The first red scare occurred not in the 1950s but two
centuries earlier. In the midst of the
Seven Years’ War, Spain faced a new and unexpected threat from the Pacific
Northwest: The Russians. “The Muscovites
in California?” asked one Franciscan, with mock incredulity. “Yes. The very same.”
The Russian menace, he argued, was no
joke.
The scare originated in news of Russian expansion into
Alaska. Russian fur trappers, known as
promyshlenniki, had recently crossed the Bering Strait in search of sea otter
pelts and were now somewhere in America – but where exactly? Spain’s knowledge of the Pacific Northwest
was so poor that no one could be sure exactly how close the Russians were to
the heart of New Spain and its capital, Mexico City.
The alarm of Spanish officials was made worse by their
stubborn belief that a river as large as the Mississippi must empty into the
Pacific somewhere along the California coast.
Whichever European power possessed it would be able to seize control of
the American West and, eventually, of northern New Spain. In 1760, Mikhail Lomonosov, described by one
scholar as a Russian da Vinci who could do everything but paint, captured the spirit
of the times:
Russian Columbuses, scorning sullen Fate,
Through the ice will open a new way to the East,
And our power will reach as far as America.
A few years later, Pedro Calderón y Henríquez, a high-ranking
judge who had served for many years in the Philippines, illustrated the Russian
menace on a map, which he forwarded to one of the king’s most powerful
ministers. This marvelous product of geographic
ignorance and imperial anxiety now sits in the collections of the California
Historical Society.
Even by the standards of the time, the map was wildly
inaccurate and uninformed. “Tartary of the Muscovites,” or Kamchatka, hangs
menacingly over the Pacific Ocean and appears as large as the entire North American
coast from the tip of Baja California up to the Russian discoveries. The details are even more bizarre. Calderón plotted the Aleutians in a straight
line between Kamchatka and Mendocino, California. He labeled the easternmost island “Tukoskoi”
(confusing it with Siberia’s Chukchi Peninsula) and placed it a mere
seventy-five miles from Cape Mendocino.
As a result, the Russians appeared to have stepping stones leading
directly from Kamchatka to Spanish California.
Arriving in the vicinity of Mendocino, he wrote, they would find a “very
copious river.” “By this river,” he
warned, “they can have access to New Mexico or the lakes along the course of
the St. Lawrence River, both of which are of the greatest importance.”
In the age of Google Maps, European ignorance of American
geography seems comical, yet it had serious consequences for the two hundred
thousand people who lived along the West Coast at the time. Spurred by the red scare, Spain pushed into
California, establishing a string of presidios from San Diego (1769) up to San
Francisco (1776) and setting in motion an invasion of missionaries, soldiers, livestock,
and viruses that devastated indigenous communities and reduced individuals to
starvation.
Though California’s Spanish period is well-documented,
Patriots and Red Coats on the East Coast still predominate in narratives of
American history. California history tells a different story from that of the
hard-fought but triumphal march to independence – one of interdependence. Calderón’s map opens a window onto the foreign
nations and distant state administrators, global trade, and macro and
microbiota that remade the lives of Californians in the eighteenth century. In the age of climate change, globalization,
and invasive species, it is a history that has never seemed more relevant.
by Claudio Saunt
Author of
West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776
________________________________________________________________________________
Claudio Saunt at CHS!
As part of its special end-of-year bookstore programming, Dr. Claudio Saunt will be at CHS on December 21 discussing his book,
West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776.
To register for this event, click
HERE.
Giuseppe Torrubia,
I
Moscoviti nella California (Rome, 1759), 31-32.
