Two miles north of the Farm on the English Grade Road (a railroad 100 years ago), remnants of a square, 3’ high log house stood until the 1920s. (The bottom logs, set on wet ground, were eaten away by rot; in the West, miner and trapper cabins became shorter each succeeding year.) Early settlers called it the “Russian Trapper Cabin,” then thought to be 60 years old. Clearly the Russians could have trapped, lived, and traded all the way south of their capital in Sitka to San Francisco/Fort Ross; it is not impossible that this cabin could have existed in 1820, but that’s not the crowdsource story. This Russian trapper was said to be part of the population of Alaskans who were ethnically cleansed after the U.S.
purchase of Sitka, i.e., Seward’s Folly of 1867. (Turned over by a farmer’s plow in 1925, his skull contained a single bullet hole; cabin photo from Sitka’s Library.) Some Russians moved to the Fort Ross area while others moved to Oregon (to seed the ground for an Orthodox Church in Woodburn). Russians could live in the “New Land,” but not in Alaska. It is ironic that the site of this trapper cabin became part of this writer’s grandparents’ 40-acre farm, themselves having been ethnically cleansed from the northern 2 “new” counties of Germany, Schleswig-Holstein. If you read the URLs below, you will find 2 eras: “post 1841* where Russian involvement in Cascadia all but ceased, and an earlier explorer history reporting the effect of cultures colliding, 1741 – 1841; e.g.,
1799 – Yakutat, most died within 24 hours
1806 – Respiratory epidemic on Atka, no one left to bury the dead
1819 – Epidemic on Kodiak, few escaped death
Perhaps forgiving public officials’ mindsets in March 2020; plagues can be 100% fatal.
Those who turned down the Russian-America Company’s offer to relocate and stayed in California included: Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Belarusians, Finns, Baltic Germans, Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Georgians, Circassians, Tatars, Aleuts, Kashaya, and Creoles. There were perhaps 10 pioneers (all men) in Snohomish and Skagit Counties in 1841, but Sonoma County was already a melding pot of immigrant cultures, not counting the Native American, Spanish, and Mexican populations. Freedom appears to flourish in lands that allow cultural diversity.
https://sites.kpc.alaska.edu/jhaighalaskahistory/timeline/
http://www.plc215.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Russian-Hunters.pdf
https://nhlrc.ucla.edu/nhlrc/article/166943
https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/polish-russian/russian-beginnings/
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/56081#page/7/mode/1up
https://sites.google.com/a/lclark.edu/rsco/immigrant-communities/old-believers
https://www.fortross.org/history/russian-american-company
History Farm Prose & Primary Level Question
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