The territory which Russia sold so cheaply she had won at the cost of much hardship, but for a lime it had brought her rich rewards. Her original impulse toward America had come during the reign of Peter the Great (1682–1725), who in 1725 dispatched Vitus Bering, a forty-four-year-old Danish veteran of the Russian Navy, to seek the answer to a question then puzzling the academic world: Were Asia and America joined?

Bering’s first voyage, in 1728, was inconclusive, but on a subsequent expedition in 1741, one of his ships sighted land on July 15 near Cape Addington off southeastern Alaska, and on the following day Bering himself glimpsed through suddenly clearing clouds the rugged coast line of Kayak Island and a soaring, snow-capped mountain which he named Mount St. Elias after the saint of the day. Bering had found America.∗

∗ But he was not the first Russian to do so. It seems probable that “Bering” Strait had been penetrated by Simon Dezneff in 1648; and between Bering’s first and second voyages an army officer named Michael Gvozdev sailed to within sight of Alaska. Probably other voyages were launched unofficially and never recorded, but Bering’s was the official one, and brought him enough hardship and grief to merit the credit.

He never returned to Russia to claim what fame and fortune his journeys may have won. On the way back, lashed by Arctic storms and ice that rotted his ship’s rigging and turned her sails to boards, he anchored off a bleak island in the Commander group; there, on December 8, 1741, Vitus Bering, huddled in a pit scooped out of the sandy shore and fighting off a swarm of vicious blue foxes, died of scurvy.

The survivors—forty-six of a crew of seventy-seven—struggled back to Kamchatka the following September, having lost their ship and been forced to build another to bring them home. Hoping to salvage something from the voyage, they managed to bring back nearly one thousand peltries, among (hem many sea-otter skins, which at the great Russian-Chinese trading post at Kiachla brought the modern equivalent of seventy-five to eighty dollars apiece.

If it was scientific curiosity that had impelled the Russians eastward, the lure of riches now turned the impulse into an obsession. Like New Fiance, whose great era would soon close at one end of the continent, Russian America, whose star was about to rise at the other, was built upon the fur trade. And where New France had its coureurs de bois , bold adventurers who served as advance agents for the merchants, Russia had her promishleniki , fur hunters who had been following the sable and the fierce Siberian tiger eastward for over a century. It was these

At once the wealthier and more enterprising among them began Ruing out expeditions which leapfrogged eastward along the Aleutian chain chasing the seal, the sea otter, and the fox. In the islands and on the Alaskan mainland beyond, the next sixty years was a period of rugged, pell inell competition in which many Russians went broke and many died, but in which a single ship, after a successful two-year voyage, might bring back furs worth, at today’s prices, $2,500,000.

The chief victims of this scramble for riches, in addition to the animals, were the cheerful, peace-loving Aleuts who inhabited the islands, a people whom the Russians turned into virtual slaves to do their hunting for them. Clarence L. Andrews, one of the historians of Alaska, says of the Aleuts:
Hunting was with them n passion. … When one of them saw the head of a sea otter on the sea lie trembled with excitement as a setter dog trembles at the scent of a bird, and he could hardly be made to take his eyes off the coveted prize. In [their] wonderful little skin boats they searched the seas and when the head of an otter was sighted it was almost equivalent to a death warrant for the animal, for one seldom escaped.

In addition to enslaving the men, the bearded promishleniki took the Aleut women for their own, and lived like sultans with their harems. “Heaven is high,” the saying among them went, “and the Czar is far away.” Finally aroused to action, in 1762 the natives all along the Aleutian chain rose up against their masters, but their revolt was put down at once with such violence that, according to Andrews, “they never after made any resistance to wrongs.”

Few of the promishleniki stopped to realize that intensive hunting in one location year after year might eventually exterminate all the fur-bearing animals in the vicinity. That is exactly what happened: by the end of the eighteenth century the sea otter was virtually extinct all along the Aleutian chain, and the Russians found themselves forced to travel farther and farther eastward to make a profitable catch. About this time one among them, more enterprising and farseeing than the rest, began to realize that if the cutthroat competition continued unchecked, there would soon he no livelihood for any of them. Grigoii Ivanovich Shelekhov was foresighted enough to realize something else, too: (hat organized operations so far from home would require bases closer to the Alaskan mainland. Accordingly, he began to consolidate some of the smaller fur companies, and appealed to the Empress Catherine the Great (1762–96) for a monopoly. In 1794, to give his venture the color of permanence, he brought over to Kodiak island just off the mainland coast some thirty families of settlers, together with missionaries of the

