David W. Rickman
Exhibits Coordinator
Division of Parks and Recreation/C.A.R.S.
152 South State Street
Dover, DE 19901
Telephone: 302-739-9187
Cell: 302-388-5605
Fax:: 302-739-6967
E-mail: david.rickman@state.de.us
 
Text and Illustrations by David Rickman - 1986
Promyshlenniki
For most of us the story of the Fur Trade era begins with Lewis and Clark and follows the exploits of buckskin-clad frontiersmen with their Hawkins on their arms moving ever on the to Pacific. But the true excitement of studying this history of that time is the discovery that there were many frontiers and many kinds of frontiersmen. For example. few realize that much of what later became the United States was explored and settled by Russian fur hunters, and that in clothing and equipment they cut a figure ever bit as distinctive as the mountain men's .
The Russian fur hunter was called a promyshlennik or promyshlenniki in the plural. When he emerged upon the Alaskan Frontier in 1741, he had behind him a heritage of two centuries of pioneers; Cossacks and freemen who had fought their ways similar to our West, except that is was more than twice as wide. In a frozen landscape of forest and tundra they faced not Indians, but Mongols and fierce tribes of reindeer riding nomads. Yet the quest for rich fur and the lure of seeing unknown lands led them on; it led them very far indeed.
When the loose bands of free booting hunters were organized in 1799 into the ?Russian American Company, the promyshlennik had already begun to carve out and empire in North America. In 1804 they secured their claim to southern Alaska by subduing the head-hunting Tlingit's of Sitka. From there they sent parties north, into the Yukon and south, in the forbidden waters of Spanish California. In search of valuable sea otter and seal pelts, the Russians and their Aleut allies traveled in small ships and leather kayaks as far as San Diego and the Channel Islands. After t establishing a stronghold in 1812 at Fort Ross, north of San Francisco, the Russians turned inland, traveling northwest to Mount Shasta and the Sierra Nevada. In stray reports leaned from odd sources,, the adventure of individual promyshlennik hints at a lost history of epic scale. We read of Russian and Aleuts dancing on the beaches of Kauai with Hawaiian warriors, captured by the whale- hunting Makah on the coast of Washington, or leading an uprising of mission Indians at Santa Barbara and showing them how to use guns to fight the Spanish.

In the 1820's there was a report of a Russian working with a French-Canadian party of trappers in the Colorado Rockies. Other Russians rode with Kit Carson and John Fremont as members of the California Battalion of Mounted Volunteers in 1846 and were among the first of the gold-hunters of '49.

There  were never very many of these men in America. From 1799 to 1867, (when Alaska was sold to the United states), the average number of Russians in the colonies varied, but usually averaged 500 men. As a result, most of their lives here were spent working and living with the Native Americans who made up the bulk of the Russian American Company's manpower. Typically, a few Russians commanded fleets of as many as a thousand Aleut or Kodiak hunters traveling in fragile two or three man baidarkas (kayaks). These huge flotillas would stay away for months at a time, crossing broad expanses of ocean,  enduring storms at sea, cold and privation as well as the constant threat of native attack; all this for the hides of otters and seals. Smaller parties traveled by land, on foot in Alaska and by horseback in California, to hunt and explore.

It was among the native people that most of the promyshlenniki found their wives. Russian women, of the sort who could endure the life of a hunter's wife; were hard to attract to the colonies. In those days America was only a little closer to Russia than the moon. At Fort Ross in 1833, out of the forty five Russian colonists there, only four were women. Ten to one was a typical ratio of Russian men to women in the colonies. Most of the men who went to America were either unmarried or had left their wives so many thousands of miles behind them that they simply took another while serving the time of their contract with the company. The Company encouraged these unions with the hope that it would accustom the native peoples to European civilization more quickly. This was an idea borrowed from the French colonial experiment. Not surprisingly then, it was a French word Creole, that was used for the children of these marriages to naive women of Alaska and California. As years passed, however, the trend was for the Russians to marry Creole women, whom they found more attractive while Creole and native men married native women.

In the New World colonies of the Russian Empire a blending of Russian, Alaskan, and Siberian cultures took place that was reflected in the clothing worn from the late 18th century until after the middle of the 19th. Where the management of the company usually wore civilian costume typical of Europe, the hunters and craftsmen, along with their families, mixed the styles. So far no drawings have been discovered that recorded the promyshlenniki in the way that Alfred Jacob Miller has preserved the mountain man for us. But descriptions, inventories and other sources remain which help us to reconstruct the promyslennki's appearance.

PLEASE CHECK BACK AS MORE WILL COME IN THE NEXT FEW WEEKS
 

American Rendezvous Magazine, April 1986 and the publisher, Richard D. Teater.

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Travel by water was done in baidarkas or kayaks of wood and leather, as well as larger boats. Baidarkas were made with up to three hatches and important Russians would ride in the center of the three-hatch boats while the Aleuts paddled.