True Location of Famed Fort Attacked by Russians Is Found

Tlingits used wood structure to repel Russians on Alaska's Baranof Island
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 31, 2021 2:33 PM CST
An Impenetrable Fort Stood 200 Years Ago. Now It's Found
This 19th-century drawing by Yuri Lisyansky, the captain of the Russian warship Neva, shows the Sh?s'gi Noow fort on Baranof Island.   (National Park Service)

Archaeologists have found the site of a 200-year-old wooden fort where native Alaskans battled colonization and cannonballs. The fort helped the Tlingit people hold back Russian invaders for six days in 1804 before they were forced to leave the land their ancestors had occupied for 11,000 years, per NBC News. Two years earlier, the Kiks.ádi clan had attacked a Russian outpost, killing nearly all of the Russian and indigenous Aleut inhabitants, amid Russia's push to expand the fur trade into Baranof Island. Believing retaliation would come, the Tlingit set to work on the fort, some 300 feet long by 165 feet wide, which proved crucial when Russians returned with cannonballs in the fall of 1804, per Smithsonian. With guns and cannons of their own, the Tlingit held off an initial assault but were forced north on a survival march as their supply of gunpowder diminished.

The Russians razed the fort in their wake. Wood and cannonballs were previously found in Sitka National Historical Park, but the precise location of the fort was unknown until a 2019 radar survey, described Monday in Antiquity. Thomas Urban, a research scientist at Cornell, and Brinnen Carter of the National Park Service used ground-penetrating radar to scan huge areas, coming upon the buried remains of a fort in the shape of a trapezoid—which matched drawings the Russians had made. Shís'gi Noow, the indigenous name for the fort, translates to "sapling fort," and experts believe flexible saplings were used in construction for the sole purpose of absorbing cannonball blows, per Smithsonian. It was also "strategically situated behind tidal flats and out of range of the Russian naval guns," per NBC. (More discoveries stories.)

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