Alaska was sold by Russia to the United States in 1867 , with the purchase treaty signed on March 30, 1867.

Quick Scoop: When was Alaska sold?

  • Alaska was sold in the year 1867.
  • The sale was formalized when the Treaty of Cession was signed on March 30, 1867 by U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward and Russian envoy Eduard (Edouard) de Stoeckl.
  • The agreed purchase price was 7.2 million dollars , often summarized as “about two cents an acre.”
  • The United States formally took possession of Alaska later that year, on October 18, 1867 , a date still marked in Alaska as Alaska Day.

A tiny bit of story

In the late 1800s, Russia no longer saw much strategic or economic value in its distant, hard‑to‑defend Alaskan territory and worried it might lose it for nothing in a future conflict, especially to Britain. The United States, meanwhile, was in an expansionist mood after the Civil War, and Seward saw Alaska as a long‑term strategic and commercial asset, even though many critics mocked the deal as “Seward’s Folly” or “Seward’s Icebox” at the time.

In hindsight, that “frozen wilderness” turned out to hold immense natural resources and a key geopolitical position in the Arctic and North Pacific.

TL;DR: Alaska was sold in 1867, with the sale agreed and the treaty signed on March 30, 1867, for 7.2 million dollars, and U.S. possession completed in October 1867.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.