Same Old Russians in California 200 Years Ago

Here’s the way history ought to be written. An account of some Russki shenanigans on the West Coast more than two hundred years ago.

THE RUSSIANS have landed on the California coast!

Don’t grab your musket or phone the F.B.I. This happened in March, 1812, but the men from Moscow had ideas about this country just the same as they do now.

They didn’t come ashore on the California coast to look for caviar. They came to stay.

The Russians have always been a great people for figuring everything out. They figured this one out this way. They said they had to land at Bodega Bay up north of San Francisco and had to start up housekeeping at a place they called Rossiya because they were thirsty. Later the place got to be known as Fort Ross.

It seems once before when they stopped at San Francisco the Spanish Mayor refused to give the Russians any water. He must have been a pretty smart Mayor at that, because if you give a Russian a drink, he claims he owns your well.

Suppose the Russians were thirsty — they still seem to be — so they grab a hunk of California and start a ranch. The Russians have always been a great people for appearances too. It was their idea to have this deal look right, so after they staked out their claim at Fort Ross, they turned right around and bought it.

Of course the Spaniards owned California then, and they told the Russians they didn’t want to sell any real estate.

That was a big laugh, sneered the Russians. Who did the Spaniards think they were anyway, putting out that old fascist propaganda. Everybody knew the Indians owned California (that was the official line in those days).

So Ivan Alexandrovich Kuskof, the commander of the Russians, went right out and proved it. He just made a trip into the woods and got an Indian. He got the Indian to get some of his Pomo tribesmen. Then Kuskof had the Indians admit that they owned all the California land the Russians wanted.

The Indians were “persuaded” to give Kuskof a piece of birch bark which said something like this, “Me givem all land Russia wantum, for what Russia wantum givem me.”

All the Russians were very pleased with this deal, so they were very generous. They gave the Indians three blankets, three pairs of breeches, two axes, three hoes and a bag of beads. The redskins found out right away that they got the hoes so they could work for the Russians.

After that Ivan Alexandrovich Kuskof and his boys did all right for about 30 years. Nearly everyone does all right in California.

The Czar’s stooges collected some cattle and horses. Then they collected all the Pomo and Miwok Indians they could round up and started an Indian labor camp.

It looked good until they began calling their ranch “Russian America.” Then everybody back in the States, even the Senators, started getting mad.

Senator Thomas H. Benton of Missouri organized himself and opened up around 1821 with what must have been about the first one-man, Un-American Activities Committee in history.

They think he was the fellow who wrote a piece for the St. Louis Enquirer, and he sure raised a fuss about the Russian Fifth Column out in California. He didn’t like it. Neither did anyone else in the States.

Right away the other Senators got the idea and they started to debate the whole thing, the way Senators do when the people think something ought to be done. They made a lot of speeches about the Russian Peril on the Pacific Coast and made a lot of headlines.

California itself wasn’t standing still. In April, 1822 it declared itself independent of Spain and for the next twenty-six years it considered itself a province of the Republic of Mexico.

EVERY schoolboy knows that we purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, but few Americans have heard of this Russian penetration of California, which lasted to 1841. The Czar in the early 1820’s issued a ukase that denied to vessels of other powers the right to navigation off the West Coast of North America north of the 51st parallel. Monroe’s Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, not only refused to accept this, but in addition served notice on all the Powers that they must not set up any new colonies in the Western World. And in December, 1823 Monroe sent to Congress the famous message we call the Monroe Doctrine, not only backing up Adams’ statement, but warning Europe we meant to see that the newly-created South American nations remained independent.

About this time Kuskof and the boys at Bodega and at Fort Ross weren’t doing so well. The redskins began to get the idea that “Russian America” wasn’t so good for them either and they quit working. So the crops didn’t get hoed and the cows didn’t get milked.

The big boys back in Moscow decided they’d better change bosses, so they ordered Ivan Alexandrovich Kuskof back to Russia. Then they put a fellow with an un-Russian name in charge. He was Karl Schmidt, the new Commander of Fort Ross, California.

But Schmidt wasn’t any more of a success than Kuskof. “Russian America” went right ahead and went broke, and the Czar’s boys had to write home for money. The Muscovites had to start supporting their poor relations in California. That did it!

You can’t say the Russians aren’t smart. They always have wanted everything coming in and nothing going out. Being that way, the big shots back home ordered Comrade Schmidt to sell out before he went any further in the red.

By this time it was 1841. Schmidt considered himself pretty smart at getting $30,000 for the colony from a Swiss-born adventurer named Capt. John A. Sutter. But seven years later one of Sutter’s men, James W. Marshall, discovered gold on the property, just nine days before the formal transfer of the territory from Mexico to the United States. He and Sutter succeeded in keeping the discovery secret for a few weeks, but by 1849 all the world knew about the new El Dorado, and about everybody who had even a small stake was on his way to the diggings.