How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America

1: Outposts of Empires

17| He came upon Bexar [San Antonio] in the evening of the fourth day and he sat the tattered mule on a low rise and looked down at the town, the quiet adobe houses, the line of green oaks and cottonwoods that marked the course of the river, the plaza filled with wagons with their osnaburg covers and the whitewashed public buildings and the Moorish churchdome rising from the trees and the garrison and the tall stone powderhouse in the distance. —Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985) In after years, you will think of it as the City of the Little Squares. After all the other memories are gone—the narrow streets twisting and turning their tortuous ways through the very heart of the old town, the missions strung out along the Conception road like faded and broken bits of brica -brac, the brave and militant show of arsenal and fort—then shall the fragrance of these open plazas long remain. . . . They lend it the Latin air that renders it different from most other cities in America. They help to make San Antonio seem far more like Europe than America. —edward Hungerford, The Personality of American Cities (1913) Sitka, Alaska, wasn’t much of a town 200 years ago—nor is it all that impressive today with its fewer that 9,000 people—but it was the nerve center for a Russian trading territory that arced 1,200 miles from the Aleutian islands to the Queen Charlotte islands of present-day British Columbia. CHAPter one Outposts of Empires | CHAPter one 18 the town had a precarious start. the Russian-American Company placed its original base on Kodiak island in 1784. As hunting parties ranged farther and farther eastward after sea otter, the company planted an outpost that it named Archangel Michael on the seaward side of what is now Baranov island. the fort infuriated the native tlingit people as an intrusion on sacred ground and a usurpation of prime fishing territory. they overran and sacked Archangel Michael in 1802 and remained a potent hostile force after Governor Alexander Baranov refounded the post as new Archangel in 1804 and moved his headquarters there in 1808. there were strategic reasons for the choice. new Archangel had a superior harborandbettertimber.itwasfarcloserthanKodiaktoAlta,California,where the Russians bought necessary grain and supplies from the Spanish Mexican rancheros. it interposed the Russian-American Company squarely between the tlingits and American sea captains who were trading firearms for furs. it helped to fend off the British, who were active along the Columbia and Fraser rivers and looking north along the coast (the islands of what is now the Alaska panhandle, including Baranov island, were the King George iii Archipelago to the British and [Czar] Alexander Archipelago to the Russians). Sitka grew slowly, starting with fewer than 200 Russians and several hundred Aleut employees in 1810. the tlingits remained formidable until the late 1830s, when smallpox reduced their numbers and the arrival of some of the Russian navy’s first steam-powered ships allowed the Russians finally to outmaneuver tlingit canoes. Until then, the military barracks, arsenal, and storehouses all crowded for safety inside a fort that perched on a small promontory , but the church, school, and civilian houses stood in constant danger outside the walls. incessant rain made the looming forest ever darker and more threatening. Wooden buildings rotted within ten years. the only local crops were watery turnips and potatoes. Pork tasted like the rancid fish that fed the local hogs. Some officials argued for a return to Kodiak, an option that remained on the table until Ferdinand Von Wrangell confirmed Sitka as the Russian capital. the population slowly climbed to 1,279 Russians in 1845 and then sagged until the United States acquired the orphaned territory of Russian America in 1867 and made the sixty-year-old Russian capital its base of official operations until 1906. Far to the southeast, past fjord-lined coast, volcanic peaks, high desert, and granite mountains, Santa Fe was completing its second century at the same time that Governor Baranov was setting up shop in new Archangel. even with a head start of two centuries, however, it was scarcely more substantial . the town got its start as a privately settled village in 1608. it was formally reconstituted as a royal colony and seat of government in 1610: La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco.1 the villa was part of the far northern frontier of sixteenth-century new...