'The forgotten empire': When Russia colonised California

For nearly 30 years, part of Sonoma was ruled by Tsarist Russia, and it played a pivotal – if little-known – role in shaping the US.

It's a pretty, two-hour drive north from San Francisco to Крѣпость Россъ.

After slicing through the Golden Gate fog, I wound past sunburnt vineyards to Sonoma's remote coast and rolled down the windows. To my left, California plummeted into the Pacific and seals barked from boulders cropping out of the foamy surf. To my right, cliffs rose sharply and titanic redwoods shot up from the road's switchbacks.

Suddenly, a lonely twin-domed chapel topped with Orthodox crosses appeared against the blue ocean. I got out and followed a footpath past a Cyrillic sign towards a wooden, frontier-like stronghold built 150ft (46m) atop a bluff hanging over the sea.

"Welcome to Fort Ross (Крѣпость Россъ), the southern edge of the Russian Empire," said Chris Kimsey, an archaeologist with California State Parks.

Every year, millions of travellers set out on the Pacific Coast Highway to twist and turn their way along, one of the US's most stunning roads, as it hugs the entire California coastline. But chances are, few of these road-trippers realise that hidden here on a secluded headland 90 miles (145km) north of San Francisco lies a relic from the days when part of California was ruled by Tsarist Russia.

I didn't, and judging by Fort Ross's eerie emptiness, it seems I'm not alone.

"Even most Californians don't know Russia once had a colony in California," Kent Lightfoot, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, later told me. "They all know about the Spanish and the Mexicans, but almost no one knows anything about the Russians being here. It's kind of like the forgotten empire."

While some Americans may recall that the US's largest state, Alaska, was part of Russia for nearly 70 years, the Russian Empire's only permanent overseas colony, known as Russian America, also extended into California from 1812-1842. In fact, Russians settled in California decades before newly independent Americans did.

Innovative and surprisingly cosmopolitan, Fort Ross (short for Rossiya, meaning "Russia") was intended to be a breadbasket for Russia's struggling Alaskan settlements, but it also became the source of hotly debated plans for Russian expansion across North America.

As European powers expanded west in the 1500s and 1600s, Russia expanded east. By the 1640s, Russian fur traders and mercenaries had swept their way across Siberia to reach the Pacific coast.

This rush led to permanent Russian settlements along Alaska's islands and coasts. In 1799, Tsar Paul I formalised the empire's Alaska claims by chartering the Russian-American Company. Modelled after the British East India Company, the for-profit venture didn't just control the fur trade; it now controlled all of Alaska as a corporate colony.

But there was a problem: while the company was growing rich on sea otter pelts, the colonists were growing hungry because they couldn't farm in much of Alaska's frozen landscape. So, the Russian settlers sailed south in search of warmer climates and Spanish trading partners.

In April 1806, with his colony stalked by starvation and his crew decimated by scurvy, Russian-American Company director Nikolai Rezanov steered the prow of his ship, the Juno, into San Francisco Bay. As the brig limped towards Spain's northernmost California settlement, a Spanish soldier grabbed a megaphone and demanded the strange vessel identify itself.

"Russia," a voice called back. It was a response the Spanish had been expecting for nearly 40 years.

Though Spain claimed all of California starting in 1542, it didn't actually occupy it until 1769, after getting word that Russian fur traders were rapidly moving east across the Alaskan islands. To prevent Russian and British advancement, Spain created a chain of presidios (military outposts) along the coast, starting with San Diego.

"The expansion of all of Alta [Upper] California, in many ways, was stimulated by the Russians," Lightfoot said. "The Spanish were nervous about the Russians coming south. So, the founding of San Diego, Santa Barbara, Monterey and San Francisco were a response to the Russians in Alaska."

During Rezanov's six-week stay in San Francisco, the 42-year-old statesman secured enough food from the Spanish to save the starving Alaskan colonists by getting engaged to the 15-year-old daughter of San Francisco's Spanish commandant. As he sailed back through the Golden Gate, Rezanov realised that the entire northern coast of California was undefended and far sunnier than Siberia or Alaska, so he hatched a plan to extend Russian America into California.

In 1812, after years of stealthily surveying the coast, 25 Russians and 80 Native Alaskan hunters settled on a shelf-like plateau overlooking the Pacific on what is now Sonoma County's rugged coast. Here, close enough to the area's abundant sea otter population but far enough from the Spanish Empire's sparsely guarded northern frontier, they lived in a Siberian-designed settlement hewn from California redwoods under the tsar's double-eagle flag.

Today, Russia's far-flung California colony remains a solitary, surreal place. Set 12 miles (19km) from the nearest town or mobile phone service, the weathered wooden remnants of a once-bustling settlement open onto a 180-degree view of the sea. In two days at the 3,400-acre Fort Ross State Historic Park, I counted 14 other visitors, and except for the occasional chime from the St Nicholas chapel, the only noise breaking the stillness was the waves crashing below the bluff.

"There's a magical feel to Fort Ross," said Robin Joy Wellman, who worked as an educator with California State Parks for nearly 30 years. "It's something of a mystery, but once people discover it, they say it's one of the most beautiful places they've ever visited."

The site's dramatic setting straddles the San Andreas fault, and the same earthquake that flattened San Francisco in 1906 also levelled much of the original wooden outpost. But detailed displays of the partially reconstructed fortress paint a vivid picture of frontier life in Russia's wild, wild East.

The heart of the colony was the fort-like stockade, where a handful of high-ranking Russian soldiers, officers and company officials lived in barracks enclosed by a 12ft (3.6m) palisade. I followed Kimsey up the steps of two blockhouses armed with enough cannons to command the coast. He explained that while the Russians chose this natural overlook to defend against Spanish attacks, the two empires never actually clashed, and even depended on each other for survival.

