[Illustration: Sitka from the Sea.]
Later, in 1812, when the Russian coasters were refused watering
privileges at San Francisco, the Russian American Company bought land
near Bodega, and settled their famous Ross, or California colony, with
cannon, barracks, arsenal, church, workshops, and sometimes a
population of eight hundred Kadiak Indians. Here provisions were
gathered for Sitka, and hunters despatched for sea-otter of the south.
The massacres on the Yukon and the clashes with the Hudson's Bay
traders are a story by themselves. The other doings of these "Sea
Voyagers" became matters of international history when they tried to
exclude American and British traders from the Pacific. The fur hunters
in the main were only carrying out the far-reaching plans of Shelikoff,
who originated the charter for the company; but even Shelikoff could
hardly foresee that the country which the Russian government was
willing to sell to the United States in 1867 for seven million dollars,
would produce more than twice that during a single year in gold.
To-day all that remains to Russia of these sea voyagers' plundering are
two small islands, Copper and Bering in Bering Sea.
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