Representation

The gold rush brought the first self-government to Alaska with the Civil Code of 1900. This allowed Alaskan towns to incorporate and form local governments for the first time. The Civil Code of 1900 was fine as far as it went, the governor of Alaska told Congress in 1906, but "I think it would be wise to provide some means by which the Alaskan code of laws could be revised."

One element in the Civil Code of 1900 allowed for territorial taxation in the form of business license taxes. This led to complaints of "taxation without representation," a contradiction that helped spur the campaign to give Alaska a voice in Congress. In 1903, a Senate subcommittee reported that "the universal opinion among all classes in Alaska is that the District should be represented by a delegate in Congress."

Alaskans wanted someone who could lend balance to the political situation in Washington, D.C.  While unelected lobbyists of mining and shipping companies and the canned salmon industry made sure that their interests were protected, Alaskans felt they had no voice. Frustrated at the lack of progress, the citizens of Valdez sent a telegram to President Theodore Roosevelt on the day of his inauguration in 1905: "On behalf of 60,000 American citizens who are denied the right of representation in any form, we demand, in mass meeting assembled, that Alaska be annexed to Canada."

The campaign for a representative voice in the nation's capital paid off the following year when Congress finally allowed Alaskans to have one non-voting member in the U.S. House of Representatives. Some congressmen supported the addition because Alaska was becoming more famous as a result of the Gold Rush and so it required more attention. As President Roosevelt put it in a message to Congress, he preferred an elective delegate "whose business it shall be to speak with authority. " From then on, Alaska was a "territory," not a district as it had been called in the past.

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