Alaska

An American Colony

Stephen W. Haycox

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780295998671
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Alaska has not evolved in a vacuum. It has been part of larger stories: the movement of Native peoples and their contact and accommodation to Western culture, the spread of European political economy to the New World, and the expansion of American capitalism and culture.

Alaska, an American Colony focuses on Russian America and American Alaska, bringing the story of Alaska up to the present and exploring the continuing impact of Alaska Native claims settlements, the trans-Alaska pipeline, and the Alaska Lands Act. In contrast to the stereotype of Alaska as a place where rugged individualists triumph over the harsh environment, distinguished historian Stephen Haycox offers a less romantic, more complex history that emphasizes the broader national and international contexts of Alaska?s past and the similarities between Alaska and the American West. Covering cultural, political, economic, and environmental history, the book also includes an overview of the region?s geography and the anthropology of Alaska?s Native peoples.

Throughout Alaska, an American Colony, Haycox stresses the continuing involvement of Alaska Natives in the state?s economic, political, and social life and development. He also explores the power of myth in historical representations of Alaska and the controlling influence of national perceptions of the region.

PART ONE / RUSSIAN AMERICA

MAP 3. The coast of northwest America and northeast Siberia, by G. Muller, 1758 (James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota)

1 / Russian America, an Introduction

The history of Russian America begins with the expansion of Russian fur trappers, known as promyshlenniki in Russian, across the steppes of Siberia to the Sea of Okhotsk, the Amur River valley, and the lower Lena River basin. Not until near the end of Peter the Great’s reign in 1725 did the government undertake exploration of Siberia and the North Pacific Ocean. The problem of North Pacific geography, determining the shape and size of the continents, complicated the leap across the Pacific to America, which did not come until nearly a century after Russians reached Okhotsk. The saga of Russian expansion forms a prelude to settlement in America.¹

Russian development in North America falls into several fairly well-defined chronological periods. The first, from Bering’s discovery of the North American mainland in 1741 to the tsar’s first charter for the Russian American Company (RAC) in 1799, encompasses the movement of the promyshlenniki, organized by private investors, through the Aleutian Islands to the Alaska Peninsula and Kodiak Island, and their subjugation of the Aleut people. After the accession of Catherine the Great in 1762 and the inconclusive Krenitsyn/Lazarev expedition of 1768, the greater distances and costs forced some consolidation of this activity into the hands of a smaller number of investors, highlighted by the government’s charter of Grigorii Shelikhov’s company and his successful founding in 1784 on Kodiak Island of the first permanent Russian settlement in North America.

Three elements combined to produce the creation of the monopoly company by Tsar Paul: Aleksandr Baranov’s aggressive organization of activity in North America, the determination of Shelikhov’s widow, Natal’ia, to keep his partners united in one group, and the diplomacy and competence of her son-in-law Nikolai Rezanov lobbying in St. Petersburg among the nobility and in the imperial court. The contest among European powers for sovereignty along the Northwest Coast of North America began in this period as well, after the findings of the Krenitsyn expedition circulated among the St. Petersburg intelligentsia and quickly beyond, exciting Spain particularly. Baranov’s extension of Russian occupation of the coast was coincident with the creation of the monopoly.

The second period circumscribes Baranov’s tenure as the first manager of the RAC and the first governor of Russian America, from 1799 through 1819. England, which had the strongest navy at the time and therefore logically perhaps ought to have occupied the coast north of the Spanish outpost at San Francisco, became embroiled in the French wars and was thus unable to attend to the Northwest Coast. Both Spain and Russia attempted to capitalize on the “vacuum” left by Britain’s distraction, but only the Russians had success. Baranov not only recaptured his post at Sitka from the Tlingit, but he established a post in California ninety miles north of San Francisco. In this period Baranov came to understand what the board of directors in St. Petersburg would grasp only after the tsar and the navy had reorganized the RAC: the magnitude of the problem of adequately supplying Russian America. His failure to gain a foothold in Hawaii, together with Rezanov’s failure to force the Japanese to open their ports to Russia, forced Baranov to purchase supplies from Yankee maritime traders, a decision that created great unease back in Russia.

