By Eliot Stein
BBC
Every year, millions of travelers set out on the Pacific Coast Highway to twist and turn their way along, one of the US’s most stunning roads, as it hugs the entire California coastline.
But chances are, few of these road-trippers realize that hidden here on a secluded headland 90 miles (145km) north of San Francisco lies a relic from the days when part of California was ruled by Tsarist Russia.
“Even most Californians don’t know Russia once had a colony in California,” said Kent Lightfoot, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “They all know about the Spanish and the Mexicans, but almost no one knows anything about the Russians being here. It’s kind of like the forgotten empire.”
While some Americans may recall that the US’s largest state, Alaska, was part of Russia for nearly 70 years, the Russian Empire’s only permanent overseas colony, known as Russian America, also extended into California from 1812-1842.
In fact, Russians settled in California decades before newly independent Americans did.
Innovative and surprisingly cosmopolitan, Fort Ross (short for Rossiya, meaning “Russia”) was intended to be a breadbasket for Russia’s struggling Alaskan settlements, but it also became the source of hotly debated plans for Russian expansion across North America.
The beginning of Russian America
As European powers expanded west in the 1500s and 1600s, Russia expanded east. By the 1640s, Russian fur traders and mercenaries had swept their way across Siberia to reach the Pacific coast.
This rush led to permanent Russian settlements along Alaska’s islands and coasts. In 1799, Tsar Paul I formalized the empire’s Alaska claims by chartering the Russian-American Company. Modelled after the British East India Company, the for-profit venture didn’t just control the fur trade; it now controlled all of Alaska as a corporate colony.
But there was a problem: while the company was growing rich on sea otter pelts, the colonists were growing hungry because they couldn’t farm in much of Alaska’s frozen landscape. So, the Russian settlers sailed south in search of warmer climates and Spanish trading partners.
California dreaming
In April 1806, with his colony stalked by starvation and his crew decimated by scurvy, Russian-American Company director Nikolai Rezanov steered the prow of his ship, the Juno, into San Francisco Bay. As the brig limped towards Spain’s northernmost California settlement, a Spanish soldier grabbed a megaphone and demanded the strange vessel identify itself.
“Russia,” a voice called back. It was a response the Spanish had been expecting for nearly 40 years.
Though Spain claimed all of California starting in 1542, it didn’t actually occupy it until 1769, after getting word that Russian fur traders were rapidly moving east across the Alaskan islands. To prevent Russian and British advancement, Spain created a chain of presidios (military outposts) along the coast, starting with San Diego.
“The expansion of all of Alta [Upper] California, in many ways, was stimulated by the Russians,” Lightfoot said. “The Spanish were nervous about the Russians coming south. So, the founding of San Diego, Santa Barbara, Monterey and San Francisco were a response to the Russians in Alaska.”
During Rezanov’s six-week stay in San Francisco, the 42-year-old statesman secured enough food from the Spanish to save the starving Alaskan colonists by getting engaged to the 15-year-old daughter of San Francisco’s Spanish commandant. As he sailed back through the Golden Gate, Rezanov realized that the entire northern coast of California was undefended and far sunnier than Siberia or Alaska, so he hatched a plan to extend Russian America into California.
Russia’s Romeo and Juliet
Rezanov’s whirlwind romance with a Spanish teen in San Francisco inspired one of the most famous Soviet rock operas, Juno And Avos.
In 1812, after years of stealthily surveying the coast, 25 Russians and 80 Native Alaskan hunters settled on a shelf-like plateau overlooking the Pacific on what is now Sonoma County’s rugged coast. Here, close enough to the area’s abundant sea otter population but far enough from the Spanish Empire’s sparsely guarded northern frontier, they lived in a Siberian-designed settlement hewn from California redwoods under the tsar’s double-eagle flag.
Exploring Russian California
Today, Russia’s far-flung California colony remains a solitary, surreal place. Set 12 miles (19km) from the nearest town or mobile phone service, the weathered wooden remnants of a once-bustling settlement open onto a 180-degree view of the sea.
“There’s a magical feel to Fort Ross,” said Robin Joy Wellman, who worked as an interpreter with California State Parks for nearly 30 years. “It’s something of a mystery, but once people discover it, they say it’s one of the most beautiful places they’ve ever visited.”
The site’s dramatic setting straddles the San Andreas fault, and the same earthquake that flattened San Francisco in 1906 also levelled much of the original wooden outpost. But detailed displays of the partially reconstructed fortress paint a vivid picture of frontier life in Russia’s wild, wild East.
The heart of the colony was the fort-like stockade, where a handful of high-ranking Russian soldiers, officers and company officials lived in barracks enclosed by a 12ft (3.6m) palisade.
While the Russians chose this natural overlook to defend against Spanish attacks, the two empires never actually clashed, and even depended on each other for survival, explained Chris Kimsey, an archaeologist with California State Parks.
Guided tours of Fort Ross are available upon request. The site hosts an annual festival each July and a local church still holds services in Russian on Memorial Day and the Fourth of July.
“The Russians and the Spanish were at the very far edges of their overstretched empires. They both needed things the other side could provide, so they traded illicitly,” Kimsey said.
In the warehouse, drying sea otter pelts worth $100 each (a year’s salary for a Pennsylvania farmer at the time) destined for China, Europe and Spanish California would have hung from the rafters. Under the bulbous dome of one of the oldest Orthodox churches in the Western hemisphere, the little settlement gradually grew into a cosmopolitan colony, complete with banyas, bakeries and some 60 buildings.
“It was a bustling, pluralistic mercantile village, with lots of languages and people from different homelands living together,” Lightfoot said. “The stockade was just the tip of the iceberg. The real action was outside.”
Beyond the fort
Kimsey explained that as the colony expanded to include nearly 400 people by the 1830s, it became one of the most diverse places in California – and virtually everyone there worked for the Russian-American Company.
Here, where the sloboda (village) once stood at the edge of the cape, paid Aleutian and Kodiak hunters lived with Native California women, mixed-race Russian and European Creoles married local Kashaya Pomo and Coast Miwok workers and people were buried next to each other at the Old Russian Cemetery up the hillside.
Compared to other European colonies, it was also largely tolerant.
“The Russians didn’t come here to ‘civilize’ like the Spanish,” said Kimsey, who serves as the tribal liaison for the area’s Native communities.
On a nearby crescent-shaped beach, coopers, carpenters and blacksmiths brought in by the Russian-American Company from as far afield as Finland and Hawaii once worked side by side.
“This is where the first ocean-going ships in California were built,” Kimsey said.
It’s also where the first bricks, glass and windmills in California were made. As workers crafted longboats, forged iron, cast brass and made metal, Fort Ross became the center of manufacturing in California.
The Russians traded these highly-coveted goods with their Spanish and (later) Mexican neighbors in exchange for further provisions for their Alaskan settlements – and in doing so, they unwittingly helped their rivals settle California.
