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Advice for visiting Alaska

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Greetings from California! I'm planning a June trip to the Anchorage, Alaska area and I'm researching any trade musket/Brown Bess/blunderbuss displays in local museums. I'm especially interested in any Native American use. Any advice, please? Thanks in advance.
 
Not responsive to your question, but maybe of some interest to you. When I am in Anchorage I make a point to stop by Great Northern Guns at 4425 Wright Street. They typically have a large inventory of C&R and antique firearms.
 
Greetings from California! I'm planning a June trip to the Anchorage, Alaska area and I'm researching any trade musket/Brown Bess/blunderbuss displays in local museums. I'm especially interested in any Native American use. Any advice, please? Thanks in advance.

Dunno of anything like that in Anchorage, sorry to say. The state museum in Juneau has some stuff I think, but who knows whether it's on current display or in a back room. The Russian museum in Kodiak has a couple of pistols and a small cannon from that era, but no long guns. After that the pickings get real skinny. From what I've been able to learn the Native Americans were kept pretty far from guns.
 
I don't think trade guns or Bess's would be very common in Alaska. In fact I think finding one that was used in Alaska might be darn near impossible.

Up until the time they sold it to the US, Alaska was Russian territory. Although a British voyage by Cook in 1778 charted its coast they didn't create any posts on the land.

The Russians exploited the native tribes for fur and about the last thing they would have wanted was to provide the Indians with firearms.

By the time the US bought Alaska in the mid 1850's the Bess was a relic of the past and early US explorations were of a scientific nature so it is very unlikely that any firearms would have been supplied to the Indians.

Here is an interesting link that gives the major events that happened in Alaska:

https://www.pbs.org/harriman/1899/exploration.html
 
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