Because it was remote and not useful at the time
Sells a giant piece of land for literal peanuts to another superpower ... How fucking retarded was the ruling class in Tsarist Russia? Then people wonder how the communists could take over
Thread: https://boards.4channel.org/his/thread/17343857
Discussion
Yeah, nobody lived there. The US government was like "shoot, why not?" And then a bunch of citizens were like, "shoot, why not?" And then once people were actually living there, they realized that there are some ways to make decent money over there.