The Forgotten Colony: America’s Lost Russian Outpost
Alaska once hosted a thriving 19th-century Russian colony, complete with Orthodox churches and fur traders, decades before becoming part of the United States.
In the early nineteenth century, long before the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, the remote and striking landscape was home to an outpost that few Americans today realize ever existed. This was not an American or British settlement, but rather a Russian colony, where Orthodox priests and Siberian fur traders mingled with the indigenous Aleut and Tlingit peoples. The center of Russian America, as it was called, lay in the port town of Novo-Arkhangelsk, known today as Sitka.
The Russian-American Company, chartered in 1799 by Tsar Paul I, was granted a monopoly over North American fur trading. The quest for valuable sea otter pelts drove ambitious expeditions to the northern Pacific, and what began as modest trading posts soon grew into a network of Russian settlements stretching from modern-day Alaska down the California coast. The most significant by far was in Sitka, established in 1804 after a bloody battle with the Tlingit. By the 1820s, large wooden buildings, palisades, and onion-domed churches dominated the skyline, and Russian Orthodox missionaries began converting local populations, leaving marks still seen today in some Alaskan communities.
The Russians’ presence was not limited to Alaska, either. For a brief period in the early 1800s, they established Fort Ross in northern California, intended to supply their northern colonies with crops and goods that could not be produced in Alaska’s cold climate. There, Russians, Native Alaskans, and Californian Miwok and Kashaya Pomo people lived and worked together in an early example of multicultural communities on the West Coast.
Daily life in Sitka reflected a unique blend of Russian customs and indigenous traditions. Russian-style bathhouses, Orthodox processions, and Cyrillic inscriptions became commonplace alongside the subsistence practices of the Alaskan natives. The population included Russians, Aleuts, Creoles (descendants of Russian settlers and Alaska Natives), and even a handful of people from Finland, Poland, and other parts of the Russian Empire.
Despite their spread and influence, the Russian colonies struggled with isolation, harsh weather, and supply shortages. Sea otter populations declined due to overhunting, making the trade less profitable. By the mid-19th century, maintaining the Alaskan outpost became more of a liability than an asset for the Russian Empire, which feared losing it to British expansion from Canada. In 1867, the Russians sold Alaska to the United States for $7.2 million, ending their North American chapter.
Yet, the Russian influence remains in unexpected places. Some native Alaskan families still bear Russian surnames. Memorial Orthodox churches still stand, their intricate icons and architecture telling of a time when Russia’s reach extended across the Bering Sea. Notably, the All Saints of North America Orthodox Church in Anchorage and Saint Michael’s Cathedral in Sitka draw heritage tourists each year. Russian place names dot the Alaskan map, including Baranof Island, Kodiak, and the Aleutian Islands’ Attu, Kiska, and Unalaska.
While the United States’ acquisition of Alaska is often remembered as the moment the region entered the American story, a little-known but remarkable chapter of Russian America preceded it. Today, less than one in ten Americans are aware that for over half a century, the westernmost outpost of the Russian Empire sat within what is now the United States—a forgotten colony left behind, but not entirely erased, by the tides of history.
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