Juneau today is a capital of about thirty-two thousand that hosts well over a million cruise visitors a summer, a government town and a Tlingit cultural center at once — every two years, Celebration fills the streets with Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian dance in one of the largest Native gatherings in Alaska. The borough sprawls over three thousand square miles of ice, forest, and channel; the town itself is a few steep blocks you can walk in an afternoon.
The founding took a guide. In 1880, Chief Kowee of the A'akw Kwáan led prospectors Joe Juneau and Richard Harris up Gold Creek to the color they had failed to find on their own, and the camp that sprang up that October is often called the first new town founded in Alaska after the purchase. It nearly carried a different name — Harrisburg, then Rockwell — before the miners voted in 1881 to call it Juneau. Kowee's reward was smaller than his part deserved, and the town has spent a century restoring his name to the story.
Why People Visit Juneau Alaska
Juneau is the capital of Alaska as a civic destination and a wilderness port in one — the only U.S. state capital with no road access, the 1931 Capitol, a walk-to glacier, whales in the channel, and gold-rush ruins on the mountainside. People come by ship and plane for the ice and the whales, and find a small stubborn capital that likes being hard to reach.
