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 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.”
There were no telephones at the capitol then, and messengers were sent
in every direction to summon Secretary Seward’s assistants, and open and
light the building at Fourteenth and S Streets, then occupied by the
State Department. Baron Stoeckl hunted up his secretaries and
chancellor, and at midnight the company assembled, including Senator
Charles Sumner, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
Leutze has preserved the scene in a painting owned by Hon. Frederick W.
Seward, of Montrose, N. Y. Secretary Seward and his assistants, Messrs.
Hunter and Chew, and M. Bodisco, Secretary of the Russian Legation, form
a central group. Baron Stoeckl stands beside the large globe of the
world, and the lights of the chandelier overhead fall full upon Russian
America, to which Baron Stoeckl is pointing his hand. Senator Sumner and
Mr. Frederick Seward occupy a sofa in a corner back of this group,
holding a school atlas before them.
The signatures were affixed to the treaty at four o’clock on the morning
of March 30. The illumination of the State Department at that unusual
hour attracted suspicious attention, and it was known that something of
import was going on. It was intended to keep the matter wholly secret
until the Senate had ratified the treaty, but journalistic enterprise
ran high, and a New York reporter shadowed the Secretary of State, and,
hanging on to the back of his carriage as he drove home with Baron
Stoeckl that night, caught an inkling of the terms of the treaty and
gave them to the world.
On the same day the treaty was sent to the Senate, then convened in
extra session, and, discussed in secret conclaves, was confirmed on the
10th of April, chiefly through the agency of Charles Sumner, who,
although not favorable to the measure at first, arose on the tenth day
and delivered a speech, which was one of the finest efforts of his life,
and an epitome of all that was known and had been written up to date
concerning Russian America. Every chart, every narrative of the old
discoverers, every scientific work and special report, was consulted by
that great scholar, and his speech “on the cession of Russian America”
is still a work of authority and reference to those who would study the
question.
There was great surprise when the terms of the treaty were made known.
The wits went to work with their jokes on the “Esquimaux Acquisition
Treaty,” and Sir Frederick Bruce, the British Minister, was so chagrined
at the news, that he telegraphed to the Earl of Derby for instructions
to protest against the acceptance of the treaty. It was ratified by the
Senate by a vote of thirty yeas and two nays, the opposing twain being
Senators Fessenden and Ferry.
While the matter was pending there were many conclaves and dinner
councils at the residence of the Secretary of State. The “polar bear
treaty” and the “Esquimaux senators” were common names at the capital,
and of the Secretary’s dinner parties one scribe wrote: “There was roast
treaty, boiled treaty, treaty in bottles, treaty in decanters, treaty
garnished with appointments to office, treaty in statistics, treaty in
military point of view, treaty in territorial grandeur view, treaty clad
in furs, ornamented with walrus teeth, fringed with timber, and flopping
with fish.” Other menus gave “icebergs on toast,” “seal flippers
frappee,” and “blubber au naturel.”
It was a great puzzle for a while to know what name should he given to
the new territory, as Russian America would no longer do. The wits
suggested “Walrussia,” “American Siberia,” “Zero Islands,” and
“Polaria,” but at Charles Sumner’s suggestion it was called “Alaska,”
the name by which the natives designated to Captain Cook the great
peninsula on the south coast, and which, translated, means “the great
land.” The articles were exchanged and the treaty proclaimed by the
President, June 20, 1867. Secretary Seward was more than delighted with
the success of his efforts, and the day after the proclamation said:
“The farm is sold and belongs to us.” He felt sure that he had the
advantage of his enemies this time, and had gone far enough north to
counteract any leaning or sentiment toward the South, that he had been
accused of harboring. He proposed to make General Garfield, then fresh
in his military honors, a first Governor of the Territory, and later he
intended to divide the country into six territorial governments.
The President and his premier lost no time in clinching the bargain, and
immediately set about to receive and occupy the Territory, without
waiting for the House of Representatives to appropriate the $7,200,000
of gold coin to pay for it with. Brigadier-General Lovell H. Rousseau
was furnished with a handsome silk flag and many instructions by
Secretary Seward, and left New York the same August in company with
Captain Alexis Pestchouroff and Captain Koskul, who acted as
Commissioners on the part of Russia. Gen. Jefferson C. Davis, in command
of 250 men, was ordered to meet him at San Francisco, and left there at
the same time as the Commissioners, on September 27. Gen. Rousseau and
his colleagues were taken on board the man-of-war _Ossipee_, then in
command of Captain Emmons, and when they reached Sitka, on the morning
of October 18, 1867, found the troop ships already at anchor there.
