When I was reading about how the US (among other Allied countries) actually sent troops to Russia to aid in the Russian Civil War, I saw that apparently a lot of soldiers were Michigan. I thought this may had been the case because the leaders may have thought that Michiganders and other northern state men may be more "winter-resistant". The next line of thought was why not recruit a lot of people from Alaska (which at the time likely had a very, very low population and this does indeed check out) because Alaska is colder and more "Russia-like".
I found this census data from 1900s-1920s Alaska:
https://live.laborstats.alaska.gov/cen/histpdfs/1920char.pdf
We can see that from the 1910s to the 1920s, there's a 15% drop in the population in Alaska, where most of this comes from a seeming exodus of White and Chinese males. On the Chinese male population specifically, they go from several thousand, to just over a thousand, to nearly nothing from 1900 to 1920. I know this is a really specific and vague question but I was just wanting to see if anyone might have an answer for why a significant number of White and Chinese men left Alaska over the span of about 10 years over a century ago.
The same website of the Labor and Workforce Development of Alaska had explained why:
"The first large-scale growth in Alaska since the U.S. takeover was a direct result of the 1896 gold strike in the Klondike region of the Yukon Territory. Thousands of would-be prospectors set out along the most direct route to the Klondike through the towns of Skagway and Dyea through the Chilkoot Pass. Other prospectors fanned out across Alaska trying to find their own mining claims. Gold was found at Anvil Creek on the Seward Peninsula in 1899, causing a rush of people to the new town site of Nome."..
"The settlement patterns of Alaska changed drastically with all of the newcomers. Nome, a gold mining boom town on the Seward Peninsula, was Alaska’s largest city at 12,488 people and nearly 20 percent of the territory’s population. No settlement in Alaska had been known to be this large before, and no incorporated city would reach 20 percent of the total population on again until Anchorage in the 1960 census."..
"The Gold Rush era also transformed the racial makeup of Alaska. In 1900, the indigenous Alaska Natives were a minority for the first time, at 46 percent of the total population. Whites came in large numbers. The 1900 census counted 30,493 whites (90 percent of whom were male) in the territory, up from 4,298 ten years earlier. Foreign-born whites made up about 29 percent of this total, with nearly half of them from Sweden, Norway, and Canada. However, the largest foreign-born population in 1900 was the Chinese, with about 3,100 people. Over the next few decades, the Chinese population in Alaska shrank considerably while the Swedish and Norwegian population continued to grow.
By the 1910 Census, Alaska settlement had shifted as the rush for gold tapered off . The territory as a whole gained just 764 people from 1900 to 1910. Nome, which by some estimates reached 20,000 in the years just after 1900, had fallen in population on to 2,600. Skagway had also lost population, from 3,117 down to 858."..
"The 1920 Census recorded 55,036 people in Alaska, a 14.5 percent drop from 1910, which was due to several factors beyond the decline of mining. One was World War I — many of the men who were working in the territory left to join the army or war-related industries. Between 1910 and 1920, the number of males per 100 females in Alaska dropped from 247 to 168.
Another reason for the decline was the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918-1919. The global disease spread to Alaska and hit Alaska Natives particularly hard. Several villages in Western Alaska, including Wales on the Bering Strait, were practically wiped out by the disease. All told, several thousand Alaska Natives likely died from influenza during that time."
Source: https://live.laborstats.alaska.gov/pop/estimates/pub/pophistory.pdf