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 barricade erected on the site of the present Sitka.
Here {333} the fort was rebuilt and renamed New Archangel--a fort
worthy in its palmy days of Baranof's most daring ambitions.
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