is Drake opened it, originated in the brain of
Shelikoff, or his successors, is immaterial. It was the aggrandizement
of the Russian American Fur Company as planned by Shelikoff from 1784
to 1796, that led to the Russian government trying to exclude foreign
traders from the North Pacific twenty-five years later, and which in
turn led to the declaration of the famous Monroe Doctrine by the United
States in 1823--that the New World was no longer to be the happy
hunting-ground of Old World nations bent on conquest and colonization.

Like many who dream greatly, Shelikoff did not live to see his plans
carried out. He died in Irkutsk in 1795; but in St. Petersburg, when
pressing upon {306} the government the necessity of uniting all the
independent traders in one all-powerful company to be given exclusive
monopoly on the west coast of America, he had met and allied himself
with a young courtier, Nikolai Rezanoff.[3] When Shelikoff died,
Rezanoff it was who obtained from the Czar in 1799 a charter for the
Russian American Fur Company, giving it exclusive monopoly for hunting,
trading, and exploring north of 55 degrees in the Pacific. Other
companies were compelled either to withdraw or join. Royalty took
shares in the venture. Shareholders of St. Petersburg were to direct
affairs, and Baranof, the governor, resident in America, to have power
of life and death, despotic as a czar. By 1800 the capital of Russian
America had been moved down to the modern Sitka, called Archangel
Michael in the trust of the Lord's anointed protecting these plunderers
of the sea. Shelikoff's dreams were coming true. Russia was
checkmating the advances of England and the United States and New
Spain. Schemes were in the air with Baranof for the impressment of
Siberian exiles as peasant farmers among the icebergs of Prince William
Sound, for the remission of one-tenth tribute in furs from the Aleuts
on condition of free service as hunters with the company, and for the
employment of Astor's ships as purveyors of provisions to Sitka, when
there fell a bolt {307} from the blue that well-nigh wiped Russian
possession from the face of America.

It was a sleepy summer afternoon toward the end of June in 1802.
Baranof had left a guard of twenty or thirty Russians at Sitka and,
confident that all was well, had gone north to Kadiak. Aleut Indians,
impressed as hunters, were about the fort, for the fiery Kolosh or
Sitkans of this region would not