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Updated: May 10, 2025
Louis and New York companies, so a master mind arose among the Russians, grasping the situation, and ready to cope with its difficulties. This was Gregory Ivanovich Shelikoff, a fur trader of Siberia, accompanied to America and seconded by his wife, Natalie, who succeeded in carrying out many of his plans after his death. Shelikoff owned shares in two of the principal Russian companies.
On leaving Cook Inlet, we kept a southerly course through the gloomy Barren Islands which mark the eastern boundary of the much-dreaded Shelikoff Straits, and early one morning passed Afognak, and made Wood Island landing, where we were most hospitably received by the North American Fur Company's people. Wood Island, about 1-1/2 miles from Kadiak, is small and well covered with spruce.
Like many who dream greatly, Shelikoff did not live to see his plans carried out. He died in Irkutsk in 1795; but in St. Petersburg, when pressing upon the government the necessity of uniting all the independent traders in one all-powerful company to be given exclusive monopoly on the west coast of America, he had met and allied himself with a young courtier, Nikolai Rezanoff.
In Kadiak Village, we met a Captain Nelson, the first man down from the north that spring, who had sledded from Nome to Katmai on Shelikoff Straits in two months. At Katmai he was held up several days, his men refusing to cross the straits until the local weather prophet, or astronom, as he is called, gave his consent.
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