Married to the Empire

Three Governors' Wives in Russian America 1829-1864

Susanna Rabow-Edling

• Publisher: University of Alaska Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781602232648
• eBook ISBN: 9781602232655
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Russian Empire had a problem. While they had established successful colonies in their territory of Alaska, life in the settlements was anything but civilized. The settlers of the Russian-America Company were drunk, disorderly, and corrupt. Worst of all, they were terrible role models for the Natives, whom the empire saw as in desperate need of moral enlightenment. The empire's solution? Send in women. In 1829, the Company decreed that any governor appointed after that date had to have a wife, in the hopes that these more pious women would serve as glowing examples of domesticity and bring charm to a brutish territory.

Elisabeth von Wrangell, Margaretha Etholén, and Anna Furuhjelm were three of eight governors' wives who took up this domestic mantle. Married to the Empire tells their stories using their own words and though extraordinary research by Susanna Rabow-Edling. All three were young and newly wed when they left Russia for the furthest outpost of the empire, and all three went through personal and cultural struggles as they worked to adjust to life in the colony. Their trials offer a little-heard female history of Russian Alaska, while illuminating the issues that arose while trying to reconcile expectations of womanhood with the realities of frontier life.

PART I

ELISABETH VON WRANGELL

IN THE SUMMER OF 1830, a large party was traveling down the Okhotsk trail in eastern Siberia en route to Novo-Arkhangel’sk (Sitka) across the Okhotsk Sea. At the head of the party was the newly appointed governor of Russian Alaska, Ferdinand von Wrangell. At his side was his wife Elisabeth and their baby daughter, Müs’chen. In their retinue was Müs’chen’s nursemaid, Maria Ivanovna, Elisabeth’s maid, Annushka, another gentlewoman by the name of Madame Rosenberg with her maid, on their way to Okhotsk, Dr. Mayer and a washer woman, also destined for Alaska, and several local guides and porters. The company had just passed the Aldan River and had left behind them both horrific swamps and a desolate and depressing landscape. The scenery had changed for the better. Hills covered with larches and birch trees now alternated with swamps. In the far distance the mountain range that they would have to cross to reach Okhotsk could be vaguely made out. On July 11, having traveled under clear skies but on a miserable and rocky road, the party reached the river Belaya, where the company was taken across by boat. While the horses were swimming the river and before being saddled for the onward journey, Elisabeth arranged a lasso throwing game to the delight of her fellow travelers. “Subsequently, I waded into the water up to my knees in order to determine whether my boots really were water-tight. This turned out to not be the case, for the water simply rushed into them. Ferdinand told me that I had been very naughty, but that made two of us, for he followed my example!”¹

NOTE

1. Elisabeth von Wrangell, “Briefe aus Sibirien und den Russischen Niederlassungen in Amerika,” Dorpater Jahrbücher für Litteratur, Statistik und Kunst, besonders Russlands, 2 vols. (Riga und Dorpat, 1833–1834), vol. I, pp. 365−366. English translation:“Staging Post Tünülä, 40 versts east of Yakutsk, July [June] 27th, 1830,” in Alix O’Grady, From the Baltic to Russian America 1829–1836. The Journey of Elisabeth von Wrangell (Fairbanks, AK, 2001), pp. 101−102. O’Grady’s English translation will be used below except when it is far removed from the German original.

CHAPTER ONE

THE JOURNEY ACROSS SIBERIA TO RUSSIAN AMERICA

ELISABETH DE ROSSILLON (1810–1854) was born in a cultivated family of French and Baltic-German origin. Her father, Baron Wilhelm de Rossillon, belonged to the French nobility. Through Baltic-German relatives on his mother’s side, he came into an inheritance and moved to the Baltic Province of Estland, then part of the Russian empire,¹ in the early years of the nineteenth century. In Reval (Tallinn), he met Elisabeth’s mother, Natalie von Toll, who came from an old, established Baltic-German family.² Elisabeth grew up at the manor of Ruil, or Roela, in the Northeastern part of Estonia, but she met her future husband, Ferdinand von Wrangell, outside the city of Reval. It happened on May 3, 1829. Elisabeth was nineteen years old. Ferdinand was thirty-three and had just been appointed chief manager of the Russian-American Company colonies in North America. His appointment had made it imperative for Ferdinand to marry, as the RAC had recently decided that the chief manager and governor of Russian America needed to bring a European wife to the colonies.

