Kodiak

In August of 1783, Shelikhov led an expedition of three ships with 193 people to create the first permanent Russian settlement in Alaska. His wife Natal'ia accompanied him.  The first white woman in Alaska, she would take over management of his fur-trading company after his death. In the spring of 1784, the Shelikhovs' ships sailed past the Aleutian Islands and arrived at Kodiak Island in early August. There, the Shelikhovs chose a site for their settlement on a small spit in what they named Three Saints Bay, about 75 miles southwest of present-day Kodiak.

During their first year on Kodiak Island, the Russians built a small village consisting of eight homes, a set of bunkhouses, a commissary, barns, storage buildings, a smithy, and a carpenter shop. At the time, Three Saints Bay was the only European settlement between the coast of Kamchatka and the tiny presidio of San Francisco, founded eight years before by the Spanish.

Work camps on other areas of Kodiak Island and Afognak Island quickly followed the village at Three Saints Bay. A work camp at Karluk took advantage of the tremendous salmon runs up the Karluk River. In 1792, after a tidal wave destroyed the village at Three Saints Bay, the Shelikhovs' workers moved the settlement to the site of today's city of Kodiak. From the settlement on Kodiak Island, the Shelikhovs sent fur hunters into other parts of Southcentral Alaska and then into Southeast Alaska. 

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