The third period of Russian colonial history in America focuses on the mature RAC. Eleven naval governors brought able administration to the colony through the mid-nineteenth century, beginning with Matvei Murav’ev in 1820 and culminating with Prince Dmitri Maksutov, who presided over the liquidation of company holdings in 1867. Successive governors eased conditions for the Natives somewhat, encouraged scientific and geographic exploration, supported the activities of the Orthodox mission, and explored opportunities for economic diversification. By the 1840s Sitka had become the “Paris of the Pacific,” a remote colonial outpost of European civilization where there were trade goods from around the world and frequent formal entertainments for Europe’s military, commercial, and diplomatic elite. At the same time, however, the RAC’s labor force lived in deplorable and exploitative conditions, the sea otter were nearly extinguished, and the Aleut Natives, despite somewhat better conditions, continued to be subjugated. During this period the Russians became increasingly dependent on both the supplies and the goodwill of the Tlingit Indians of the Alexander Archipelago, who fiercely maintained their independence.

But the company’s hold in North America was always precarious, primarily because the Russians never determined to create a new society there and provided no incentives for its citizens to stay. Russia wanted the resources of North America on the least costly terms possible. The Crimean War (1854–56) demonstrated the tenuous hold Russia had on its colony and coincidentally opened the Amur River valley, an area rich in undeveloped resources that was easier to supply and defend. This rendered the colony vulnerable to a crisis of stockholder confidence that occurred with the circulation of information about a false “sale” of the RAC to the United States during the war. Circulation of Russian naval captain Pavel Nikolaevich Golovin’s report on colonial conditions in 1862 exacerbated the crisis, leading ultimately to the decision to sell the colony. By 1867 the Russians knew all of Russian America’s potential, and they knew also that they did not have the will to commit the human and material resources necessary to develop it. American expansionism during this period provided Russia with a welcome solution to that dilemma.

As it would be in the future, during the Russian period of its history Alaska was a colony, although a very limited one. Only at Sitka did the Russians establish a substantial post with schools, a library, ship repair facilities, an administrative corps, and other marks of colonial organization. As the Canadian geographer James R. Gibson pointed out several decades ago, the Russians never adequately solved the challenge of colonial self-sufficiency.² Moreover, Gibson has argued, the Russians would not have been able to colonize North America to the limited degree that they did without comprehensive reliance on the Native population.³ In American Alaska developers would learn some of the same lessons painstakingly learned by the Russians: that distance acts as a tyranny to defeat supply, that remoteness and harshness of climate complicate the challenges of administration and drive up its costs, and that those same circumstances inhibit self-sufficiency. They would also learn that the Native people of Alaska are resilient and adaptable, and long before the Russians arrived, Natives had learned to fulfill their own needs to prosper and had created cultures rich in resources, art, and wisdom.

2 / Russian Eastward Expansion and the Kamchatka Expeditions

Russia is primarily a European nation. The seat of Russian political, economic, and cultural life and development is now and has historically been in Europe, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and before that in Kiev and Novgorod.¹ As Spain colonized South and Central America and Britain colonized the Atlantic littoral (coastal plain) of North America, so Russia colonized Siberia and later the Northwest Coast of North America. But for Russia, Siberian development was tangential; Russia’s face has historically been turned to the West.² Today Alaska’s non-Native population (as well as that of northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland) is about 85 percent of the total population. In Siberia it is also about 85 percent. But Russia’s first forays into Siberia were tentative and inconclusive.

