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The Indian village of Sitka was almost in the same place as the present town, grouped around the Baranof hill which was called by the Russians a kekoor. On the top of the kekoor was a redoubt, and a stronger fort was near the mouth of the Indian River, or Kolosh Ryeku.
The old war-horse pricked up his ears! Baranof sailed in the fall of 1818. By spring the ship homeward-bound stopped at Batavia. There was some delay. Delay was not good for Baranof. He was ill, deadly ill, of that most deadly of all ailments, heartbreak, consciousness that he was of no more use, what the Indians call "the long sickness of too much thinking."
Then in April, lest the poverty of the Russians should become known to foreign traders, Baranof sent Shields, the English shipbuilder, off out of the way, on an otter-hunting venture. It was August of the next summer before the clumsy craft slipped from the skids into the rising tide.
From the new quarters hunters were despatched eastward under Baranof and others as far as what is now Sitka. These yearly came back with cargoes of sea-otter worth two hundred thousand dollars.
In 1807 there were over 2,000 hostile natives gathered in the harbor at the herring season and they threatened an attack on the settlement. Kuskof, the most trusted and able lieutenant of Baranof, was in charge, and it put his wisdom and watchfulness to the test to avert disaster. The strictest discipline was maintained.
Baranof would have none of him. He clapped the culprit and associates in irons, put them on Ismyloff's vessel, and despatched them for trial to Siberia. That he also seized the furs of his rivals for safe keeping, was a mere detail.
Sentries paraded the gateway; so Baranof sailed back to Kadiak. The Kolosh or Sitkan tribes had only bided their time. That sleepy summer day of June, 1802, when the slouchy Siberian convicts were off guard and Baranof two thousand miles away, the Indians fell on the fort and at one fell swoop wiped it out. Up at Kadiak honors were showering on the little governor.
When he came to America accompanied by his wife, Baranof, another trader, and two hundred men in 1784, the Russian headquarters were still at Oonalaska in the Aleutians. Only desultory expeditions had gone eastward. Foreign ships had already come among the Russian hunting-grounds of the north. These Shelikoff at once checkmated by moving Russian headquarters east to Three Saints, Kadiak.
The former building was often called the Governor's Mansion, or the Baranof Castle, was built about 1837 and was destroyed by fire in 1894. The hill commands a fine view of the harbor and the surrounding islands. The present structure is the headquarters of the Alaska division of the Agricultural Department.
While waiting for the rescue that never came, Baranof studied the language of the Aleuts, sent his men among them to learn to hunt, rode out to sea in their frail skin boats lashed abreast to keep from swamping during storm, slept at night on the beach with no covering but the overturned canoes, and, sharing every hardship, set traps with his own hands.
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