There was a full-blown Russian colony in California for almost 30 years
A hundred miles north of San Francisco, Fort Ross was meant to be permanent
Perched along California’s lushly scenic Highway 1, about 60 miles north of San Francisco is a dark wooden structure that looks plucked from a Russian fairy tale. A rustic cousin of the famously onion-domed Russian Orthodox churches, Fort Ross — a small chapel that is now a National Historical Landmark — is one particularly charming vestige of an unlikely historical encounter. Between 1812 and 1841, Russian colonists lived in California, hoping to stake a claim to land they thought would be fertile and rich with sea mammals.
In 1799, Tsar Paul I chartered the Russian-American Company (a hard-to-imagine partnership today), a joint-stock initiative with the aim of encouraging trade between the two nations and expanding Russia’s colonization efforts. Before they sailed to California, Russians had settled in Alaska, where they hunted otter and sold their very valuable pelts. But the Alaskan climate was harsh and the growing season short, and settlements struggled to keep their colonists fed. After a short time, there was also a dwindling otter population. The worsening conditions prompted Alexander Baranov, then head of the Russian-American Company, to dispatch explorers southward.
An exploratory mission set out by sea in 1803, with American captain Joseph O’Cain at the helm. The voyaging party, which included 40 Russians and 150 Alaskan natives, sailed as far south as Baja. The leader of the expedition, Ivan Kuskov, returned to New Archangel, the Alaskan settlement, with beaver skins and more than two thousand otter pelts — proof that California was fertile ground for Russian interests. Kuskov also announced he had, per instructions, planted a plaque in the soil laying Russian claim to the land. They returned to establish their outpost in 1812.
But Fortress Ross, as the entire settlement was called (Ross is the first half of Rossiya, the Russian word for Russia), sat on land that was already owned and occupied when settlers arrived. The Russians had to purchase the land from Native Kashaya Pomo people, which they did for “three blankets, three pairs of breeches, two axes, three hoes, and some beads.” Members of the Native population continued to live in Fort Ross, outnumbering the Russians by a factor of five into the year 1818 at least. According to some accounts, intermarriage between Russians and Natives was common and relations were fairly good, especially in the early years of occupation.
Settling in California was, according to an 1813 report to the Tsar from the Russian-American Company, an effort “to introduce agriculture there by planting hemp, flax and all manner of garden produce; they also wish to introduce livestock breeding in the outlying areas, both horses and cattle, hoping that the favorable climate, which is almost identical to the rest of California, and the friendly reception on the part of the indigenous people, will assist in its success.” According to most accounts, life at Fort Ross was dominated by otter hunting and agriculture. The Russians also built the first windmills in California, and made some of the first scientific observations about the flora and fauna of the region. But when it came to agriculture, they were wrong about the climate.
Part of the aim of the California settlement was to grow wheat for flour to send up to the Alaskan settlement, but in gauging the fertility of this patch of land near Bodega Bay, the Russians made an “error in judgment,” according to a member of the Fort Ross Interpretive Association. The damp marine climate of Sonoma County was in fact not a great place for growing these crops, and was entirely unlike the other regions of California (what we now know as microclimates).
Moreover, hostility from Spanish and Mexican neighbors made further expansion a daunting prospect. The indigenous population wasn’t the only one from whom the Russians sought a “friendly reception.” Spanish colonists dominated California, and they weren’t especially welcoming — in fact, they’d founded San Francisco in 1776 in part to discourage the southward growth of Russia’s Alaskan colony. While there was no outright violence, the Russians mostly kept to their own outpost, and had the sense that enlarging their presence was highly unlikely.
About a decade into the Russian colonial experiment in California, the otter population had dwindled to near extinction levels. In the subsequent decade, the Native population of the region would be badly affected by outbreaks of smallpox and measles. By the late 1830s, with the fur trade suffering and crops doing badly, the Russians at Fort Ross decided they would cease the provision of food and supplies to the Alaskan colony, and enlisted instead Hudson’s Bay Company, which had outposts in Washington and British Columbia.
Shortly thereafter, the Russians were ready to call it quits, and tried selling Fortress Ross to Mexican settlers, military commander Mariano Vallejo, and others, before finding a taker in John Sutter — of the famed Sutter’s Mill gold discovery — who paid $30,000 for it. Though he used an unsecured bank note that many believe was never paid. The last of Russia’s American holdings were sold back to the U.S. in 1867.
Russian influence on Northern California was not mighty, but it was significant. The Cyrillic tombstones found during the California gold rush are reportedly what gave the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco its name. And when the California government threatened to close the Fort Ross park in 2009 as part of a cost-cutting initiative, Russian-Americans stepped in to save it. They circulated petitions to Russian emigrés around the globe, and sent them to then-governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger. Eventually, the Kremlin sent its ambassador Sergey Kislyak to visit the imperiled site, a visit whose press coverage convinced Olga Miller, the New York-based CEO of Renova Group, a massive Russian company, to buy it. Fort Ross regularly hosts folk dances, harvest festivals, and other Russian cultural events for Russian-Americans and others who want to sample a taste of the Motherland just a hundred miles north of Silicon Valley.
