Fur companies world over have run the same course. No sooner has game become scarce on the hunting-grounds, than rivals begin the merry game of slitting one another's throats, or instigating savages to do the butchering for them. That was the record of the Hudson's Bay Company and Nor'westers in Canada, and the Rocky Mountain men and American Company on the Missouri. Four years after Bering's crew had brought back word of the sea-otter in 1742, there were seventy-seven different private Russian concerns hunting sea-otter off the islands of Alaska. Fifty years later, after Cook, the English navigator, had spread authentic news of the wealth in furs to be had on the west coast of America, there were sixty different fur companies on the Pacific coast carrying {303} almost as many different flags. John Jacob Astor's ships had come round the Horn from New York and, sailing right into the Russian hunting-grounds, were endeavoring to make arrangements to furnish supplies to the Russians in exchange for cargoes of the fur-seals, whose rookeries had been discovered about the time sea-otter began to be scarce. Kendrick, Gray, Ingraham, Coolidge, a dozen Boston men were threading the shadowy, forested waterways between New Spain and Alaska.[2] Ships from Spain, from France, from London, from Canton, from Bengal, from Austria, were on the west coast of America. The effect was twofold: sea-otter were becoming scarce from being slaughtered indiscriminately, male and female, young and old; the fur trade was becoming bedevilled from rival traders using rum among the savages. The life of a fur trader on the Pacific coast was not worth a pin's purchase fifty yards away from the cannon mouths pointed through the netting fastened round the deck rails to keep savages off ships. Just as Lord Selkirk indirectly brought about the consolidation of the Hudson's Bay fur traders with Nor'westers, and John Jacob Astor attempted the same ends between the St. Louis and New York companies, so a master mind arose among the Russians, grasping the situation, and ready to cope with its difficulties.
[Illustration: John Jacob Astor.]
This was Gregory Ivanovich Shelikoff, a fur trader {304} of Siberia, accompanied to America and seconded by his wife, Natalie, who succeeded in carrying out many of his plans after his death. Shelikoff owned shares in two of the principal Russian companies. When he came to America accompanied by his wife, Baranof, another trader, and two hundred men in 1784, the Russian headquarters were still at Oonalaska in the Aleutians. Only desultory expeditions had gone eastward. Foreign ships had already come among the Russian hunting-grounds of the north. These Shelikoff at once checkmated by moving Russian headquarters east to Three Saints, Kadiak. Savages warned him from the island, threatening death to the Aleut Indian hunters he had brought. Shelikoff's answer was a load of presents to the hostile messenger. That failing, he took advantage of an eclipse of the sun as a sign to the superstitious Indians that the coming of the Russians was noted and blessed of Heaven. The unconvinced Kadiak savages responded by ambushing the first Russians to leave camp, and showering arrows on the Russian boats. Shelikoff gathered up his men, sallied forth, whipped the Indians off their feet, took four hundred prisoners, treated them well, and so won the friendship of the islanders. From the new quarters hunters were despatched eastward under Baranof and others as far as what is now Sitka. These yearly came back with cargoes of sea-otter worth two hundred thousand dollars. Shelikoff at once saw that if the Russian traders were to hold their own against {305} the foreign adventurers of all nations flocking to the Pacific, headquarters must be moved still farther eastward, and the prestige of the Russian government invoked to exclude foreigners. There were, in fact, no limits to the far-sighted ambitions of the man. Ships were to be despatched to California setting up signs of Russian possession. Forts in Hawaii could be used as a mid-Pacific arsenal and halfway house for the Russian fleet that was to dominate the North Pacific. A second Siberia on the west coast of America, with limits eastward as vague as the Hudson's Bay Company's claims westward, was to be added to the domains of the Czar. Whether the idea of declaring the North Pacific a closed sea as Spain had declared the South Pacific a closed sea till Francis Drake opened it, originated in the brain of Shelikoff, or his successors, is immaterial. It was the aggrandizement of the Russian American Fur Company as planned by Shelikoff from 1784 to 1796, that led to the Russian government trying to exclude foreign traders from the North Pacific twenty-five years later, and which in turn led to the declaration of the famous Monroe Doctrine by the United States in 1823—that the New World was no longer to be the happy hunting-ground of Old World nations bent on conquest and colonization.
Like many who dream greatly, Shelikoff did not live to see his plans carried out. He died in Irkutsk in 1795; but in St. Petersburg, when pressing upon {306} the government the necessity of uniting all the independent traders in one all-powerful company to be given exclusive monopoly on the west coast of America, he had met and allied himself with a young courtier, Nikolai Rezanoff.[3] When Shelikoff died, Rezanoff it was who obtained from the Czar in 1799 a charter for the Russian American Fur Company, giving it exclusive monopoly for hunting, trading, and exploring north of 55 degrees in the Pacific. Other companies were compelled either to withdraw or join. Royalty took shares in the venture. Shareholders of St. Petersburg were to direct affairs, and Baranof, the governor, resident in America, to have power of life and death, despotic as a czar. By 1800 the capital of Russian America had been moved down to the modern Sitka, called Archangel Michael in the trust of the Lord's anointed protecting these plunderers of the sea. Shelikoff's dreams were coming true. Russia was checkmating the advances of England and the United States and New Spain. Schemes were in the air with Baranof for the impressment of Siberian exiles as peasant farmers among the icebergs of Prince William Sound, for the remission of one-tenth tribute in furs from the Aleuts on condition of free service as hunters with the company, and for the employment of Astor's ships as purveyors of provisions to Sitka, when there fell a bolt {307} from the blue that well-nigh wiped Russian possession from the face of America.