Three United States ships, the _Ossipee_ under Captain Emmons, the
_Jamestown_ under command of Captain McDougall, and the _Resaca_ under
Captain Bradford, were flying their colors in the harbor that gay
October morning, and the Russian flag fluttered from every staff and
roof-top. At half past three o’clock in the afternoon the United States
troops, a company of Russian soldiers, the group of officials, some
citizens and Indians, assembled on the terrace in front of the castle.
The ceremony of transfer was very simple, the battery of the _Ossipee_
starting the national salute to the Russian flag, when the order was
given to lower it, and the Russian water battery on the wharf returning,
in alternation of shots, the national salute to the United States flag,
as it was raised. The Russian flag caught in the ropes coming down,
wrapped itself round and round the flagstaff, and although the border
was torn off, the body clung to the staff of native pine. The Russian
soldiers could not reach it until a boatswain’s chair was rigged to the
halyards, and then one of them untwisting the flag, and not hearing
Captain Pestchouroff’s order to bring it down, flung it off, and it fell
like a canopy over the bayonets of the Russian soldiers.
The rain began then, and the beautiful Princess Maksoutoff wept when the
Russian colors finally fell. The superstitious affected to find an omen
in this incident, but the American flag ran up gayly, and when the
bombardment of national salutes was over, Captain Pestchouroff said: “By
authority of his Majesty the Emperor of Russia, I transfer to the United
States the Territory of Alaska!” Prince Maksoutoff handed over the
insignia of his office as governor, and the thing was done. There was a
dinner and a ball at the castle, an illumination and fireworks that
night, and the bald eagle screamed on all the hill tops. The Russian
citizens began to leave straightway, and in a few months fifty ships and
four hundred people had sailed away from Sitka, and the desolation of
American ownership began. Only three families of the educated class and
of pure Russian blood now live there, to remember and relate the tales
of better days. After this formal transfer, garrisons of United States
troops were established at Fort Tongass, near the southern boundary
line, at Fort Wrangell, at Sitka and Kodiak, under orders of the
Department of the Columbia; but the ship carrying the troops to
establish a fort on Cook’s Inlet struck a rock and went to pieces when
near its destination. All the lives were saved, and the project of a
fort at that point was then abandoned.
Immense sums were paid by the government for the transportation of
troops and freight in the few months after the occupancy, and, by the
time Congress met, the United States had a firm hold on the new
possession. There were exciting times at Sitka for a few months, and the
first rush of enterprising and unscrupulous Americans quite astonished
the departing Russians, who were unused to the tricks of the
adventurers, who always hurry to a new country.
Professor George Davidson was sent with eight assistants to make a
report on the general features and resources of the country, and from
July to November he cruised along the coast on the revenue cutter
_Lincoln_. He was mercilessly cross-examined by the special committee of
Congress during the exciting winter that followed at Washington.
Secretary Seward trod a thorny pathway, and he and his newly-acquired
Territory were the theme of every wit and joker in the public prints.
Congress was in an ugly frame of mind, and even the party leaders in the
House of Representatives felt dubious about getting an appropriation to
pay for Alaska. The wildest reports of the country and its resources
were current, and while one sage represented it as a garden of wild
roses, and a place for linen dusters, the next one said the only
products were icebergs and furs, and the future settlers would cultivate
their fields with snow-ploughs.
The irrepressible Nasby wrote: “The dreary relic of diplomacy to the
south of the North Pole is a land reservation for the Blair family,” and
he advised President Johnson to “swing around the circle,” and visit
“this land of valuable snow and merchantable ice.”
In a less humorous vein a Democratic editor said: “Congress is not
willing to take $10,000,000 from the Treasury to pay for the Secretary
of State’s questionable distinction of buying a vast uninhabitable
desert with which to cover the thousand mortifications and defeats which
have punished his pilotage of Andrew Johnson through his shipwrecked
policy of reconstruction. The treaty has a clause binding us to exercise
jurisdiction over the Territory and give government to forty thousand
inhabitants now crawling over it in snow-shoes. Without a cent of
revenue to be derived from it, we will have to keep regiments of
soldiers and six men-of-war up there, and institute a Territorial
government. No energy of the American people will be sufficient to make
mining speculation profitable in 60° north latitude. Ninety-nine
one-hundredths of the territory is absolutely worthless.”
