Russian America: The Colony That Was Never Really a Colony

In the summer of seventeen forty-one, Vitus Bering, a Danish captain sailing for the Russian Imperial Navy, sighted a coast he could not name from a ship called the Saint Peter. His expedition made brief landfall near what is now Kayak Island in the Gulf of Alaska, took on fresh water, and then turned back. Bering died on the return voyage, shipwrecked on an island in the Commander Islands that now bears his name. The survivors of his crew brought back sea otter pelts, and the pelts changed everything.

For the next one hundred twenty-six years, Alaska was Russian America, administered by the Russian-American Company under a series of imperial charters. The company operated from Sitka, then called Novo-Arkhangel'sk, as its colonial capital. At its peak, the Russian presence in Alaska numbered fewer than eight hundred Russians and mixed-heritage creole employees for a territory larger than Western Europe. They were not settlers in the European sense. They were extractors.

The sea otter was the engine. Otter pelts commanded extraordinary prices in Chinese markets at Canton. The Russian-American Company achieved this extraction largely by coercing Unangax̂ hunters, the Aleut people of the Aleutian Islands, who were among the most skilled maritime hunters in the world. The company established a pattern it would repeat across Alaska: identify the Native expertise, control the people, harvest the animal until it was gone.

What the Russians also brought was the Orthodox Church. Russian Orthodox priests arrived in Alaska in seventeen ninety-four, among the earliest sustained missionary presence on the continent. Father Ioann Veniaminov, who arrived at Unalaska in eighteen twenty-four, learned the Unangax̂ language and translated the Gospels and a catechism into it. He created a written form of the language. He later became a bishop and eventually the Metropolitan of Moscow. He was canonized as Saint Innocent of Alaska in nineteen seventy-seven. His influence explains why the Orthodox Church remains unusually strong in rural Alaska today, more than a century and a half after the Russian government sold the territory.

By the eighteen sixties, the sea otter was commercially extinct in most of its Alaska range. The fur trade that had built Russian America had consumed the resource that made Russian America worth having.