Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land

by Walter R. Borneman

In the spring of 1806, Rezanov sailed south for California. Shelikhov’s daughter was now dead, leaving him a widower, but he had certainly learned the lesson of marrying well. Seeking to extend Russia’s reach well down the Pacific coast, Rezanov called at San Francisco and promptly wooed the daughter of the commandant of the Spanish presidio there. By all accounts, she was striking, a lovely senorita half Rezanov’s age. Rezanov traded furs for supplies and then returned with them to Novo-Arkhangel’sk. Then he sailed west across the Pacific for Okhotsk, determined to ask the czar’s permission to marry a Catholic and to make plans for a broader colonial empire. While en route to St. Petersburg, he fell from his horse somewhere in Siberia and died from the resulting complications. With him died his plans for furthering Russia’s colonial empire, but his admonishment that the nation that controls Alaska is the one that controls the Pacific would reverberate in the years ahead.