Siberia is a vast and varied land comprising all of northern Asia between the Ural Mountains (the natural physical boundary between Europe and Asia) on the west and the Pacific Ocean on the east, a distance of roughly four thousand miles (by comparison, it is about three thousand miles from Los Angeles to New York City), and stretching southward from the Arctic Ocean to the hills of north-central Kazakhstan and the mountain border with Mongolia and China. The most northern reaches of Siberia are north of 70° north latitude (as is Barrow, Alaska). Most Siberian cities lie south of 60° north latitude (Anchorage lies just north of 60° north latitude). Siberia falls into three, very large major regions. In the west, abutting the Ural Mountains, is the West Siberian plain, drained by the Ob and Yenisey Rivers, varying little in relief and containing huge tracts of wetlands. East of the Yenisey is the Central Siberian Plateau, which rises above five thousand feet in the northwest. Farther east the valley of the Lena River separates the plateau from a complex series of mountains and basins that make up the Siberian Far East. Other mountain ranges extend south and east along the Mongolian border. The major river basins of the Far East are the Amur, opening eastward to the Pacific, and the Indigirka, Yana, and Kolyma, opening to the Arctic.

Russian occupation of Siberia began in 1581, when the Cossack Timofeyevich Yermak (also spelled Ermak) led an expedition across the Ural Mountains from European Russia, conquering the capital of Sibir, or Kashlyk, on the Irtysh River. The expedition was a response to raids of Siberian tribesmen westward across the mountains into properties of the wealthy Stroganov family, who owned mines, salt works, granaries, and fur-trapping operations along the west flanks of the Urals. Strengthened with troops sent by the tsar, Yermak was successful at first but was eventually forced out of the area, back westward across the Urals.

But the Russians recognized the potential for wealth in the abundant furs of western Siberia, particularly sable. With others, they quickly followed this first incursion into Siberia, and by the 1590s the Russian conquest of Siberia was well engaged. Russian free entrepreneurs, the promyshlenniki, moved successively into the major river basins, trapping out the easily accessible furs and collecting tribute (iasak) from the Native tribes. Traders found the market for sable almost inexhaustible, and because the tsar collected a substantial tax on the peltry, the government encouraged the trappers. In addition, the tsar implemented a monopoly on fur exports. By the end of the century, income from furs may have contributed 10 percent of all government revenue, a return that provided the incentive for a more focused and concerted expansion eastward.³

In 1607, the same year the English founded Jamestown in North America, the Russians established a post on the Yenisey River, and in 1632 they had reached the Lena. There they founded Yakutsk, and in 1639 the first Russians arrived at the Pacific Ocean on the Sea of Okhotsk, west of Kamchatka. The ostrog (a crude fort) at Okhotsk dates from 1648. This was the first European settlement on the Pacific Coast north of Mexico. The lack of natural barriers between the Urals and the mountains east of the Lena facilitated the promyshlenniki advance. Although most trappers were uneducated and social or political outcasts, others were highly capable leaders who provided the guidance and direction that allowed rapid advance across the vast distance, circumstances that would be repeated later when the Russians began to advance on the Aleutian Islands.⁴

With other Europeans the Russians carried with them assumptions of superiority as they moved out from their centers of power and supply. Based initially on technology, these presuppositions easily and early developed into firm cultural and ideological convictions as well. Europeans were neither unaware nor unwitting in their impositions on the aboriginal populations they encountered. Debating before the Spanish Council of the Indies, the cleric-historian Bartolome de Las Casas’s plea that Americans are human beings equal to the Europeans went unheeded; the theologian Juan Gines de Sepulveda gave articulation in 1550 to what by then had become axiomatic: that the aborigines of the Americas had no rights that the Europeans did not wish to accord them because the Indians did not have the capacity to understand rights.⁵ Among the promyshlenniki, brutalization of Siberian Natives was routine. It did not proceed from any immediate philosophical considerations, of course, but in the context of business as usual. The trappers had the technological capacity to overwhelm the Native population, and they did, although from time to time not without debilitating attacks by their victims. But these were mere temporary setbacks that ultimately did not impede the relentless progress of the promyshlenniki across the land.