Scheduled to leave Russia shortly, the new governor was in a rush to find a bride. He asked his cousin, Julie von Romberg, for help. Madame Romberg and her husband, Captain Friedrich von Romberg, had become Ferdinand’s custodians at his tender age of eleven,³ on his parents’ untimely death. According to Ferdinand’s memoirs, his cousin brought him to Reval in order to introduce him to suitable young maids from the Baltic German nobility. But when they reached the outskirts of the city, their carriage broke down. Having retired to a nearby inn to await its repair, Ferdinand caught sight through the window of Elisabeth walking down the street with two friends. “Behold this angelic face,” he called to Mrs. von Romberg. “Truly, I have never seen anything like it.”⁴ Suddenly this unknown angelic young woman entered the room. It turned out that Madame von Romberg was acquainted with the baroness and, as Ferdinand wrote many years later, “a merciful fate intended to make her my friend, my priceless treasure and salvation in this life and beyond.”⁵ After only a few days of courting, Ferdinand asked for Elisabeth’s hand in marriage. She accepted without a moment’s hesitation, well aware that marriage meant leaving her home and family behind to travel to Alaska. It seemed that the long and dangerous journey across Siberia and the Pacific Ocean did not to trouble her at all. On the contrary, she was excited and looked forward to the journey as a great adventure.⁶

Elisabeth and Ferdinand were married on May 31, 1829, only three weeks after they had first met. A week later, the newlywed couple left Reval on their long voyage to Alaska. Their journey was divided into four stages. The first leg was by carriage via Saint Petersburg across Western Siberia to Irkutsk; the second by riverboat down the River Lena to Yakutsk; the third on horseback across mountain paths and swamps in eastern Siberia to the port of Okhotsk; and the fourth by ship across the North Pacific to Novo-Arkhangel’sk, or Sitka, as it was commonly called.⁷ The von Wrangells planned to spend the winter in Irkutsk waiting for the Okhotsk trail to open in late spring or early summer. Fortunately, the stages of Elisabeth’s pregnancy conformed well to the stages of their travels. She was due to give birth in the spring, and Irkutsk was the most developed town along the route.

During her journey, Elisabeth kept a journal where she recorded her adventures in the form of letters to her parents and sisters in Estonia. Only a handful of women had made this journey before her: Eva von Behm, wife of the governor of Kamchatka, with two children; Natalia Shelikhova, also with two children; the aging mother of Father Veniaminov and his wife, Catherine Sharina, with their infant child.⁸ However, Elisabeth’s journal from Siberia and Russian America is the first written by a woman. Elisabeth’s father, who realized the significance of her letters, had excerpts from some of them published in the Baltic-German journal Dorpater Jahrbücher für Litteratur, Statistik und Kunst besonders Russlands. But, before they were published, the Baron showed Elisabeth’s letters to the family of Tsar Nicholas I, who spent part of their vacation at the seaside resort of Katharinenthal near Reval. The tsar’s daughter, the young Duchess Marie, apparently read them with great pleasure. In his diary, the Baron quoted Marie as saying “. . . they have returned from China! How interesting it is and what admirable courage Madame Wrangell must have and how she writes everything so well!”⁹

One can only agree with the Duchess’s assessment. Elisabeth’s letters are a true pleasure to read. Interesting and amusing, she describes the world around her always with an open mind, analytical acumen, and a keen sense of humor.

WOMEN TRAVELERS

Literary scholars have often maintained that the conventions of travel writing are deeply marked by gender. This is due in part to the fact that male travelers defined the conventions of travel writing and partly to the fact that travel writing grew out of a context of imperialism and colonialism, in which the European traveler was perceived as the “master of all he surveys,” including landscapes, women, and Natives. It has been argued that because traveling was considered a male enterprise, women who traveled, at least in the British Empire, took care not to overstep more gender conventions than those they already challenged by journeying. Consequently, women travel writers tended to emphasize their femininity by traveling in dresses, writing in a demure voice, and understating their own courage and the physical challenges they encountered. Female travelers even had to control their curiosity, as the very notion of female curiosity was problematic.¹⁰

Elisabeth von Wrangell, however, did nothing of the sort. She traveled in trousers and a jacket of English leather, and she wrote in a “masculine voice” fully in control of events, rather than in the voice of a “modest and helpless female.” Nor did she shy away from describing physical challenges or her own courage. To the contrary, her letters are full of adventures, and she assumes the position of a hardy adventurer. In her journal, Elisabeth comes across as anything but the pious, submissive wife who finds herself at a loss outside the familiar confines of her home. Nor did she express contemporary notions of women as weak, sensitive, and delicate.¹¹ Instead, she presented herself as confident, resolute, and resourceful. As noted, even the tsar’s daughter was impressed by her courage. Elisabeth’s travel journal is characterized by analytical thinking, rationality, irony, and curiosity, qualities that scholars of travel writing typically associate with male authors.¹² She shared her inquisitiveness and thirst for knowledge with her husband, who was delighted to have a partner with whom to discuss and compare impressions.¹³

