East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia by Benson Bobrick

Author:Benson Bobrick [Bobrick, Benson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Russian Information Services, Inc.
Published: 2014-12-01T23:00:00+00:00

The mark left by the Russians on frontier America was by no means slight. Their promyshlennik vanguard had gained a foothold on Alaska’s coastal islands by the time of the Revolutionary War, and Russian pioneers had established farming communities and hunting outposts in California before any white man had ventured west of the Mississippi. When they made their unofficial grab for Hawaii, “the United States was still licking the wounds of the War of 1812.”410 Some rode with Kit Carson and John Fremont as members of the California Battalion of Mountain Volunteers in 1846, and joined the Gold Rush of 1849. One of the Indian river guides used by Lewis and Clark was a Nez Perce half-breed chief named Tetoharsky, and the most valued war medicine of one Sioux chief was a large color portrait of a Russian general who had fought in the Napoleonic Wars. Alexander Baranov, moreover, was one of the fundamental figures in the European settlement of North America, and was recognized by his contemporaries as belonging in the company of Peter Stuyvesant, Daniel Boone, and John Smith. Russians even participated (however slightly) in the pathetic final decimation of the culture of the Great Plains. As buffalo hunting became a popular sport (under the influence of railroad promoters), the Grand Duke Alexei, son of Alexander II, journeyed to Kansas to prove his shooting skill.

The only overseas colony ever ventured by the empire, Russian America was not destined to last. Geography and geopolitical realities were against it, and the course of history – perhaps even time itself. “It is rather difficult to come to terms with real time,” one traveler to the colonies wrote in 1817, “if one looks at east-west time chronology, Greenwich time and shipboard time” (reckoned from dawn, but dated from noon to noon), “time by the sun and by the stars, the astronomical day and so forth.”411 All other Europeans in the Pacific told their time from west to east, via Canton, while the Russians made their calculations from east to west, and were (it seemed) a day ahead of themselves.

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