CHAPTER XIV.
SITKA—AN HISTORICAL SKETCH.
For a town of its size, strange, old, tumble-down, moss-grown Sitka has had an eventful history from first to last. Claiming this northwestern part of America by right of the discoveries made by Behring and others in the last century, the Russians soon sent out colonies from Siberia. The earliest Russian settlements were on the Aleutian Islands, and thence, moving eastward, the fur company, whose president was the colonial governor, and appointed by the Crown, established its chief headquarters at Kodiak Island in 1790. Kodiak still lives in tradition of the Russian inhabitants of the archipelago as a sunny, summery place, blessed with the best climate on this coast.
Tchirikoff, the commander of one of Behring’s ships, was the first white man to visit the site of Sitka, and two boatloads of men were seized and put to death by the savage Sitkans, July 15, 1741.
The first settlement was made in 1800 at Starri Gavan Bay, just north of the present town, and the place was duly dedicated to the Archangel Gabriel and left in charge of a small company of Russians. In the same year, when the rest of the world was shaken with the great battles of Marengo and Hohenlinden, the Indians rose and massacred the new settlers and destroyed their buildings. Baranoff was then governor of the colony, a fierce old fellow, who began life as a trader in Western Siberia, and was slowly raised to official eminence. He established the settlement at Kodiak before he made the venture at Sitka, and when he heard of the destruction of his new station, immediately arranged to rebuild it. In 1804 he tried it over again, building the chief warehouse on the small Gibraltar of Katalan’s Rock where the castle now stands, and dedicating the place to the Archangel Michael. Baranoff was ennobled, and, moving his headquarters to Sitka, remained in charge until 1818. He opened trade and negotiations with the United States and many countries of the Pacific; he welcomed John Jacob Astor’s ships to this harbor in 1810, and made with them contracts for the Canton trade, that were sadly interrupted by the war of 1812 between our country and England.
In Washington Irving’s “Astoria” there is a life-like sketch of this hard-drinking, hard-swearing old tyrant, and the picture does not present an attractive view of life at New Archangel, or Sheetka. In 1811 Baranoff sent out the colony under Alexander Kuskoff, and established a settlement at Fort Ross, in California, in the redwood country of the coast north of San Francisco. Grain and vegetables were raised there in great quantities for the northern settlements for the space of thirty years, when the Czar ordered his subjects to withdraw from Mexican territory.
Baranoff ruled the colony with a rod of iron, and his absolute power of life and death over those under him, and the free use of the knout, kept the turbulent Indians, Creoles, and Siberian renegades in good order. He died at sea on his way home to Russia, and succeeding him as governor came Captain Haguemeister, and then a long line of noble Russians, generally chosen from among the higher officers of the navy.
Under Russian rule the colony ran along in pleasant routine; the southeastern coast was for a time leased to the Hudson Bay Company, and their proximity and the slow encroachments of the English in trade soon aroused Russia to a realization of the danger that threatened this distant colony in the event of a war. Russian America was first offered for sale to the United States during the Crimean war in 1854, by Baron Stoeckl, who afterwards concluded the treaty of purchase in 1867. In 1854 the English threatened the town of Petrapaulovski on the Kamschatkan coast, and the Russians foresaw the blockading and bombarding of their towns on the American side. This first offer was declined by President Pierce, and later negotiations came to naught in President Buchanan’s day, when an offer of $5,000,000 was declined by Russia. Robert J. Walker, who assisted in drawing up the legal documents of transfer when we did finally buy the territory, stated once that during Polk’s administration the Czar offered Russian America to the United States for the mere payment of government incumbrances and cost of transfer. Wily old Prince Gortschakoff had to tell it, too, when his envoy made such a shrewd sale for him, that his master was for years anxious to get rid of this distant and unprotected colony at any sacrifice, provided, always, that it did not fall into the hands of the English, who wanted it so badly.
In 1861 Russia and the United States held council in regard to establishing a telegraph line from this country to Europe, via Russian America, Behring Straits, and Siberia. Four years later an expedition was sent out by the Western Union Telegraph Company, and several ships and a large corps of engineers, surveyors, and scientists, were engaged in exploring the coast from the United States boundary line northward to the Yukon country, and along the Asiatic coast to the mouth of the Amoor River. Over $3,000,000 were expended in these surveys, and a telegraph line was erected for some hundred miles up the British Columbia coast, reaching to a point near the mouth of the Skeena River, that brought Sitka within three hundred miles of telegraphic communication instead of eight hundred and fifty miles, as has been its condition since the scheme was given up. After two years’ work, the company abandoned the undertaking and recalled its surveying parties. The demonstrated success of the Atlantic cable, and the difficulty of maintaining the line through the dense forest regions of the coast and the uninhabited moors of the North, induced the company to give up the plan. Prof. Dall, of the Smithsonian Institute; Whymper, the great English mountain climber; Prof. Rothrocker, the botanist, and Col. Thomas W. Knox, who accompanied different parties of the Western Union Telegraph Company expedition, have written interesting books of their life and travels while connected with this great enterprise.
As the time approached for the expiration of the lease by which the Hudson Bay Company held the franchise of the Russian-American Fur Company, great desire was manifested by citizens on the Pacific coast that the United States should purchase the colony. The legislature of Washington Territory sent a memorial to Congress in January, 1866, urging the purchase of the Russian possessions, and it was followed by earnest petitions from all parts of the Pacific coast. A syndicate of fur traders even proposed to buy the country of Russia on their private account, and sent a representative to Washington to consult with Secretary Seward in regard to having the United States establish a protectorate over their domain in that case. The Hudson Bay Company’s lease was to expire in June, 1867, and in the spring of that year the plan of purchase by the United States government assumed definite shape. Negotiations were entered into by Secretary Seward and Baron Stoeckl, the Russian minister, and, though conducted with great secrecy, were soon rumored about. At that time President Johnson was plunging into the most stormy part of his career, threats of impeachment were in the air, and the articles had even been discussed by the House of Representatives before its adjournment, March 4, 1867. All of the preceding winter Washington had been full of rumors of great schemes, looking to a drain on the Treasury, and the House had grown wary and vigilant. Mexican patriots, from three different camps, were beseeching the aid of Congress and the State Department. The Juarez[Juarez] and Ortega factions were imploring loans of from $50,000,000 to $80,000,000, and Maximilian’s emissaries were doing their best in the way of diplomacy to aid the fortunes of their imperial master, who had just taken the field against the insurgents. With such discords at home, Secretary Seward projected a brilliant stroke of foreign policy, and counted upon drawing off some of the hostile fires, and thrilling patriotic breasts by this purchase of Russian America, which should carry the stars and stripes to the uttermost limits of the north, and extend our dominion 3,000 miles west of the Golden Gate of California to that last island of Attu in the Aleutian chain, “o’er which the earliest morn of Asia smiles.”
On the evening of the 29th of March, Baron Stoeckl went to Secretary Seward’s residence on Lafayette Square, joyfully waving the cable message that gave the Czar’s approval to the plan, as then outlined. Baron Stoeckl proposed that they should draw up the treaty on the following day, but the Secretary said, “No! we will do it now, and send it to the Senate to-morrow.”