By Mindy Weisberger - Senior Writer a day ago
The battle was a pivotal moment in Tlingit history — and in Russia's colonization of the Americas.
The remains of a long-lost 19th-century fort in Alaska, once the site of a fierce battle between First Nations clans and Russian soldiers, has been revealed by radar scans. It was a stronghold of the Tlingit people, a Northwest Coast Indigenous group, and it was the last fort to fall before Russia colonized the land in 1804, launching six decades of occupation.
The Russians first invaded Alaska in 1799, and three years later Tlingit clans successfully repelled their would-be colonizers. Tlingit fighters then fortified their territory against future Russian attacks by building a wooden fort they named Shís'gi Noow — "the sapling fort" in the Tlingit language — at a strategic spot in what is now Sitka, Alaska, at the mouth of the peninsula's Indian River.
But two years later, Shís'gi Noow gave way to the second wave of Russian invaders; the Tlingit abandoned the fort, and the Russians destroyed it. For more than 100 years, historians and archaeologists searched for clues about where it once stood, identifying several promising locations. But the recent combination of two ground-scanning methods have finally revealed the trapezoid outline of the fort's perimeter, researchers reported in a new study.
On Oct. 1, 1804, the Russians launched a fresh attack on the fort, aided by allies from the Aleut and Alutiiq Indigenous groups, and the Tlingit promptly decimated their foes. But the Tlingit's reserve gunpowder blew up in a supply canoe; knowing that they could no longer defend the fort, the Tlingit defenders began planning their retreat, and by the time the Russians regrouped for a second assault, the stronghold was already abandoned, according to the U.S. National Parks Service (NPS).
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https://www.livescience.com/19th-century-tlingit-fort-alaska.html?utm_source=notification
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