FIFTY YEARS OF STATEHOOD. Fifty years of change. Consider for a moment how different Alaska would be today if it had never become a state.

Nine distinguished Alaskans -- among them two delegates to the 1955-56 Alaska constitutional convention, the last territorial governor, a Native leader, a top economist, an oil man, a historian, a journalist and a statehood critic who wants Alaska to secede from the union -- tried to imagine the difference.

While their opinions varied, they generally echoed several of the reasons Alaskans in the 1950s voted 5-to-1 for statehood. Living in a territory had disadvantages, they said. Outside corporations often ruled. Governance came from afar. Alaskans were second-class citizens.

All that began to change on Jan. 3, 1959, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower picked up his pen, smiled at the gathered dignitaries -- then signed the document that made Alaska the 49th state.

But what if all that had never happened?

"It would be radically different," says Claus Naske, professor emeritus of history at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and author of "Alaska -- A History of the 49th State."

In what way?

1. FEWER PEOPLE

Alaska's population rose sharply during World War II, as military personnel stationed here soared from 1,000 troops in 1940 to 152,000 in 1943 before settling back to 19,000 in 1946.

After the war, a fair share of those former soldiers, sailors and airmen decided to make Alaska their new home. They saw a future here. The federal government had just invested more than a billion dollars in dozens of new ports, airstrips and roads, including the wartime construction of the Alaska Highway, and statehood seemed imminent.

"It was a small population with enormous opportunities for people who had initiative," said Naske. "You could make something of yourself -- you could be a big fish in a little bowl. You couldn't do that in California or New York. But in Alaska, if you had anything on the ball, you could make a mint for yourself. Physicians did that. Dentists did that. People who went into politics."

After statehood, opportunities seemed to expand a hundredfold. New state government jobs opened up. Boroughs were founded. Town and village needs were assessed.

At the same time, all the positive publicity Alaska received during the push for statehood began to attract ordinary Americans. Suddenly living on the "last frontier" wasn't such a wild idea. Moving here wasn't just for miners and fishermen anymore. Statehood made Alaska more familiar.

During the first 40 years of the 20th century, the population of Alaska remained fairly flat, growing by only 9,000 people (to a total of 72,524 Alaskans in 1939). But during the last 40 years of the century, the population grew by 400,833 people (to 627,000 Alaskans in 2000). Anchorage residents more than tripled.

Take away statehood and Alaska still would have grown, experts say, but by nowhere near as many people. And here are a few of the reasons why.

2. LESS POWER

Aging sourdoughs can talk all they want about the good old days but in truth, territorial Alaskans were both political and economic weaklings.

So say two very different men -- Jack Coghill, a rock-ribbed Republican, and Vic Fischer, a die-hard Democrat -- both of whom served among the 55 delegates to Alaska's constitutional convention in the winter of 1955-56.

It was the lack of political power that made Alaskans so weak economically, especially when they tried to protest the powerful Outside fishing and mining interests that extracted the state's resources and left very little behind in taxes.

"What (the copper and gold mining syndicate) left behind was a lot of tailing piles," said Coghill, who later became both a state senator and lieutenant governor.

That would still be true today -- in the much more lucrative arena of Alaska's oil resources -- if the pursuit of statehood had failed, said Fischer, who also became a state senator.

"The territorial government -- they had no authority to do anything," Fischer said. "The territory had no juice."

In more ways than one.

As second-class U.S. citizens, territorial Alaskans could be drafted to fight in foreign wars, but they couldn't vote in national elections .

They paid both federal and territorial income taxes, but their single delegate to Congress couldn't vote -- and their territorial governor was selected by the president.

When they boarded an airplane and flew to the Lower 48 on a vacation, their citizenship was routinely challenged by U.S. customs officers in Seattle.

"You had to have passports to get out of Alaska and into the United States," Coghill said.

That really offended Alaskans who fought in World War II, recalled life-long Alaska journalist Michael Carey, whose father was a trapper near Fairbanks.

"We had all the obligations of citizenship with a limited number of benefits."

