ABSTRACT
During the first half of the nineteenth century, Russian ships plied California waters in conjunction with greater voyages of discovery, and Fort Ross and Port Rumiantsev became part of a Russian American outpost for sea-mammal hunting, trading, and agricultural activities. At the time, visitors such as Georg von Langsdorff, Dmitrii Zavalishin, Otto von Kotzebue, Vasilii Golovnin, Kiril Khlebnikov, Ferdinand von Wrangell, Ivan Kuprianov, and perhaps a host of others were scarcely aware of the importance of their collecting activities. Il’ia Voznesenskii seems to have been the sole exception to the rule; he deserves the honor of being recognized today as having been California’s first systematic ethnographic collector. The efforts of these men—which ranged from sporadic and haphazard to deliberately comprehensive—resulted in the assemblage of not just a rich and varied assortment of tools, utensils, costumes, ornaments, and baskets, but in fact the accumulation of the largest such collection of nineteenth-century California materials in the world, and one which documents a segment of the life of the state’s native peoples before American intrusion induced rapid and catastrophic changes.