It was a sleepy summer afternoon toward the end of June in 1802. Baranof had left a guard of twenty or thirty Russians at Sitka and, confident that all was well, had gone north to Kadiak. Aleut Indians, impressed as hunters, were about the fort, for the fiery Kolosh or Sitkans of this region would not bow the neck to Russian tyranny. Safe in the mountain fastnesses behind the fort, they refused to act as slaves. How they regarded this invasion of their hunting-ground by alien Indians—Indians acting as slaves—may be guessed.[4] Whether rival traders, deserters from an American ship, living with the Sitkan Indians, instigated the conspiracy cannot be known. I have before me letters written by a fur trader of a rival company at that time, declaring if a certain trader did not cease his methods, that "pills would be bought at Montreal with as good poison as pills from London;" and the sentiment of the writer gives a true idea of the code that prevailed among American fur traders.
The fort at that time occupied a narrow strip between a dense forest and the rocky water front a few miles north of the present site. Whether the renegade American sailors living in the forests with the Kolosh betrayed all the inner plans of the fort, or the squaws daily passing in and out with berries kept their {308} countrymen informed of Russian movements, the blow was struck when the whites were off guard. It was a holiday. Half the Russians were outside the palisades unarmed, fishing. The remaining fifteen men seem to have been upstairs about midday in the rooms of the commander, Medvednikoff. Suddenly the sleepy sentry parading the balcony noticed Michael, chief of the Kolosh, standing on the shore shouting at sixty canoes to land quickly. Simultaneously the patter of moccasined feet came from the dense forest to the rear—a thousand Kolosh warriors, every Indian armed and wearing the death-mask of battle. Before the astounded sentry could sound an alarm, such a hideous uproar of shouts arose as might have come from bedlam let loose. The Indian always imitates the cries of the wild beast when he fights—imitates or sets free the wild beast in his own nature. For a moment the Russians were too dumfounded to collect their senses. Then women and children dashed for refuge upstairs in the main building, huddling over the trapdoor in a frenzy of fright. Russians outside the palisades ran for the woods, some to fall lanced through the back as they raced, others to reach shelter of the dense forest, where they lay for eight days under hiding of bark and moss before rescue came. Medvednikoff, the commander, and a dozen others, seem to have hurled themselves downstairs at the first alarm, but already the outer doors had been rammed. The panels of the inner door were slashed out. A flare of {309} musketry met the Russians full in the face. The defenders dropped to a man, fearless in death as in life, though one wounded fellow seems to have dragged himself to the balcony where he succeeded in firing off the cannon before he was thrown over the palisades, to be received on the hostiles' upturned spears. Meanwhile wads of burning birch bark and moss had been tossed into the fort on the powder magazines. A high wind fanned the flames. A terrific explosion shook the fort. The trap-door where the women huddled upstairs gave way. Half the refugees fell through, where they were either butchered or perished in the flames. The others plunged from the burning building through the windows. A few escaped to the woods. The rest—Aleut women, wives of the Russians—were taken captive by the Kolosh. Ships, houses, fortress, all were in flames. By nightfall nothing remained of Sitka but the brass and iron of the melted cannon. The hostiles had saved loot of some two thousand sea-otter skins.
All that night, and for eight days and nights, the refugees of the forest lay hidden under bark and moss. Under cover of darkness, one, a herdsman, ventured down to the charred ruins of Sitka. The mangled, headless bodies of the Russians lay in the ashes. At noon of the eighth day the mountains suddenly rocked to the echo of two cannon-shots from the bay. A ship had come. Three times one Russian ventured to the shore, and three times was chased back to the woods; {310} but he had seen enough. The ship was an English trader under Captain Barber, who finally heard the shouts of the pursued man, put off a small boat and rescued him. Three others were saved from the woods in the same way, but had been only a few days on the ship, when Michael, the Kolosh chief, emboldened by success, rowed out with a young warrior and asked the English captain to give up the Russians. Barber affected not to understand, lured both Indians on board, seized them, put them in irons, and tied them across a cannon mouth, when he demanded the restoration of all captives and loot; but the Sitkan chief probably had his own account of who suggested the massacre. Also it was to the English captain's interests to remain on good terms with the Indians. Anyway, the twenty captives were not restored till two other ships had entered port, and sent some Kolosh canoes to bottom with grape-shot. The savages were then set free, and hastening up to Kadiak, Barber levelled his cannon at the Russian fort and demanded thirty-seven thousand five hundred dollars' salvage for the rescue of the captives and loot. Baranof haggled the Englishman tired, and compromised for one-fifth the demand.
Two years passed, and the fur company was powerless to strike an avenging blow. Wherever the Russians led Aleuts into the Kolosh hunting-grounds, there had been ambush and massacre; but Baranof {311} bided his time. The Aleut Indian hunters, who had become panic-stricken, gradually regained sufficient courage again to follow the Russians eastward. By the spring of 1804 Baranof's men had gathered up eight hundred Aleut Indians, one hundred and twenty Russian hunters, four small schooners, and two sloops. The Indians in their light boats of sea-lion skin on whalebone, the Russians in their sail-boats, Baranof set out in April from St. Paul, Kadiak, with his thousand followers to wreak vengeance on the tribes of Sitka. Sea-otter were hunted on the way, so that it was well on in September before the brigades entered Sitka waters. Meanwhile aid from an unexpected quarter had come to the fur company. Lieutenant Krusenstern had prevailed on the Russian government to send supplies to the Russian American Company by two vessels around the world instead of caravans across Siberia. With Krusenstern went Rezanoff, who had helped the fur traders to obtain their charter, and was now commissioned to open an embassy to Japan. The second vessel under Captain Lisiansky proceeded at once to Baranof's aid at Sitka.