In this spirit the thing went on through all of that stormy winter. The
impeachment trial was held, and President Johnson acquitted May 17,
1867. On the following day General N. P. Banks introduced a bill
appropriating $7,200,000 to pay for Alaska, and as it hung uncertain for
weeks, it was determined to get the appropriation through in a
deficiency bill, if the Banks bill failed. At a night session on the
30th of June, with the House in committee of the whole, and General
Garfield in the chair, General Banks made a most eloquent speech,
painting Alaska in glowing colors and luxuriant phrase, and winning the
suffrages of the disaffected ones on his own side by the audacity of his
genius. Judge Loughbridge, of Iowa, opposed the bill, and three
Democrats (Boyer of Pennsylvania, Pruyn of New York, and Johnson of
California), made ringing speeches in its favor. The next day C. C.
Washburn made a severe speech against it, and Maynard, of Tennessee,
spoke for it. Then the grand “old commoner,” Thaddeus Stevens, made an
oration in its favor, ending up with a fish story of the skipper who ran
his ship aground on the herring in Behring Sea, and ran it so high and
so dry on the wriggling fish, that it broke in two. On the 14th of July
the bill passed by ninety-eight yeas, forty-nine nays. Fifty-three
members not voting, endangered its success, but the House showed its
temper by a clause insisting that hereafter it should take part in the
consideration of treaties, as well as the Senate. Two weeks later the
Czar was chinking his bags of American gold, when dust again rose from
the State Department. The cost of the cable messages sent by the two
governments, in regard to the negotiations and the transfer, amounted to
nearly $30,000. When their share of the bill was presented to the
Russian government, they refused to pay it, claiming that the treaty
provided that the United States should pay $7,200,000 and all the
expenses of transfer. There were polite messages between the diplomats,
but at last the cable company reduced the bill, and our State Department
paid for all of it.
In the end many statements and prophecies concerning the Territory have
been disproved, but we received a country of 580,107 square miles, equal
in area to one sixth of the whole United States, and for this great
empire we paid at the rate of one and nineteen-twentieths of a cent per
acre. The Alexander archipelago itself, comprising 1,100 islands, and an
area of 14,142 geographical square miles, will soon prove itself worth
the purchase-money alone, when it is explored, developed, and settled.
Of the strip of main land, thirty miles wide and three hundred miles
long, off which the islands are anchored, Sir George Simpson,
Governor-in-Chief of the Hudson Bay Company, once said that all the
British possessions in the interior, adjacent to it, were useless, if
this coast strip were not leased to them. For years Great Britain made
overtures to buy this strip, and hordes of its mining adventurers made
threats to drive the Russians away; yet, by the hooks and crooks of
diplomacy, it came into the possession of the United States, while the
southern border of this strip is distant six hundred and forty miles
from our once northern boundary, the forty-ninth parallel. By leasing
those tiny Seal Islands, in Behring Sea, to the Alaska Commercial
Company, the government has derived a revenue of over $300,000 per
annum, and the Territory has, in this way, paid a fair percentage of
interest on the purchase-money, since it has been virtually at no
expense to protect it, or keep up a form of government. In view of the
later mineral discoveries, it is said that Douglass Island alone is
worth all that the United States gave for the Territory, and events are
slowly proving the foresight and wisdom of Mr. Seward in acquiring it.
The Russians knew almost nothing of the topography or resources of the
country when they passed it over to us, as the directors of the fur
company, having absolute control, had made everything subservient to
their interests and trade. A clause in their lease provided that the
government should have the right to all mineral lands discovered, so
that they took good care to discourage explorers and prospectors.
Baranoff is even said to have given thirty lashes to a man who brought
in a specimen of gold-bearing quartz, and warned him of worse punishment
if he found any more ore. All the records and papers of the fur company
were turned over to the United States, and the archives at St.
Petersburg were searched for any documents or reports pertaining to
Russian America. Two shelves in the State Department Library at
Washington are filled with these manuscript records of early Alaskan
events. They are written in clear Russian text, as even as print, and
forty of the volumes are archive reports of the directors and agents of
the fur company. Fifty of them are office records and journals, and one
bulky volume contains the ships’ logs that were of sufficient value and
interest to warrant their preservation. None of them have been
translated, except as students and specialists have made notes from them
for their own use. Mr. Ivan Petroff gave these archives a thorough
inspection in gathering the materials for his valuable Census Report of
1880.