The Russian-American Company founded Fort Ross in 1812, the same year Napoleon marched on Moscow. Commerce Counselor Ivan Kuskov chose a headland fifteen miles north of Bodega Bay where the Kashaya Pomo maintained a seasonal village called Metini. The settlement's purpose was twofold: harvest the sea otter pelts that fetched fortunes in the China trade, and grow the food that Russian Alaska desperately needed but could not produce in its subarctic climate. Within the wooden stockade, the Russians erected barracks, a commandant's house, a chapel with a distinctive silhouette, and workshops. Outside the walls, an orchard took root - some of those trees, remarkably, still bear fruit nearly two centuries later. By 1830, three farming ranchos dotted the inland valleys, and a sealing station operated on the Farallon Islands. Fort Ross was never just a fort. It was the hub of a constellation of outposts stretching from Bodega Bay to the open Pacific.

The sea otter was the colony's entire reason for existing, and its disappearance sealed the settlement's fate. International overhunting drove the Pacific otter population toward commercial extinction by the 1830s. Agricultural yields on the foggy coast never met expectations - rocky soil and persistent marine fog frustrated every growing season. When the Russian-American Company secured a supply agreement with the Hudson's Bay Company in 1838, Fort Ross lost its last strategic justification. The Russians offered the settlement to the Mexican government, which declined. In 1841, the entire colony was sold to John Sutter, the Swiss-born Mexican citizen who would become famous seven years later when gold was discovered at his sawmill. The price was $30,000. Whether Sutter ever fully paid remains a matter of quiet dispute between American and Russian historians.

Most of what visitors see today is reconstruction. Highway 1 once ran directly through the stockade, entering where the Kuskov House stood and exiting through the main gate; the road was not rerouted until the late 1970s. The chapel collapsed in the 1906 earthquake, was rebuilt in 1916, burned in 1970, and was reconstructed yet again. Only the Rotchev House, residence of the colony's last Russian manager, survives as an original structure, earning its designation as a National Historic Landmark. The Call family held the property after the Russian departure until 1903, when the California Historical Landmarks Committee purchased the fort and roughly three acres. By 1906, the site had been turned over to the state for preservation. Today the park encompasses 3,393 acres of rugged Sonoma coastline, coast redwood forest, and the reconstructed settlement - a place where you can stand inside wooden walls and feel the particular strangeness of Russia in California.

The park is as much about landscape as history. Wind-carved bluffs drop to rocky coves where tide pools teem with anemones and sea stars. Gray whales pass close to shore during winter migration, and harbor seals haul out on the rocks below the stockade. Fort Ross Reef draws scuba divers to explore underwater gardens of bull kelp and the scattered bones of the SS Pomona. Inland, trails wind through second-growth coast redwood forest, the trees rising in cathedral columns from a floor of sword fern and sorrel. The park nearly lost all of this in 2009, when California's budget crisis threatened closure. Russia's ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, petitioned to keep it open - a reminder that Fort Ross still matters to both nations. The closures were averted by cutting hours and maintenance statewide.

Before the Russians arrived, the Kashaya Pomo called this headland Metini. They did not vanish when the stockade went up. Kashaya workers labored alongside Russian managers and Aleut hunters, and Kashaya women married Russian men, creating families that bridged enormous cultural distances. The 1817 treaty between the Russian-American Company and Kashaya Pomo chiefs was the first agreement of its kind with Native peoples in California. The relationship was never equal, but neither did it follow the coercive model of the Spanish missions to the south. Today the Kashaya Pomo remain in their ancestral homeland, the only California tribe never removed from its territory by force. The name Metini has not been forgotten. During the fort's bicentennial celebration in 2012, more than 6,500 people gathered at the site, and a Kashaya Pomo delegation traveled to Russia for the first time - visiting the homeland of the people who had once settled on theirs.