then randomly get curious about Alaska for no reason and find gold somewhere.
 
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