During the first part of the journey across Siberia to Irkutsk and Kiakhta, Elisabeth never expressed any longing for home or family. To the contrary, the letters from this period are filled with optimism, curiosity, and excitement. Ferdinand was clearly impressed by his young wife’s ability to keep up her spirits despite difficult circumstances. Three months and two weeks after their departure from Saint Petersburg, he reported to his close friend Friedrich von Lütke that Elisabeth’s “unfailing cheerfulness . . . accompanied by a sharp mind, goodness of heart, and spiritual balance prompts me to try to fulfill my companion’s every secret wish.”¹⁴ To Elisabeth the journey from Reval to Sitka meant taking farewell of a safe childhood at her father’s manor. But it was also an opportunity for her to do something out of the ordinary, something a young woman of her background was unlikely to ever experience. Typically, girls from the Baltic-German nobility had little direct contact with the world outside their home. The freedom of venturing out into the world was a privilege reserved for men. Elisabeth’s countrywoman, Sally von Kügelgen, once described her longing for the liberty possessed by men of her social class, when she wrote in her diary about the first time she rode a horse and “roamed through the woods as free as a man.”¹⁵ Elisabeth seems to have felt something similar when she left Europe and entered the wide, open spaces of Siberia. She was captivated by the free nomadic life and the untamed wilderness in its infinite beauty. Her travel journal conveys a strong passion for liberty, for freedom from conventions and restrictions, and for the right to live “free as a man.”

The search for adventure and escape seems to have been significant to many European female travelers. They saw traveling as a release, an opportunity to experience something new and to cultivate their mental and spiritual capacities.¹⁶ Women from a social background similar to Elisabeth’s, who traveled from “civilized Europe” to the “North American wilderness,” appear to have felt this sense of liberation. Elizabeth Simcoe married the governor of Upper Canada and made the journey from the Old to the New World some thirty years prior to Elisabeth von Wrangell. In her diary, she wrote about the sense of liberty from social conventions and formality that she experienced in the vast Canadian wilderness. The backwoods of Canada made her feel exhilarated and independent, bold and spontaneous.¹⁷ The English writer Susanna Moodie traveled to Upper Canada at the time von Wrangell traveled to Russian Alaska. Moodie, too, experienced a sense of liberation in the great forest, which, she felt, protected her from the world outside, from its formalities and social conventions.¹⁸ Frances Simpson, the wife of Sir George Simpson, governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, is yet another pertinent example. She was the same age as Elisabeth von Wrangell when she traveled by canoe from Lachine to York Factory and she, too, was awed by the magnificence of the wilderness.¹⁹

In contrast to what might be expected of a newly married woman in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Elisabeth von Wrangell did not fill her letters with contemplations about her new role as a wife and mother-to-be. Nor did she write about her marriage. In fact, she wrote hardly anything about herself, her feelings, or her private life. In this regard, she differed radically from Anna Furuhjelm, who concentrated on her role as wife and mother in her writings even while traveling. Elisabeth’s interest was in the world around her. She was particularly observant of all that was different and new. When she learned that great hordes of Siberian cattle were kept outdoors year round despite the cold winter weather, she was intrigued and remarked that “[o]ne would think this were Italy and not Siberia!”²⁰ She was instantly curious about the way the Buryat people had removed snow from the shores of the Selenga River in order to grow corn.²¹ An experiment with conveying goods across Siberia on camelback aroused her interest as well. As a true Romantic, Elisabeth was not only fascinated by exotic animals, peoples, and customs, but also by the wonders of nature. She wrote excitedly about traveling through poplar forests, where they saw “tree-trunks of unbelievable height and width,” and crossing “a tremendous ice field where the ice measures one and a half arshin [i.e., c. one meter] and never melts.”²²

While traveling across Siberia to the New World, Elisabeth encountered peoples and cultures foreign to her. Unlike Anna Furuhjelm, Elisabeth did not find these cultural encounters disturbing, and she was not easily upset by novel practices and norms. Rather, she expressed a genuine desire to understand other cultures. At times, she even seemed to appreciate the superiority of foreign customs over European ones. In this she resembled other nineteenth-century female European travelers, who wrote sympathetic portraits of foreigners as persons with whom they could identify rather than “as symbols of an alien ‘otherness.’”²³ Some scholars have argued that women were positioned outside the male colonial discourse and therefore did not feel the need to cement the values of the “imperial g...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Elisabeth von Wrangell
• Part II: Margaretha Etholén
• Part III: Anna Furuhjelm
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index