By 1650 there were fifty thousand Russians in Siberia and by the end of the century, twice that number. The Russians routinely took hostages of the Native populations they encountered—Voguls, Ostiaks, Tungus, Iakuts, Lamuts, Iukagirs, Koriaks, Chukchi, Kamchadals, and others. Hostages helped to ensure the safety of the oppressors, provided needed knowledge of the land and its resources, and performed much of the labor of trapping Siberian furs. The toll on Siberia’s Natives was severe, both through outright subjugation and from disease, the virgin soil epidemics that greatly reduced the Native populations. In this the Russians differed little from the Spanish, French, English, Dutch, Portuguese, and other Europeans who spread across the world in the sixteenth century.

Russian expansion into Siberia and eventually into North America differed from other European colonization on the new American continents in at least one respect. The Spanish government was directly involved in the establishment and exploitation of New Spain. France attempted to keep restrictive controls on the development of New France, although the Montreal fur traders did resist the bonds that Paris meant to impose. Although the British government did not pay for the colonial enterprises of its subjects, it monitored them closely, failing to understand until it was too late that it had provided them with too much self-direction. The promyshlenniki and Cossacks in Siberia often proceeded without much government insight or, at times, even awareness. The territory was so vast and so distant from St. Petersburg that a thorough monitoring of the promyshlenniki’s activities would have been problematic under any circumstances.

When they reached the Sea of Okhotsk, the Russians turned both north and south. To the south lay the rich Amur, one of Asia’s great rivers, flowing twenty-seven hundred miles from the Yablonovyy Mountains east of Baikal through alpine valleys and plateaus to the Pacific near the north end of Sakhalin, its basin rich in furs. The Ch’ing dynasty of China had secured the loyalty of Native tribes living along the river, and when the Russians coming from the north raided their villages, the Natives appealed to the court at Beijing. At first the Chinese did not realize that the raiders had come from Europe by land; they thought they were adventurers who had come upriver from the Pacific. When some of the tribesmen defected to the Russians, however, the Chinese learned who they were, and began a determined negotiation with the Russian tsar, Ivan the Terrible.

The Chinese greatly feared the Russians; if the tsar could send raiders across Asia from Europe, the Ch’ing leaders reasoned, his resources must be mighty. At the same time the Russians understood that a protracted war to secure the Amur would be costly and difficult to maintain and in the end probably futile. Therefore, the two forces began negotiations that produced the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, which, with some later additions, would govern Russian-Chinese relations for more than 150 years and would profoundly affect the nature of Russia’s North American fur trade. By its terms Russia withdrew from the Amur, which along most of its length would be recognized as the international border. To underscore their determination to protect their frontier, however, the Chinese insisted that the border’s eastern portion go far north of the river, reaching the ocean on the Sea of Okhotsk, thus securing the mouth of the Amur. As a concession to the tsar, the Ch’ing court licensed Russian merchants to cross the border to trade. This led to merchant caravans traveling to Beijing with European goods, although they brought mostly furs because that was the resource Siberia had to offer. Later, in 1728, the Chinese would place severe restrictions on the trade, limiting most exchanges to the border town of Kyakhta in the mountains south of Irkutsk. When Russian trappers began to bring furs from North America, Kyakhta was their principal marketplace.

At the Sea of Okhotsk the Russians also turned north. In 1648 a commercial agent named Fedor Alekseev Popov organized an expedition of ninety promyshlenniki and several Cossacks to proceed eastward along the Arctic Coast to search for the Anadyr River, reportedly rich in sable. The Cossack Semen Dezhnev was assigned to collect iasak, or tribute, from the Natives. The party debarked from the mouth of the Kolyma River in seven koches, small boats of about forty feet with a single mast and one square-rigged sail. The route was quite dangerous, and four of the boats were lost to storm and heavy seas before reaching the tip of the Chukotsk Peninsula. A fifth boat was lost on the peninsula. The remaining two boats, captained by Dezhnev and a su...