History of the Russian Settlement at Fort Ross, California
For the small group of California natives, that cool, overcast day in March 1812 was a forerunner of massive change. They stood there in astonishment as a large sailing ship came to anchor in the little cove beneath their quiet bluff top settlement. For the next few days, they continued to watch as some twenty-five Russians and eighty Alaskans came ashore, set up a temporary camp, and began building houses and a sturdy wooden stockade - the colony and fortification of Ross.
The Kashaya people assembled to watch the spectacle had no way of knowing that their hunting and gathering lifestyle would be changed forever. These Russians had come to hunt sea otter, to grow wheat and other crops for the Russian settlements in Alaska, and to trade with Spanish California.
In addition, though they were careful not to say so, they came with an eye toward continuing the saga of Russian eastward expansion, a process that had begun some 250 years earlier, in the time of Ivan the Terrible, Russia's first Tsar.
http://www.parks.sonoma.net/rosshist.html
