Fort Ross. I promise you will not be tested for our stopping here. It’s just that we do not want our readers to ever suffer the jeopardy of confidently answering, “Alex, what is John Wayne, directed by John Ford,” or any other piece of American history you learned at the movies.

Required reading for our grandchildren traveling with us on a motorhome vacation, learning by living an adventure trail through Indian Territory is, Lies My Teacher Told Me.

Perhaps the distraction of traveling full-time along the most interesting roads in our country, is realizing that people passed this way before, following a natural way through, or around topographical features, and what they found is not necessarily documented in the rote-version textbooks of grade school Social Studies days.

I had visited the replica Fort Ross in the mid 60’s with my children, and their classmates on a field trip from an amazing one building school district in a valley inhabited by a lot of self employed creatives which attracted a lot of volunteerism. Of course I chaperoned. I was also a cub scout den mother so to defend our reputation as real men my bears and wolves needed to take a good look at the canon in the bastions.

This time around I also was treated to another harmonious lecture by a teacher on how the Californio Mexicans (not the other ones) traded with the Russian America Fur Company (read: invaders). As an eavesdropper I especially had to hold my tongue when it came to explaining how local native women were attracted to the prowess of Aleut sea otter hunters that resulted in a lot of intermarriage.

The fort had been built high on a headland hard to reach by Californians dragging wheeled caisson. Defensive cannon were aimed to fire down on ships that would not been capable of hurling a ball up. If a brigade from England’s competing Hudson Bay Company had been foolish enough to land on the beach, they would have had to go through an outside the walls defense of Aleuts, before fighting the Imperial Russian “gentlemen” of the stockade.

In the span of years between visits I had become an Alaskan. I have talked with many Aleuts about their oral legend of the missing ones. Their side of the story is that whole villages were rounded up by the Russians. The men were forced into slaughtering sea lions for if they didn’t, they would never see their wives and children ever again.

Which shamelessly, is exactly what happened. These “serfs” transported far from their Alaskan homes, being deadly killers of California otters, soon ran the idea of a permanent outpost supported solely by collecting furs, as not economic when there were no more otters. Another factor working against the hapless husbands and fathers was that it was easier to sail with the Japanese Current from the Aleutians, than to return. And what was the point of shipping a cargo of valuable furs to Alaska, when the market was an easier to reach Asia?

One long lasting legacy is all the Russian surnames in Alaska that came out of the Aleut females being held in slavery until they too were freed by abandonment. 

One interesting footnote from a people so punished for simply living in an exposed environment is that in WWII Japanese invaders sent captured Aleuts to concentration camps in Japan, while at the same time these very patriotic American Americans were being interned for appearing to be Japanese. 

Two more undocumented trivia bits. Apparently a few Aleuts kayaked over 5,000 miles home to bring the news of what had happened to the enslaved hunters.

I also would like to track down the follow-the-money Aleut oral history that as Russia had already abandoned Aleyaska, the payment for Seward’s Folly really was a clandestine reimbursement for the Russian Imperial fleet anchoring in New York Harbor during the Civil War to prevent the British from defying a US blockade of cotton bales from the South, which had lead to starving wage slave mill workers rioting in England. Where was Bob Woodward when he was really needed?