The following year Shelekhov died, but in 1799 his son-in-law, Nikolai Petrovich Rexanov, who shared his vision, organized the Russian-American Company and finally succeeded in obtaining from Catherine’s successor, Czar Paul I (1796–1801), a twenty-year charter to “use and profit by everything which has been or shall be discovered” in the Russian domains in America. It was in effect a private monopoly especially favored by the state, and during the next sixty-eight years it was to represent the czars in America, carry the Imperial double eagle down the Pacific coast as far as Spanish California, and with England and the United States turn the drive for supremacy in the Northwest into a three cornered race whose outcome was for a long time uncertain.

Considering the stubborn nature of the country, the international rivalry for the area, and the company’s weaknesses, it seems a minor miracle that it was able to accomplish any of these things. Its first manager, Alexander Baranov, set up headquarters at Sitka on what is now Baranov island in Norfolk Sound, where there was an excellent harbor girdled with virgin forests and ringed round with snow-crowned peaks. But before the colony could put down roots, disaster struck. The promishleniki had been treating the Kolosh Indians of Kodiak Island and the mainland with the same lordly air they had assumed toward the Aleuts; the bolder Kolosh rose up at once and in June of 1802 wiped out Sitka, killing all but forty two of its two hundred people.

Baranov’s troubles with the Indians were aggravated by the presence in Alaskan waters of free-lance Yankee traders who ignored the Russian American Company and bought furs from the natives on their own, which they then took to market in Canton, China. Among the goods they gave in exchange were guns and powder—with which the Kolosh armed themselves against the Russians. In vain did Baranov remonstrate with the American skippers. “I said to them again and again,” he wrote, “that these goods were not suitable things to sell to an uncivilized people. … But they paid little attention, saying, ‘We are a commercial people; we look for profits and there is nothing to stop us doing so.’”

British ships were in the vicinity, too, and “The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson Bay,” having established forts and trading posts from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Arctic Ocean to the Columbia River, were eyeing Alaska from the south and east.

Baranov could do little to prevent these incursions. He had all he could do to keep alive his Russians and the Aleut hunters they had brought with them from the islands. Time and again Sitka and the other little company outposts that sprang up along the coast were in danger of starvation, for no crops were raised

∗ Life at Sitka in Baranov’s time is described in George Howe’s “The Voyage of Nor’west John,” in the April, 1959, AMERICAN HERITAGE . The history of Fort Ross is contained in “Russians in California,” by Allan Temko, in the April, 1960, issue.

For most of the first charter’s duration Russia was caught up in European wars, but when the charter came up for renewal in 1819 Czar Alexander I began to take a more active hand in the company’s affairs.

The renewed interest of the Czar meant a different kind of administration for the colony. Imperial Navy officers on detached service with the company now became its officials, and the rough-and-ready ways of the promishleniki gave way to a quasi-military discipline and government bureaucracy.

For the bulk of the population, life in Sitka must have been dull monotony in a gray company town. An American newspaperman who visited it at the time of its transfer to the United States found it a one-street settlement of plank sidewalks and hewn-log houses. The laboring classes and the soldiers, he wrote,
have been a slow, simple-hearted, well-disposed people. On account of the numerous [church] holidays, they have worked for the company not over two hundred days annually. Their pay has been about sixty dollars per year. To a citizen of the States, this would seem nothing short of “starvation” wages. True, their fare has been coarse, and they have, to use a homely phrase, lived “from hand to mouth.” Yet in Sitka no family has really ever been destitute of food and clothing. The company has a bakery, and furnishes coarse wheat bread and flour at four and a half cents a pound, and dispenses either fish or venison soup gratis. The soup is prepared daily, and after inspection … is distributed from the soup-house to each family, according to its wants. Added to this, the company furnishes a physician, priest, and school-teacher free from tax. Food, drink, and clothing is supplied at a stipulated price. In a word, it leaves nothing for the individual to do—but to work. … Yet, having no conception of any other [life], they have been, for the most part, a contented people. Their world was the little town in which they lived, with its surrounding waste of water and woodland. The busy outside world, its revolutions, its bustling trades and startling improvements, have been to them of as little moment as to the inhabitants of the moon. Of all the inventions of the past century only two have been practically known to this people—the

The company, which could look after soup-kitchens, schools, and commissaries with such thoroughness, was totally incapable of acting with any imagination on a larger scale. As the years passed and the fur-bearing animals were exterminated along the mainland coast as they had been in the Aleutians, its directors did not seem to know what to do. Like the Company of One Hundred Associates, which for so long impeded the progress of New France, the Russian-American Company made no effort to explore the interior or develop its resources. The charter was renewed for a third twenty-year period, but by mid-century it was evident that the company was in deep trouble.

