Atherton's Russians

In 1887, at the age of 29, Gertrude Atherton became a widow. Her 35-year-old husband, George Atherton, died of liver failure at sea, en route to Chile.

George’s body was delivered unceremoniously to her home in San Francisco – in a barrel of rum. Not expecting the cask to contain anything but liquor, Atherton’s butler opened the barrel and found George’s body… with his heart cut out.

Rather than burying George at sea, the ship’s captain had opted to embalm him in rum. Atherton’s heart, legal proof of his death, was “placed in a jar filled with alcohol” and deposited in a safe at the Banco Edwards in Valparaiso, Chile.

Two years later, after traveling to the East Coast and Europe, Gertrude Atherton turned up at Fort Ross. Laura Call, at the time a 14-year-old resident at the Fort, described Atherton as a “doubtful” person who “walked about the cliffs in rainy and foggy weather dressed in long black garments.” “To me,” Call continued, “she was fascinating because she was so mysterious.” It was the custom of the time for widows to wear black for two and a half years after the loss of a husband. Atherton had come to Fort Ross, formerly the southernmost settlement in Russian America, to research and write what would be her first major novel — The Doomswoman.

Atherton liked Fort Ross. “It is” she wrote, “a beautiful place and very solitary… the cliffs are very fine, and the hills, covered more or less with redwoods, slope almost to the river.” During her three-month sojourn there, she walked four miles a day and never tired of it. The dramatic scenery – “with the sea thundering at the base of the cliffs, and the winter wind howling in the redwood forest” – captivated her.

The Doomswoman was published in 1892 and became a best seller. The novel is a Romeo and Juliet tale culminating at the Fort in a lovers’ tragedy. Chonita, the main character, goes on a bear hunt with Alexander Rotchev and his wife, the beautiful Princess Hélène Pavlovna Gagarin Rotchev. Rotchev is the Russian American Company’s manager at Fort Ross. The princess is the niece of Russian Tsar Nicholas I. The trio is accompanied by Don Estenega, the fictional arch enemy of Chonita’s family and a high government official of Mexican California with a huge land-grant estate near Fort Ross. He, along with Mexican President Lopez de Santa Anna, secretly supports the peaceful annexation of California by the United States. Estenega and Santa Anna want desperately to avoid a war with the Americans — a war they know they cannot win.

Estenega’s political views are abhorred by Chonita’s family — another prominent Mexican family from Santa Barbara which opposes annexation. And Estenega is responsible for having Chonita’s brother Reinaldo imprisoned for treason (he was friends with another who “has incited rebellion against the government”).

Despite Estenega’s transgressions against her family, Chonita falls in love with him. Finally surrendering to her heart, she plans to announce her love to Estenega that very night in the forests outside Fort Ross, but Estenega is suddenly confronted by a knife-wielding Reinaldo. Estenega kills Reinaldo in self-defense. “The last act of her brother’s life had been to lay the foundation of her lover’s ruin; his death had completed it.” In the book’s closing scene, Chonita steps over her brother’s lifeless body and kneels beside Estenega. She “drew his head to her breast” knowing her love could now never be consummated.

Born Gertrude Franklin horn in San Francisco, Atherton was educated by her grandfather, Stephan Franklin, a nephew of Benjamin Franklin, after her parents separated. At the age of 19, Gertrude eloped with George H. Bowen Atherton, who had been a suitor of her mother’s and who was the son of Faxon Atherton, a wealthy California merchant. They had a son, George (who died of diphtheria at the age of six) and a daughter, Muriel. Atherton initially wrote under a pseudonym, and when she revealed this to her family, she was ostracized. After George’s death, she took up writing as a way to support herself and her daughter. She did freelance newspaper reportage and began writing stories about historical California, which is what eventually led her to Fort Ross.

As it turned out, The Doomswoman was only Atherton’s first novel about Russians in California. In 1906, she published Rezanov, a fictionalized version of the tragic love story of Concepción Arguello and Russian Count Nikolai Rezanov. In 1806, Count Rezanov, the 42-year-old Ambassador Plenipotentiary of Tsar Alexander I, fell in love with Concepción Arguello, the 15-year-old daughter of the commander of the Spanish presidio at San Francisco. The two became engaged. But, because she was Catholic and he was Orthodox, their marriage had to be postponed for two years while Rezanov sought permission from the Tsar, the Spanish Monarch and the Pope.

Six months later, the love-struck Rezanov died in a reckless journey across Siberia, en route to St. Petersburg to petition the tsar. Concepción learned of her lover’s death only four years later, and resolved to never marry, instead dedicating her life to charity. She became the first Catholic nun invested in California and died in 1857, at the age of 67.