Alaskans especially bridled at the way Seattle-based canneries set up giant fish traps that intercepted spawning salmon at the mouths of Alaska rivers and reduced the catch upstream.

They voted 10 to 1 to outlaw the practice. But that citizen initiative was regarded as advisory only, and Congress ignored it. When Alaska became a state, the governor's very first official act was to sign a proclamation that outlawed fish traps.

"Once they were abolished, that was a big deal," said former Anchorage Borough Mayor and oil prospector Jack Roderick. "That morphed into fisherman's rights."

3. LESS PROPERTY

Take away statehood and you lose the 102 million acres of land Alaska received in its statehood compact (an area larger than all of California). You also take away the near $100 billion in revenue Alaska has received since statehood from the extraction of natural resources from those lands.

Resources like oil.

No one realized that in 1959. Back then there was no operating oil field at Prudhoe Bay. The territory's fishing industry employed the most people and produced the most wealth, most of which was carted Outside. Oil had recently been discovered on privately leased land on the Kenai Peninsula, but that only benefitted Atlantic Richfield Co., while turning a few Anchorage businessmen into millionaires.

Five years into statehood, however, Gov. Bill Egan -- Alaska's first elected chief executive -- decided to take the advice of two relatively unheralded state land managers -- Natural Resources Commissioner Phil Holdsworth and State Lands Director Roscoe Bell -- who urged the governor to choose 1.5 million acres of barren federal land on the North Slope among the state's earliest land selections.

Holdsworth and Bell believed the land contained fossil fuels, as Roderick details in his memoir, "Crude Dreams -- A Personal History of Oil & Politics in Alaska." Three years later, on the morning of Dec. 27, 1967, that hunch came true when Arco struck a gusher on state land adjacent to Prudhoe Bay. It was later determined to be one of the largest petroleum reserves in the world.

"We would have gotten a paltry amount of money for that as a territory," says former state economist George Rodgers.

Instead, two years later, the young state received $900 million for granting oil companies the right to drill at Prudhoe. Which felt like a colossal windfall at the time.

And yet that paled by comparison to the $92 billion in oil revenue that later flowed into the state treasury, mostly from Prudhoe. About $10 billion of it was set aside in the Alaska Permanent Fund, a citizen-owned savings account that annually pays every man, woman and child in Alaska a dividend

Lose statehood and you almost certainly lose your dividend, Naske said.

"The oil companies would have gone ahead and done their exploration under federal rules. As a territory we wouldn't have got squat."

4. LOST RIGHTS

It's arguable whether Native Alaskans' age-old claim to the lands their ancestors lived and died on ever would have been recognized by the federal government had Alaska not become a state.

Perhaps that claim would have been acknowledged in territorial Alaska anyway if failing to do so stood in the path of some corporate bulldozer waiting to clear land for a pipeline, several observers said.

But what happened instead, soon after statehood -- spurred by the governor's initial selection of state lands -- was much more immediate: Native activists like Willie Hensley, a Kotzebue-born Inupiat whose legal research into aboriginal rights helped galvanize a statewide movement, argued in court that Natives had first dibs. A freeze was placed on state land selections until such rights could be resolved. Lawyers and lawmakers wrangled -- and the unprecedented 1971 Native Claims Settlement Act finally emerged.

At a time when most rural villages still lacked plumbing, and Native children and grandparents suffered high mortality rates for want of adequate health care, ANCSA offered a partial remedy: It created 13 regional Native corporations, which received nearly $1 billion and 44 million acres of Alaska land to invest in their collective future.

"Not everyone was happy with the outcome," Hensley writes in his memoir, "Fifty Miles from Tomorrow." "There were those who felt strongly that we should have held out for more."

But in a statewide vote by the Alaska Federation of Natives prior to President Nixon signing the bill into law, an overwhelming majority of delegates -- 511 to 56 -- approved it.

Said Hensley: "For better or worse, we had won."

Non-Natives gained new legal rights under statehood as well -- namely the right to a speedier trial. The federal court system in Alaska had become seriously overloaded, said Naske, who wrote a book on territorial justice.