Moreover, factors over which its directors had no control were jeopardizing its future. As early as 1844, in high government circles at St. Petersburg, a feeling had begun to grow that Russia’s future as a Pacific power lay in consolidating her position on the ocean’s Asian edge, specifically in the rich Amur River area of eastern Siberia, and in Korea to the south. Her fleet was badly outclassed by those of other European powers, notably England, and her collapse during the Crimean War, which ended in 1856, demonstrated her internal weaknesses. Only a nation strong at home can afford a losing adventure abroad; considering the limited amount of revenue Alaska was bringing in as the fur trade declined, Russia was reluctant to invest much more manpower, money, or attention there. And its defense would require all three, for Great Britain and the United States were becoming more and more interested in the American Northwest.

Already, in 1839, the Russian-American Company had leased an extensive tract in southeastern Alaska to the Hudson’s Bay Company, and during the Crimean War, in which England joined the allies against the Czar, these regions had been kept from falling into British hands only by means of a gentlemen’s agreement between London and St. Petersburg—still possible in those days before total war—to regard Alaska as neutral territory.

As for the United States, there was as yet no official government interest in Alaska itself; in fact, by the treaty signed in 1824 with Alexander I it had specifically renounced any claim to territory above 54° 40′ north latitude. But there was a keen rivalry with England for control of the Northwest. For the spirit of Manifest Destiny was abroad in the land. Texas was annexed in 1845, a clear title to Oregon south of the forty-ninth parallel was obtained from Britain in 1846, and then victory in the Mexican War brought under the Stars and Stripes the Rio Grande country, Upper California, and the vast region of New Mexico.

The Russians had no way of knowing when these ambitions might turn toward their domains. To them, in other words, it had begun to appear that sooner or later they would lose their American possessions anyhow; they preferred to cede

In 1854, when the Crimean War seemed imminent and it looked as if Alaska might fall into British hands, the Russian-American Company had cooked up a fictitious sale of its American holdings to the American Russian Commercial Company, which had been organized to procure ice for San Francisco. When Edouard de Stoeckl, Russian minister in Washington, broached the dummy transaction to Secretary of State William L. Marcy and California’s Senator William McKendree Gwin, both assured him it would never deceive England. But they told him that the United States government would make a formal, bona fide offer to buy Alaska if the Czar really wanted to sell. The gentlemen’s agreement between the Russian and British governments took the pressure off Stoeckl for the moment, but at the end of 1856 he was instructed by the Grand Duke Constantine to see if Washington was still interested. By that time, however, the United States had a crisis of its own to deal with. Not until after Appomattox would history produce the favorable atmosphere—and bring forward the man of action—to see the purchase through.

William Seward had been an advocate and a prophet of Manifest Destiny long before entering the State Department. Public men say many things under the pressures of the moment, but the expansion of the United States to the ultimate edges of the North American continent and to islands in all the seas that wash its shores—this ideal runs for twenty years through the speeches of Seward as governor of New York, as United States senator, and finally as Secretary of State.

He expressed it best at St. Paul, Minnesota, during the presidential campaign of 1860:
… I now believe that the last seat of power on the great continent will be found somewhere within a radius not very far from the very spot where I stand, at the head of navigation on the Mississippi river … Standing here and looking far off into the northwest, I see the Russian as he busily occupies himself in establishing seaports and towns and fortifications, on the verge of this continent, as the outposts of St. Petersburg, and I can say, “Go on, and build up your outposts all along the coast up even to the Arctic ocean—they will yet become the outposts of my own country—monuments of the civilization of the United States in the northwest.”

