Map of Santa Clara County ranchos, n.d.; courtesy the Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley

Russians, American Settlers and Fur Trappers

Russians also established a permanent settlement in California. In 1812 they built the Fort Ross (probably short for Rossiya, or Russia) settlement near Bodega Bay, a few dozen miles north of San Francisco Bay. The purpose of the settlement was to support the Russian sea otter pelt industry in Alaska. The pelts of sea otters were highly prized, and the Russians sold them at home and in other markets in Asia and Europe for enormous profit. Fort Ross lasted as a modest but thriving frontier outpost until the sea otter population from San Francisco to Alaska was depleted, and trading there was no longer profitable. Fort Ross was sold to John Sutter in 1841, and very little evidence remains of the Russians’ 30 years in California.

By the 1820s explorers and fur trappers had also started traveling to California from their homes in the established territories of the United States. Few of the early American fur trappers and explorers settled permanently in California. The trails they blazed and the maps they drew, however, set the routes that the U.S. military and civilian wagon trains would follow in later years.