Anchorage and Fairbanks had municipal courts with city magistrates to address traffic fines and public drunkenness and such, but nearly anything else became a federal case. Even a simple robbery. That is, if you could get a hearing.

"Good lord, people who were witnesses had moved away and died (before cases ever went to trial)," Naske said. "It was just a mess."

By comparison, creating a state judicial system that interpreted the law from an Alaska perspective in accordance with the Alaska Constitution was a huge step forward, Fischer said.

Return to the old ways with U.S. marshals and cash-strapped federal courts?

"We'd be second-rate citizens again," Coghill said.

5. FEWER AMENITIES

Did we mention there'd be no Uncle Ted without statehood? That's because Alaska as a territory had no representation in the U.S. Senate. And the absence of the man who would later become Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens would have hurt.

Sometimes senators from Washington state looked out for Alaska's interests, recalls former Territorial Gov. Mike Stepovich. But those Pacific Northwest neighbors were also beholden to Seattle cannery owners, who fiercely opposed paying taxes to Alaska.

"So we wanted to be a state," Stepovich said. "We wanted to have two senators."

After statehood, Alaska sent three veteran leaders to Congress -- all of them Democrats: Sens. Ernest Gruening and Bob Bartlett, and Rep. Ralph Rivers.

All of their federal dollar wheedling skills were soon tested by the 1964 Good Friday earthquake, the largest quake ever recorded in North America, which devastated Southcentral Alaska.

Fischer, who served as a state and city planner during those years, recalls how Alaska's congressional delegation encouraged President Lyndon Johnson to commit millions of dollars to Alaska's reconstruction -- at a time when the state economy had fallen into the doldrums. "We had a tremendous infusion of cash."

It never stopped flowing. University of Alaska Anchorage economist Scott Goldsmith has calculated that one-third of all household income in Alaska nowadays is traceable to the federal government, which spends billions on Alaska each year -- more per capita than in any other state -- for the military, highway construction, university research, grants to local governments, public housing, health care and a myriad of federal jobs.

6. SIMPLER LIVES

More people, more power, more prosperity -- more problems? Will success spoil Alaska? Some longtime residents believe it already has and trace the trouble back to statehood. Or they point to choices Alaska's leaders have made along the way.

Some even agree with Alaska Independence Party chairwoman Lynette Clark, who would be happier if Alaska were still a territory. Or maybe a commonwealth. Or best of all, an independent nation.

"Secession is not a bad word," Clark said this week. "We would simply be masters in our own house."

Not many Alaskans today agree with that point of view, or its more full-throated articulation in the Alaska Independence Party platform. The AIP candidate in the last gubernatorial election received less than 1 percent of the vote.

Clark's second concern, however -- that mistakes have been made since statehood and Alaskans have suffered the consequences -- might resonate more broadly. Look at the crime rate, she said. The traffic. Look at all the corrupt politicians.

"Things have drastically changed since 1980. The passage of new programs. All kinds of regulations. Stuff that's got big business taint in it -- and cheap, easy buys on senators and representatives. If I was Roman, I would say, 'It's Caligula time.' "

Stepovich, now 89, still has fond memories of the way Alaska was.

"The farther north you went, the more friendly people were, because they had to depend on each other a lot more," he said.

Carey, a former Anchorage Daily News editorial page editor, was just a Fairbanks teenager at statehood. But he still misses some of those old-time Alaskans.

"I never met anybody who was in the oil industry when I was a kid," he said. "What we had then were people whose parents worked in gold mining."

Since then he's watched Alaska change and heard all the complaints -- from fishermen incensed over the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill to miners unhappy about "locking up" resource-rich lands in national parks and wildlife preserves.

Even so, Carey doesn't think either side would find a federal territory to its liking. "Today they would be even more unhappy."

Coghill agrees, in spite of his association from 1990 to 1994 with the AIP. Secede from the union?

"They're dreaming," he said. "The best system in the world is still the United States. And you can't turn back the clock ."

What you can do, Coghill said, is try to make Alaska a better place to live. "Nothing is ever perfect."