Today, a lot of people call Alaska The Last Frontier. Alaska is referred to as a wilderness that is unsettled, covered in snow, not accessible, remote, and a very intense land where very few tough pioneers traveled to. Hope, a small town on the Kenai Peninsula, gives Alaska a frontier spirit. Hope was the location for the first gold discovery in Alaska in 1896 and gold was the mainstay of the Alaskan economy. The gold rush caused the building of railways to extract minerals. More recently, extraction of oil has provided the foundation of the Alaskan economy. Alaska is not an unsettled wilderness. In fact, it’s the longest-occupied part of the Americas. The Intuit and Yupik Eskimos and inland Athabaskan cultures have come after the native Alaskans.