"The Russians and the Spanish were at the very far edges of their overstretched empires. They both needed things the other side could provide, so they traded illicitly," Kimsey said.

In the warehouse, drying sea otter pelts worth $100 each (a year's salary for a Pennsylvania farmer at the time) destined for China, Europe and Spanish California would have hung from the rafters. Under the bulbous dome of one of the oldest Orthodox churches in the Western hemisphere, the little settlement gradually grew into a cosmopolitan colony, complete with banyas, bakeries and some 60 buildings.

"It was a bustling, pluralistic mercantile village, with lots of languages and people from different homelands living together," Lightfoot said. "The stockade was just the tip of the iceberg. The real action was outside."

As Kimsey and I walked out of the palisade, he explained that as the colony expanded to include nearly 400 people by the 1830s, it became one of the most diverse places in California – and virtually everyone there worked for the Russian-American Company.

Here, where the sloboda (village) once stood at the edge of the cape, paid Aleutian and Kodiak hunters lived with Native California women, mixed-race Russian and European Creoles married local Kashaya Pomo and Coast Miwok workers and people were buried next to each other at the Old Russian Cemetery up the hillside.

Compared to other European colonies, it was also largely tolerant. "The Russians didn't come here to 'civilise' like the Spanish," said Kimsey, who serves as the tribal liaison for the area's Native communities.

We then followed a steep path down to a crescent-shaped beach where coopers, carpenters and blacksmiths brought in by the Russian-American Company from as far afield as Finland and Hawaii once worked side by side. "This is where the first ocean-going ships in California were built," he said.

It's also where the first bricks, glass and windmills in California were made. As workers crafted longboats, forged iron, cast brass and made metal, Fort Ross became the centre of manufacturing in California. The Russians traded these highly coveted goods with their Spanish and (later) Mexican neighbours in exchange for further provisions for their Alaskan settlements – and in doing so, they unwittingly helped their rivals settle California.

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This shallow-water cove was also where cargo boats and kayak-bound hunters would set off for the colony's main deep-water port 20 miles (35km) south in Rumyantsev (present-day Bodega Bay) and its sealing station off the coast of San Francisco on the Farallon Islands.

As Fort Ross' footprint grew, so did the calls from within the Russian-American Company to heed Rezanov's recommendation of annexing North America's west coast for Russia. In 1821, Tsar Alexander I issued an imperial decree claiming Russian control over modern-day Oregon through Alaska. The US's soon-to-be sixth president, John Quincy Adams, swiftly objected and his warning to Russia that the Americas "are no longer subjects for any new European colonial establishments" established one of the most fundamental principles of US foreign policy: the Monroe Doctrine, which opposes foreign interference in the Western hemisphere.

From the beach, Kimsey and I climbed a steep hill past the stockade to the orchard the Russians started with a single peach tree in 1814 and pushed open the gate. Of the hundreds of citrus trees and crops the Russians planted, only a single branch of a 200-year-old Capulin cherry survives. Yet, the Russians actually left a far greater agricultural legacy here than most people realise.

"It was the Russians who planted the first grapes in [what is now] Sonoma County in 1817," said Megan Jones, Sonoma's official wine librarian. As Jones explained, while Sonoma is now considered "the birthplace of the modern American wine movement", Russian traders introduced the now-rare Mission grape to Sonoma and produced small batches of light red wine.

For all its innovations, however, Fort Ross never succeeded in its two main goals: turning a profit and feeding hungry Alaskans. By the early 1820s, the Russian-American Company's Native Alaskan hunters had speared so many sea otters they wiped out the local population, and a combination of heavy coastal fog and rampant rodents yielded just 13 tonnes of wheat annually between 1826 and 1833.

When the British-run Hudson's Bay Company agreed to supply Russian Alaska with provisions from its Pacific Northwest settlements starting in 1839, it was the beginning of the end for Tsarist California.

Two years later, a Swiss emigrant named John Sutter purchased Fort Ross' buildings and assets from the Russians for $30,000. He cannibalised parts of the structures to create his new settlement in Sacramento. Seven years after the Russians sailed back to Alaska, a chance discovery on Sutter's property ignited the California Gold Rush.

Today, reminders of California's Tsarist past are still scattered across the Golden State as you drive north from San Francisco. One of the city's most famous neighbourhoods, Russian Hill, gets its name from the graves of Russian-American Company sailors discovered there during the Gold Rush (look for a plaque near 1120 Vallejo Street). A historical marker at Bodega Bay shows where Russians set sail for their Alaskan capital, Novo-Arkhangelsk (present-day Sitka). And more than a million people visit the Russian River Valley each year to splash, hike and taste some of the US's best wines.

"The Russians called this river Slavyanka, and it's one of the main arteries they used to exploit the area," said Suki Waters, a Kashaya Pomo descendant and the owner of WaterTreks, which leads eco-tours along the Russian River. As we kayaked past harbour seals and migrating pelicans, she recounted stories from her great-great-grandmother, who was alive when the Russians sailed in.

"Fort Ross was a seasonal fishing village called Metini for thousands of years," she said. "When the Russians first came, the Elders called them the 'Undersea People', because from high on the bluff, it looked like they rose out from under the ocean."

Later that afternoon, I walked back through Fort Ross' Cyrillic signs, stockade and sloboda towards a lone bench at the edge of that bluff. Peering across the Pacific, I wondered how many days it would take to reach Russia. But as a distant chime from the chapel echoed in the air, I was reminded of something Wellman told me.

"The fact that a little part of Russia was right here in California is amazing. Why would we ever want to forget that?"

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