Fort Ross - California
FORT ROSS
Brian Landers, author of EMPIRES APART: THE AMERICANS AND RUSSIANS FROM THE VIKINGS TO IRAQ, writes:
Fort Ross was the site of the first and last Russian colony south of Alaska. It is located 12 miles north of Jenner in California and is now a state park. There is only one original structure, a house built in 1836, but there are some very interesting reconstructions. There are also picnic tables near the parking lot, in the orchard near the Call House, and in the fort compound itself. See further details on www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=449
Extract from EMPIRES APART:
In the spring of 1812 Napoleon was massing his troops in Poland ready to strike east, General Andrew Jackson was calling for volunteers for “the conquest of all the British dominions upon the continent of North America” and in Russia most eyes were turning fearfully west, most but not all; the Russian pioneers in Alaska were looking south - to California.
California offered not only an abundance of sea otters but fertile agricultural land. In March 1812 the first Russian settlement in California was founded at Fort Ross (from Rossiya, the Russian for Russia). Reminiscent of Peter Minuit in Manhattan the land all around was bought from the native inhabitants for three blankets, three pairs of breeches, two axes, three hoes and some beads. The settlement initially prospered and farms were established inland. Again like the French, but unlike the English, the Russians inter-married with the Californian natives and the Alaskans they brought with them.
Meanwhile the golden boy of Europe, the young tsar Alexander I, was becoming ever less attractive as he grew older. He developed an almost messianic conviction that autocracy was God’s plan for the entire world. His constant lecturing left other European rulers bemused; when he extended his musings to life across the Atlantic the consequences were more serious.
First Alexander tried to extend the frontiers of Russian Alaska further south. In 1821 he decreed that all lands along North America’s Pacific coast as far south as Latitude 51° North belonged to Russia. If implemented a significant part of the Oregon Territory, already claimed by both America and Britain, would have become Russian. Even though the United States only really occupied territory east of the Mississippi American leaders were convinced that the whole of North America should rightfully be theirs. In 1805 Lewis and Clark had reached the Pacific reinforcing this view. (Some American texts write as if they were the first to cross the North American continent but they were only sent because it had been done before. In 1801 the Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie, who had already twice crossed Canada to the Pacific, published his book “Voyages from Montreal”, directly inspiring US President Thomas Jefferson to send Lewis and Clark to repeat Mackenzie’s feat).
The Russian Tsar could pass whatever decrees he liked but the reality was that he had no way of enforcing them. The settlers at Fort Ross reached agreement with the Spanish to the south but the British in Oregon outmaneuvered them. In 1839 the Hudson Bay Company agreed a trade deal with the Russian colonies in Alaska and two years later Fort Ross was sold to American settlers; the Romanov flag was hoisted for the last time over Russian California a few months short of the colony’s thirtieth birthday. Fort Ross had been far more successful than the first English settlement on Roanoke Island but the Russians were too late. North America was no longer “available”, the world had moved on.
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