The Untold Truth Of Russian Alaska

Following the Second Kamchatka Expedition's Alaska landing in 1741, Russia began to gradually settle Alaska beginning with the Aleutian Islands. According to the Library of Congress, the first to make the jump were Siberian serfs called promyshlenniki. These men operated as independent traders and trappers, sometimes by coercing Aleuts and other natives to trap for them and then selling their furs at profit.

The fur trade operated much like the later gold rushes of American history. Per the Sitka History Museum, one Russian trapper named Emilian Basov went to Alaska and returned to Kamchatka with a load of otter pelts, which he sold at an enormous profit. The subsequent "fur rush" brought a wave of promyshlenniki to Alaska. Some stayed behind, taking local Aleut trapping and business partners. But, the disorganized nature of the trade led the Russian government to bring some order through the creation of a colonial company.

In 1799, the Russian-American Company, a joint-stock company resulting from a merger of several smaller trading enterprises, received a monopoly on the Alaskan and North Pacific fur trade. It subsumed the promyshlenniki class, which became its employees, and a booming organized Alaskan fur trade was born. The Chinese elite became the principal and most lucrative market for Alaskan fur. But the profits soon attracted attention from American, British, and French trappers, who saw thinly-settled Russian America as an enticing business and colonial opportunity.

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