California   We hadn’t been to California for a while, and we always particularly enjoy trips to San Francisco, so we took advantage of the Amtrak Air-Rail plan, flying one way and taking the train back, all for a round-trip fare. We flew to San Francisco, drove to Los Angeles, and I am at the moment writing on my laptop seated in our sleeper on the Southwest Chief to Chicago, to change to the Lakeshore Limited back to New York. It occurs to me writing here that I’d like to expand these letters and add a number of stories on travel and language that I have in mind, and then review Bev's 18 travel diaries amassed over four decades of travel for additional anecdotes that I've forgotten.

Fort Ross   One of the main reasons we came to California this time involves Russia. I had been wanting to go to Fort Ross for at least twenty years and never did before. There was too much to do when visiting San Francisco to run some 100 miles up the Sonoma coast to see what is now a California State Historical Park. As it was, the coast road was beautiful, but winding, and it made a full day's round trip.

So what is Fort Ross? It has to do with a phrase you rarely see in most standard history books, Russian North America. The most you read about are phrases such as "Seward's Folly" as to how Alaska became American after being settled by the Russians, and people hardly think about anything beyond that.

But it's fun to think that if history had gone slightly differently, two friends travelling in Alaska this summer when we were in California, could have been visiting the same country, Russia.

These comments will invove fact and some historic speculation. Historic speculation (What would have happened if the axis had won the war?) can be a futile, if not foolish exercise. What I'll mention is what did happen, and what appeared was going to happen, but didn't.

But first, geographic panhandles often have a story behind them. For instance, Florida has a panhandle because it's a remnant of when Florida had an entire land connection through to Mexico around the Gulf.

So my question is: Why does Alaska have a panhandle going down what otherwise would be the Canadian west coast?

Russia is one country that, in regard to expansion, "did well", and I'm not speaking about the 20th Century, but from medieval times through the 1700's and 1800's. Just considering Russia-in-Europe, west of the Urals, it's clearly the largest European country in area. And no other country comes near it in successful expansion into Eurasia. When you consider that Russian Siberia takes in all of Northern Eurasia it's amazing.

While sometimes water or land separations can be problems, apparently the Bering Strait in the beginning wasn't. The Russian explorers and settlers just continued across and founded Russian North America. Russia was now located on three continents.

The bulk of the land area of Alaska is, of course, the interior, although in the beginning, most of the settlements must have been on the coast. And then there's that panhandle.

The Alaska panhandle, as you see it on the map today, is an incompleted work-in- progress. It is a finger pointing at California and everything in between. One can't comment about interior areas, just coastal ones, but as it is, the Alaska panhandle prevents the Yukon and upper British Columbia from having a coastline. If the panhandle had been extended, the rest of BC, plus Washington, Oregon, and northern California would have lost their coastlines as well. Russia would have had a land border with Spain, and after Mexican independence, with Mexico.

If you add to the speculation that Russia would have been successful in coming down the coast, a second speculation that the US hadn't gotten upper California from Mexico, then not only wouldn't Canada have had a Pacific coast, neither would the US.

But putting speculation aside of what might have been, what basis is there to say that they were planning on coming? Well, Fort Ross, for one thing.

Much is a restoration, but it's beautifully located on the coast. The only original building is the Rotchev house (Photo by Halibut Thyme). The atmosphere is "North Woodsy". The wall around it and all the buildings are built of solid redwood, which means they really meant to stay. There are living quarters and the restored Holy Trinity Saint Nicholas Chapel (Photo by Introvert), the first in North America outside Alaska. This is the chapel interior (Photo by Susan Kelleher). The blockhouses (Photo by Vlad Butsky) had such formidable cannon that they never needed to be used. (Note also the well, and the magnificent view of the Pacific.) The Spanish knew better than to attack. It was the hub of Russian settlements in California from 1812 to 1842. But then two things turned against it fatally, economics and politics. It never made money through its hunting and fishing. They show a record of how many rubles they lost per year. And finally the Tsar felt that it was, well, just too far away. Fort Ross was sold and abandoned, and not too many years later, Alaska was sold to the US. The Russian settlers felt totally betrayed. And that water separation across the Bering Strait turned out after all to be the fatal cutoff line. Russian North America existed no more.

An odd footnote is that the Russians sold the fort to John Sutter of Gold Rush fame. It changed hands over the years, and is now a California State Historic Park, a National Historic Landmark, and is on the National Register of Historic Places.

I realized at the fort the extent that world history doesn't pay attention to Russian exploration. We always hear about the British, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian explorers, and of course their activity was confined to the Atlantic. In the 1700's and 1800's, the Russians, in their Duke of Wellington plumed hats and all, regularly sailed from the Baltic, around most of Europe, all of Africa and Asia, to explore and then visit the Asian coast of their country, and of course Russian North America. They had even established that route as a training route for young cadets. In addition to other places, they explored Antarctica (in sailing ships!).

I had always wondered why Fort Ross had such an English-sounding name. It was named Krepost' Rossiya (Fortress Russia), and the Russians themselves used the short form for Rossiya, Ross. That also explains why there's a Ross Sea off Antarctica.

Parenthetically, partially because I'm crossing the US by train as I write, but also because I think the idea fascinating, on more than one occasion, and once quite recently, I read about proposals to dig a rail tunnel under the Bering Strait. US and Canadian rail lines would have to be extended to it, as well as extending Russia's Trans-Siberian routes. It'll probably never happen, but freight, and possibly passengers as well, could connect from the east coast of North America to Britain. Think of going from New York westward to London by train. The scenic route, of course.

Finally, place names. The Russians named a number of towns and bays near Fort Ross after Russian generals and such. Virtually none of these Russian names have survived. However, the river known as the Russian River, known as a region of fine California wines, still flows through the area. And down in San Francisco, of course, just north of Nob Hill, is Russian Hill.

They had certainly been on their way.