Russian America

Alaska as we know it now has been a part of the Russian Empire back in the days. Some people know that it has been purchased by the United States, but not very many are aware of how it became a colonial possession of Russia along with parts of northern California. The formal incorporation took place in 1799 with a decree of the tsar. The first Europeans to reach Alaska indicated in earliest written accounts were Russian.

The first russians to find Alaska from the Siberian side were the expedition of Semen Dezhnev in 1648. There is a legend that holds that some of the boats got carried away and reached Alaska and the survivors could have settled there, yet there is no evidence of that. However, in 1725 Tsar Peter the Great called for another expedition.

In 1732 Mihail Gvozdev sailed to the shore of the "Big Land" and first of all the Europeans reached Alaska near the Prince of Wales Island. Gvozdev determined the coordinates, put over 200 miles of the shore on the map, described the channel and the islands in it. In 1732 he came back to the Kamchatka.

As a part of the 1733-1743 second Kamchatka expedition two ships Sv. Petr (Bering) and Sv. Pavel (Chirikiov) set sail from Petropavlovsk, a port in Kamchatka in June 1741. Even though they got separated both continued to sail east. At about the same time, in the middle of July, both crews sighted land. Bering's crew turned westward towards Russia, whereas Chirikov headed back to Russia in October with the news of the land they have found. Bering's ship crashed in November on Bering Island, the captain got ill and dies, the crew wintered at the island and later built a boat from the wreckage and sailed for Russia in August 1742. They have reached Kamchatka with the word of expedition. The sea-otter the brought with them pretty much began the idea of the settlement of the Russians in Alaska.

Shortly, small associations of fur traders began to sail towards the Aleutian islands. As the expeditions to America became longer, the crews established hunting and trading posts that had later become permanent settlements.

The Russians forced the Aleuts to do the work for them. As the word of such riches in furs spread out the competition among russian companies raised the Aleuts were forced into slavery. Some groups of traders were capable of relatively peaceful coexistence with them, Others could not manage the tensions and committed such exactions as taking Hostages, split up families, and forced individuals to leave their villages and settle elsewhere. The growing competition between the trading companies, merging into fewer, larger and more powerful corporations, created a conflictual situation that worsen the relations with the indigenous populations. Over the years, the situation became catastrophic.

The Aleuts were increasingly pressured into taking greater risks in dangerous waters of the North Pacific to hunt for more otters due to their dependence on the new barter economy created by the Russian fur trade. As the Shelekhov-Golikov Company, also known as The Russian-Alaskan Company, established itself as a monopoly, conflicted and violent incidents turned into systematic violence as a tool of colonial exploitation of the indigenous people. When the Aleuts rebelled and won some victories, the Russians repaid by killing them, or destroying their boats and hunting gear leaving them with no way to survive. On top of that eighty percent of the Aleut population died of the Old World diseases, which they were not immune to, during the first two generations of Russian contact.

In 1784, Grigory Ivanovich Shelekhov, arrived in Three Saints Bay on Kodiak Island with two ships. The Natives harassed the Russian party and Shelekhov responded by killing hundreds and taking hostages to enforce the obedience of the rest. After that Shelekhov founded the second permanent Russian settlement in Alaska on the island's Three Saints Bay. In 1790, Shelekhov, back in Russia, hired Baranov to manage his Alaskan fur enterprise. Baranov moved the colony to the northeast end of Kodiak Island (the city of Kodiak), where timber was available. In 1795, Baranov established Mikhailovsk six miles (10 km) north of present-day Sitka. He bought the land from the Tlingits, but in 1802, while Baranov was away, Tlingits from a neighboring settlement attacked and destroyed Mikhailovsk. Baranov returned with a Russian warship and destroyed the Tlingit village. He then built the settlement of New Archangel. It became the capital of Russian America and today is the city of Sitka, which covers what was previously the Mikhailovsk area.

The Shelekhov family continued to work back in Russia to win a monopoly on Alaska's fur trade as Baranov secured the Russians' physical presence in Alaska. In 1799 a monopoly on the American fur trade was obtained from Tsar Paul I by Nikolay Petrovich Rezanov, Shelekhov's son-in-law. Rezanov then formed the Russian-American Company. The deal was made on conditions of establishment of new Alaskan settlements and expansion of colonization program.

By 1804, following his victory over the local Tlingit clan at the Battle of Sitka. Alexandr Baranov, now manager of the Russian-American Company, had strengthened the company's hold on fur trade activities in the Americas. But despite these efforts, the Russians never fully colonized Alaska. For the most part they stuck to the coast and did not touch the inshore.By the 1830s, the Russian monopoly on trade began to weaken. In 1839 on the southern edge of Russian America