33.8 America: a.d. 1801 to 1900

America

Back to America: A.D. 1701 to 1800

North america

The far north and canada

Alaska

The century opened with bloody warfare for the small Russian settlement at Fort St. Michael on Baranov Island, when the Tlingits Indians massacred the men and carried off the women to their village at the site of present day Sitka, in 1802. Two years later Baranov's men, regrouped in kayaks and supported by a Russian warship, bombarded Sitka and finally forced an Indian withdrawal. The Russians then built a new fort and in the years that followed the missionary Father Ivan Veniaminov built a cathedral, started a seminary, saved the Tlingits from a small-pox epidemic by vaccination, taught the Aleuts carpentry, blacksmithing and brickmaking, created an Aleut alphabet and with that translated the Gospels. Baranov was followed by 13 Russian governors, chiefly naval officers, but there was one prince and one baron. Commerce with San Francisco was brisk, particularly during the latter's gold-rush days. Among other things, 20,000 tons of Alaskan ice, packed in sawdust, was sold in San Francisco at $35 a ton. The zenith of Russian culture at Sitka was about 1820

The Kiksadi clan of Tlingits dominated the hinterland and thus the principal source of Russian food supply. Frequently these clans mounted crippling raids against the Russian mainland settlements, some as late as 1866. Supply ships from Russia had to go around the Cape of Good Hope and in some years none arrived. Many Russians died of scurvy before they learned that potatoes and other vegetables could be grown in the far north. At one point, the Russians attempted to solve their grain problem by establishing Fort Ross, only 90 miles north of the Spanish mission of San Francisco, but the area was not very fertile and they sold out to John Sutter in 1841.

We mentioned in the last chapter that the Russians virtually enslaved the Aleuts, forcing 1/2 of all males between the ages of 18 and 50 to work for very meager compensation. By this policy, along with disease and the use of the white man's firearms, the Aleut population had been reduced to about 1/10 of the original and the Eskimos on the mainland had been cut to about 1/2 by 1857. A massive seal fur industry resulted when a machine was developed which removed the outer layer of bristly guard hairs from the animal. A Moscow journal of 1835 boasted that between 1786 and 1832 there had been 3,178,561 Pribilof fur seals killed. Soon the yield decreased and both European and American fur markets declined so that the fur based economy ceased to be very profitable. The worst losses were in the 1820s.

When Russia was defeated in the Crimean War in 1856 she was desperate for money, and that, along with an increasing interest in China rather than America, was the big f actor leading to the sale of Alaska's 375,000,000 acres to the United States in 1867 for $7,200,000.

That purchase, arranged by Secretary of State William Henry Seward of the Andrew Johnson administration, resulted in the name "Seward's Folly" for that region for many years.