the west,
Mount Edgecumbe towered up a dome of snow. Eastward were the bare
heights of Verstovoi; and countless tiny islets gilded by the sun
dotted the harbor. Baranof would have selected the site of the present
Sitka, high, rocky and secure from attack, but the old Sitkan chief
refused to sell it, bartering for glass beads and trinkets a site some
miles north of the present town.

Half the men were set to hunting and fishing, half to chopping logs for
the new fort built in the usual fashion, with high palisades, a main
barracks a hundred feet long in the centre, three stories high, with
trap-doors connecting each story, cabins and hutches all round the
inside of the palisades. Lanterns hung at the masthead of the sloops
to recall the brigades each night; for Captain Cleveland, a Boston
trader anchored in the harbor, forewarned Baranof of the Indians'
treacherous character, more dangerous now when demoralized by the
rivalry of white traders, and in possession of the civilized man's
weapons. Free distribution of liquor by unscrupulous sea-captains did
not mend {332} matters. Cleveland reported that the savages had so
often threatened to attack his ship that he no longer permitted them on
board; concealing the small number of his crew by screens of hides
round the decks, trading only at a wicket with cannon primed and
muskets bristling through the hides above the taffrail. He warned
Baranof's hunters not to be led off inland bear hunting, for the bear
hunt might be a Sitkan Indian in decoy to trap the hunters into an
ambush. Such a decoy had almost trapped Cleveland's crew, when other
Indians were noticed in ambush. The new fort was christened Archangel.

All went well as long as Baranof was on the ground. Sea-otter were
obtained for worthless trinkets. Sentries paraded the gateway; so
Baranof sailed back to Kadiak. The Kolosh or Sitkan tribes had only
bided their time. That sleepy summer day of June, 1802, when the
slouchy Siberian convicts were off guard and Baranof two thousand miles
away, the Indians fell on the fort and at one fell swoop wiped it
out.[1] Up at Kadiak honors were showering on the little governor.
Two decorations of nobility he had been given by 1804; but his grief
over the loss of Sitka was inconsolable. "I will either die or restore
the fort!" he vowed, and with the help of a Russian man-of-war sent
round the world, he sailed that summer into Sitka Sound. The Indians
scuttled their