By the 1780s, the barbaric chaos of the promyshlenniki had given way to the relatively organized exploitation of six trading companies. Named for their founders, all of the companies were privately funded. They controlled individual territories—private hunting grounds almost—stretching across the Aleutians and eastward to Prince William Sound. The largest were the Lebedev-Lastochikin Company operating from the Kenai Peninsula and the Shelikhov-Golikov Company headquartered on Kodiak Island. As each company trapped out its own territory, it looked covetously on its neighbors’, and rivalries
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