Nicknames: The Last Frontier, Land of the midnight sun

Capitol: Juneau

Motto: North To The Future

Song: Alaska's Flag written by: Marie Drake

Flower: Forget me not

Tree: Sitkaspruce; Picea sitchensis

Bird: Willow Ptarmigan

Gained Statehood: On January 3, 1959, Alaska was officially proclaimed the forty-ninth state of the Union.

Alaska is known as the last frontier and the land of the midnight sun. No matter how you chose to explore Alaska, you will find yourself in the largest state in the union. Alaska accounts for one fifth of the United States with over 586,000 square miles to explore. There is abundant wildlife, from the solitary polar bear to tremendous herds of caribou. Humpback whales, Killer wales and seals, foxes and bears, eagles and snowy owls. Alaska's great parks, thick forests, wildlife refuges and other types of public lands account for more than 300 million acres -- an area more than twice the size of Texas. Alaska is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, Yukon Territory to the east, British Columbia to the southeast, the Gulf of Alaska and the Pacific Ocean to the south, and by the Bering Sea, the Bering Strait, and the Chukchi Sea to the west. Of the 20 highest peaks in the United States, 17 are in Alaska. Mt. McKinley, the highest peak in North America, is 20,320 ft. above sea level. Denali, the Indian name for the peak, means "The Great One." The Yukon River, is the third longest river in the U.S. There are more than three thousand rivers in Alaska and over three million lakes. Lake Iliamna, encompasses over 1,000 square miles. Alaska has an estimated 100,000 glaciers, ranging from tiny cirque glaciers to huge valley glaciers. There are more active glaciers and ice fields in Alaska than in the rest of the inhabited world. The largest glacier is the Malaspina at 850 square miles.

Vitus Bering and Alexei Chirikov discovered the Alaskan mainland and the Aleutian Islands in 1741. Alaska was unexplored in 1867 when Secretary of State William Seward arranged for its purchase from the Russians for $7,200,000. Despite the low price of about two cents an acre, the purchase was widely ridiculed as "Seward's Folly." The Gold Rush of 1898 resulted in a mass influx of more than 30,000 people. Since then, Alaska has contributed billions of dollars' worth of products to the U.S. economy. In 1968, a large oil and gas reservoir near Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Coast was found. The Prudhoe Bay reservoir, with an estimated recoverable 10 billion barrels of oil and 27 trillion cubic feet of gas, is twice as large as any other oil field in North America. The Trans-Alaska pipeline was completed in 1977 at a cost of $7.7 billion. Oil flows through the 800-mile-long pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to the port of Valdez. About a third of Alaska Natives are American Indians. The major tribes are the Alaskan Athabaskan in the central part of the state, and the Tlingit, Tsimshian, and Haida in the southeast. The Aleuts, native to the Aleutian Islands, Kodiak Island, the lower Alaska and Kenai Peninsulas, and Prince William Sound, are physically and culturally related to the Eskimos. About 15% of Alaska Natives are Aleuts.

Clarence L. Andrews, Aleksandr Baranov, Margaret Elizabeth Bell, Benny Benson, Vitus Bering, Charles E. Bunnell, Susan Butcher, William A. Egan, Carl Ben Eielson, Henry E. Gruennig, Walter J. Hickel, Joe Juneau, Austin Lathrop,Sydney Lawrence, Ray Mala Virgil F. Partch, Joe Redington, Sr., Peter Trinble Rowe, Ivan Popov-Veniaminov, Ferdinand Wrangel, Samuel Hall Young