ABSTRACT
The new world was first a goal for Asiatic immigrants who arrived in successive waves of limited scale over long time periods, many stages of this migration flowing through the Alaska gateway. The first trickles from European centers of human dispersion arrived from the same general west-to-east direction thousands of years later, to be replaced by movements from an opposite direction, across Canada and from the south up the coast, as the advance of Russian fur traders was halted and then put to retreat by British and American traders. As economic motivations changed, these more recent and less important migration movements ebbed and flowed, generally in a north-south direction. Further Asian migration was curtailed for a time by political action from the European-American sector, and recent attempts to reopen the more ancient human movement by force of arms were thwarted; in the process the south-to-north flow intensified for a period.
