Mexico’s Forgotten Frontier (La Jornada, Mexico)

“Throughout this tragic story, history mercilessly marches on. New Spain fades in a war that gives rise to Mexico. The Russians extract everything they can from California before abandoning it in 1840. From 1821, Upper California becomes a province of the new country of Mexico, and a Mexican rancher of Swiss ancestry named John Sutter acquired the once-Russian lands. To the east galloped the still far off United States.”

By Hermann Bellinghausen

Translated By Douglas Myles Rasmussen

July 9, 2012

Mexico – La Jornada – Original Article (Spanish)

As strange as it sounds, there was a time when at the ends of the world, Mexico shared a border with Russia, at a place where frontiers were still fuzzy. In 1806, along the coast of Upper California, New Spain reached as far north as San Francisco and the missions at San Rafael and Sonoma. In that year, envoys from the famously mad Czar Alexander I landed in the bay, looking to establish the limits of Russian America, starting in Alaska.

In 1812, the Russians would erect a strategic outpost near the Sebastian River delta (today’s Russian River) that flows through the bountiful lands of Sonoma toward the Pacific Ocean: Fort Ross (a term of endearment evoking the Motherland). They established commercial and even warm relations with the Spanish. Between them, in terra incognita, lived the Pomo people (also known in their native language as the Kasaya), before they were enslaved by the Spanish, exploited by the Russians and abandoned by the Mexicans. In 1848, the U.S. would put them on a reservation and snatch everything and everyone thanks to the infamous Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo [ending the Mexican-American War in 1848].

By the time the Spanish and Russian Empires met at the dawn of the 19th century, the first didn’t know it was about to disappear and the latter calculated, wrongly, that it could take over California. One can imagine in the Sonoma hills, a melancholic sentry from New Spain waiting for the barbarians who never came. But they did come, by sea, when ships under the command of Baron (or Count) Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov, sent by the Russian-American Company, arrived under order of the Czar. In San Francisco’s Presidio, in Yerbabuena, the explorer presented his credentials to Spain colonial Governor José Darío Argüello, and fell madly in love with the governor’s beautiful daughter, Concepción. She was 15 years old, he was 41.

This is how the empires came to know one another. If the two monarchs were mad, why shouldn’t their representatives be, too? Rezanov returned to Moscow to ask the Czar for permission to marry Conchita Argüello. Before parting, the couple swore their eternal love. He died in Siberia under bad circumstances in 1807 [He died of fever and exhaustion]. When Conchita found out, she refused to believe it and waited 35 years for her beloved’s return. When she was finally convinced that Nicholas would not return, she became a nun in Monterey and adopted the name Sister Dominica, which was the name under which she was buried years later - still a virgin.

The story of their love gave rise to an enormously popular rock opera in Russia: Juno and Avos. Opening in Moscow in 1978, it ran for 25 years, surviving Perestroika, and it is still frequently performed. Composed by Aleksei Rybnikov, with a libretto by Andrei Voznesenski (an iconoclastic poet from the Soviet era), the California drama continues to captivate Russian audiences. The title alludes to two Russian-American Company ships. Fortunately overlooked by Brezhnev era censorship, the opera injected some pop modernity, a little bit of color, and a lot of Romeo and Juliet into the Soviet nation, and it continues to be a big hit. Decades after the end of communism, it is being performed in other parts of the world and is acquiring the patina of a classic.

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Throughout this tragic story, history mercilessly marches on. New Spain fades in a war that gives rise to Mexico. The Russians extract everything they can from California before abandoning it in 1840. From 1821, Upper California becomes a province of the new country of Mexico, and a Mexican rancher of Swiss ancestry named John Sutter acquired the once-Russian lands. To the east galloped the still far off United States.

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In 1811, when Mexico did not yet know it was Mexico and the United States did not know how far its bloody conquest of the west would lead, Ivan A. Kuskov, senior assistant to the chief administrator of the Russian-American Company, landed on the coast. The following year, he founded Fort Ross on a hill at the southernmost point of a bay that the Spanish named Bodega and the Russians called Rumantisiev. For the next three decades, the company would trade heavily with Mexicans in San Francisco and Sacramento to supply agricultural products to its colonies in North America.

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The Czarist company imposed itself on the Indians (whom the ill-fated and romantic Rezanov had dreamed of liberating from the Spanish yoke, but whose successors pressed into service at a rate of $8 per year). The colonists added to this work force a party of Aleuts who were brought from the Aleutian Islands to decimate the otters and furry creatures that preceded the gold rush, known as the fur rush, which caused the extinction of otters from their Russian River paradise. There are countless illustrations showing piles of pelts loaded and bound for Moscow. The Kasaya, who also lived along the river - called Sebastian since 1606 - would suffer the same fate as the otters.