Russian settlements reached as far south as San Francisco, where, in 1806, a little over eighty years after Peter’s death, a Russian fur-trading center was established. For more than a century, Alaska—known then as Russian America—was controlled by the state-owned Russian-American Company. In 1867, the vast area which became America’s forty-ninth state was sold by Tsar Alexander II for $7,000,000. Today, the only point on the globe where the frontiers of the United States and the Soviet Union actually meet is across the fifty-three miles of the Bering Strait.
