Battle of Sitka, 1804: The Withdrawal That Was Not Surrender

Two years before the battle, the Kiks.ádi clan of the Tlingit had already demonstrated what they were capable of. In eighteen oh two, they destroyed the Russian American Company outpost at Redoubt Saint Michael, killing most of its garrison. The Russians called it a massacre. The Tlingit understood it as the defense of their coastline against a colonial operation that had arrived uninvited and stayed.

Alexander Baranov arrived in October eighteen oh four with reinforcements, the warship Neva, and enough firepower to reduce fortifications to rubble. He found the Tlingit waiting behind the walls of Shis'ki Noow, a fort they had built specifically to withstand a Russian assault. For four days, Baranov bombarded the position. The Tlingit held.

Then, in the darkness before dawn on October seventh, the Kiks.ádi conducted an organized withdrawal. They carried their families, their ceremonial objects, and their dead north through the forest under cover of night. The Russians entered the empty fort and declared victory.

The Tlingit oral tradition frames the event differently. The retreat was not surrender. It was the strategic repositioning of a people who understood that holding one fortified position was not the same as accepting Russian authority over their homeland. The Kiks.ádi returned to Sitka within years, in smaller numbers at first, then in greater ones. The Russians named their new colonial capital Novoarkhangelsk. The Tlingit called it Shee Atika. Both peoples remained in the same place through the Russian period and through the American one that followed.

The Sitka National Historical Park, which now occupies the site of Shis'ki Noow, was established in nineteen ten. Its totem poles and its trail through the rainforest carry the Tlingit version of this history as fully as the Russian one.