October 18 · This Day in America
On a windswept hill at Sitka, soldiers from two empires stand at attention while a continent quietly changes hands. The Russian flag comes down; the Stars and Stripes goes up to a roar of artillery. For $7.2 million — about two cents an acre — the United States has bought 586,000 square miles of mountain, glacier, forest, and coast. Newspapers mock it as "Seward's Folly," a frozen wasteland the Secretary of State paid a fortune to own. They could not have been more wrong. Beneath that ice and timber lay gold, oil, fisheries, and a strategic gateway to the Pacific that would matter for a century to come. It also bound new peoples and old nations into the American story, with consequences still being weighed. The transfer takes effect this day, and the map of the country grows by nearly a fifth in an afternoon.
Source: www.britannica.com
Also on this day · 1767
After four years of dragging chains and reading stars through the wilderness, English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon end their work near the Maryland frontier when their Iroquois guides will go no farther. They had drawn a precise 233-mile boundary to settle a colonial land feud. Generations later, that same line would come to mean the border between free states and slave states — and the soul of a divided nation.
Source: philadelphiaencyclopedia.org