When he took over the State Department in 1861 Seward was sixty years old, but he was a veteran of three decades of state and national politics and was a still-vigorous man at the peak of his powers. A slender, slouching figure with a voice made husky by too many cigars and too much snuff, he was, says Margaret Leech, a complex personality. “He was gentlemanly, subtle and smiling, but not quite

He started out as if to prove that the Republican party had made a mistake at Chicago in not nominating him instead of Lincoln. “It is doubtful,” remarks his biographer, Frederic Bancroft, “if it ever occurred to him that he could not best perform any task falling to the President or to any member of the Cabinet.”

With the exception of an inept handling of the Fort Sumter crisis at the very outset of the war, he built up a creditable record as Secretary of State. But at the beginning of Lincoln’s second term, he suffered two very serious reverses. On April 14, 1865, he was grievously wounded by a would-be assassin involved in the same conspiracy that brought about Lincoln’s death. It was two months before Seward could return to his desk at the State Department, and when he did, some of his old drive was gone.

More serious was his identification with Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction policy. In August, 1866, Johnson launched his famous—and ill-fated—“swing-around-the-circle,” taking his case to the people over the heads of the Radicals. When Seward, conceiving it to be “a duty to the President and the country,” agreed to go along, he signed his political death warrant. “It is a sad fact,” Bancroft remarks, “that Seward’s popularity had gone and was never to return, to any considerable extent, while he remained in public life.”

In October of 1866, shortly after Seward returned to Washington, Edouard de Stoeckl was arriving in St. Petersburg on leave. Conferences were in progress at the Foreign Office on the future of the RussianAmerican Company, whose affairs had gone from bad to worse since the Grand Duke had last instructed Stoeckl to explore the possibilities of a sale. All the old arguments for selling were reviewed, and everyone agreed that if the United States could be jockeyed into making another offer, Russia should snap it up.

Stoeckl’s instructions were carefully prepared. In the first place, the boundaries of the proposed cession were delineated. High-ranking officers in the Imperial Navy were anxious not to have the Yankees—friendly or not—too close to the Russian mainland, so they recommended retaining the Commander Islands and the Kuriles. (The latter were, economically speaking, a part of Alaska, but the admirals had their way. Thus Soviet Russia can thank the Czarist Navy for the fact that the United States has no toe hold in Asia.) But the Bering Sea islands, the Aleutians, and the Alaskan mainland—all these were to be included in the package. In addition, Stoeckl was told to insist:

• —That the property rights and freedom of religion of Russian citizens in Alaska be respected, and that once the purchase was completed, they be given the choice of remaining

Stoeckl received one further order: under no circumstances was he to accept less than $5,000,000.

He returned to his Washington post in March of 1867, sought an interview with Seward, and after some diplomatic sparring made clear the reason for his visit. Though his bargaining instincts told him to conceal his eagerness, the offer must have seemed to the beleaguered Secretary almost too good to be true. Here was an opportunity at one stroke to further his long- deferred dreams of Manifest Destiny and perhaps to assure himself a place in history. At the very least he was likely to recover some of his lost prestige.

He was shrewd enough to realize that getting the purchase approved would take a bit of doing, but realist enough to know, too, that he had a great advantage working for him: the friendly feelings that the American people then entertained for the Russians and their rulers. Throughout the North, men of all political persuasions remembered with warm gratitude the visit of the Russian fleet to New York and San Francisco during the recent Civil War ( see “A Royal Welcome for the Russian Navy,” AMERICAN HERITAGE , June, 1960). The voyage had been dictated by Russian self-interest, but that fact was not generally known here for many years; most Americans had taken it as a gesture of support for the Union at a time when the rest of Europe seemed about to recognize the Confederacy. Moreover, Alexander II’s liberation of the serfs in 1861 had been favorably compared in the United States to Lincoln’s freeing of the slaves.

Still, Congress was locked in a determined battle of wills with Andrew Johnson, and was likely to reject anything, good or bad, that bore the stamp of his administration. Seward knew that only if he could make Congress and the American people believe that a rejection of the Russian offer would be an insult to the Czar could he win their approval. To do that he would have to arrange matters so as to give the Senate, when the treaty came before it for advice and consent, the idea that the United States had already been committed to the purchase and could not honorably renege.

Accordingly, his negotiations with Stoeckl went forward in secrecy. In general, the tentative draft that he and the Russian minister finally agreed upon for submission to their respective governments followed the lines of the instructions Stoeckl had received before leaving home. The only sticking points were the price and the matter of honoring Russia’s outstanding contracts in Alaska.