FORT ROSS

FORT ROSS (1812–1841). Situated ninety miles north of San Francisco Bay on the Sonoma Coast and now a National Park, the fort was established along with Port Rumyantsev (Bodega Bay) and a hunting camp on the Farallon Islands off the Golden Gate in order to extend Russian land (especially, agriculture) and fur trade claims to its maximum southern limit in Alta California. The name itself is most probably an adaptation of “Rus’,” the old name for “Russian” in that language. The colony, made up primarily of Native Americans, was the southernmost extension of Russian America from Alaska (qq.v.). The fort was built by Ivan Kuskov, deputy to Alexander Baranov, governor of the Alaskan Russian-American Company, after which it was inspected and relations established by Lt. G. Moraga representing the Spanish governor, J. J. Arrillaga.

Impetus for trade contact and the Alta California venture may be taken back to the visit of Count Nikolai Rezanov to Lt. L. Arguello in 1806. Extensive trade took place between the Russians and the Hispanics in San Francisco, Mission San Rafael, and Mission Sonoma, largely on an unofficial basis; but one historian, D. S. Pritchard, aptly describes the Russian trade relationship with the Hispanics as that of “most favored nation status” (“Joint Tenants of the Frontier: Russian-Hispanic Relations in Alta California,” Russian America: The Forgotten Frontier, pp. 81–94). By 1832 the secularization of the Spanish Missions and Yankee competition caused deprivation at Fort Ross. It was sold by the Russians to Joh n Sutter, later of Gold Rush fame, in 1841 after the fur supply was largely exhausted and the Russians were unsuccessful at establishing agricultural operations extensive enough to support themselves or their Alaska holdings. Fort Ross was built with a chapel that was visited by Fr. Innocent Veniaminov (q.v.), and is still used for religious services by the Russian Orthodox today on Memorial Day and the Fourth of July.