In between these two novels, in 1902, Atherton published a short story, Natalie Ivanhoff, A Memory of Fort Ross. Yet another tragic love story, it culminates at the old grist mill located a mile from the Fort and includes two of the protagonists from The Doomswoman, Princess Hélène Pavlovna Gagarin Rotchev and Count Alexander Rotchev.*

It is 1838, and the Count and his wife have moved to Fort Ross, where Rotchev has been appointed manager of the Fort by the Russian American Company. Hélène asks her life-long friend, Princess Natalie Ivanhoff, to accompany her to the settlement for companionship. According to Atherton, Hélène also “had an unselfish motive” in extending the invitation. Princess Natalie is in a “deeply wretched” state of mind, as her fiancé, Prince Alexis Mikhailof, has “without explanation or chance of a parting word, been banished to Siberia under sentence of perpetual exile.”

Yet somehow Prince Alexis escapes his Siberian imprisonment and finds his way to his beloved Natalie at the Fort. Since Russian legal jurisdiction extends to the California colony, the couple must flee. Natalie involves the help of none other than Don Estenega, who arranges an escape to Boston by way of Monterrey. They secretly meet at the Fort’s grist mill at midnight, where Estenega has horses waiting for them. Once in Monterrey they will board a Yankee ship for the journey to America. “As she reached the top of the knoll, she was taken into Mikhail’s arms.” The two embrace as Mikhail’s eyes “dwelled passionately on her beauty.” He told her she looked like “the moon queen.” Suddenly, however, the mill machinery is started up by a jealous mill worker. A whirring belt catches Natalie’s long blonde hair. She is sucked into the mill’s gears, crushed and killed. The heartbroken prince immediately commits suicide by flinging himself “over the cliffs, shattering bones and skull at the stones at their base.”

The princess is laid to rest in the “straggling, unpopulous” Fort Ross cemetery. Russian craftsmen make her “coffin out of copper plates used for their ships.” Rotchev tells his heartbroken wife, Hélène, that, when they leave Fort Ross “we will take her with us” back to Russia. Yet when they do depart a few years later, when the Fort is abandoned, they do so without Natalie’s entombed body. According to Atherton, Princess Natalie “sleeps there still, on the lonely knoll between the sunless forest and the desolate ocean.”

The Russian Cemetery at Fort Ross seems to have mesmerized Atherton. The fixation may have stemmed from her husband’s tragic demise. Unfulfilled love through unforeseen, tragic events is a constant theme throughout her writings. The cemetery, she wrote, was situated on the “highest of two gulches, on a knoll so bare and black and isolated that its destiny was surely taken into account at creation.” There she saw “a tall, crude cross and a half hundred neglected graves.” In her memoirs, Laura Call recalled how Atherton hired her brother and a friend to “dig up one of the Russian graves. She wanted ‘an officer in full uniform.’” Call’s father, owner of the Fort Ross at the time, stopped the excavation and Atherton “became rather annoyed.”

In 2008, a report of an archaeological excavation of the cemetery was published. Professor Lynne Goldstein (who directed the cemetery excavations) confirmed that at least one grave had in fact been “dug twice.” She observed that items within the grave “had been disturbed, but were still relatively in place.” While not certain that it was the grave excavated at Atherton’s direction, Professor Goldstein wrote it was “the only grave that looked clearly disturbed, and its location is such that it would have been easily accessible, and probably easily identifiable as a Russian grave.” The excavations didn’t find a grave with a coffin made of copper plates, as described by Atherton in her story about Princess Natalie. They did, however, find four graves that were empty. The archeologists hypothesized the graves may have been “those of individuals who were later moved from the cemetery.” Is it possible that the Russians did take some bodies with them when they abandoned the fort — perhaps even Princess Natalie’s? Assuming, of course, there was a Princess Natalie.

Gertrude Atherton is no longer a household word. But during her lifetime she was one of the most successful novelists in America. Yet her public smoking scandalized society as much as her semi-erotic fiction. After her husband’s “rummy” death, she never remarried — though she did have a string of high-profile suitors. Some of her books were banned — such as Black Oxen, which espoused sexual regeneration — an x-ray stimulation of the ovaries — a procedure that she herself underwent. Viewed as a threat to public morality, the book was “denounced from the pulpit,” yet later made into a silent movie.

During her long career, Atherton wrote a wide variety of historical and romantic fiction, including biographies of Alexander Hamilton and Maine’s Senator Eugene Hale. While her writing is not generally given high literary marks, she was quite good at spinning a yarn, and her work was notable, and original, for focusing on women’s quest for personal identity and self-realization beyond the bounds of procreation and motherhood.

In fact, during the 1920’s, Atherton was the most popular American author in Europe, surpassing both Edith Wharton and Sinclair Lewis. Shortly before her death, at the age of 89, she published her biography, My San Francisco. It was about “her” town of “quaint neighborhoods, venerable bookstores, private clubs, festive restaurants, historic banks, strong-minded women, and old families who knew one another.” She died in San Francisco in 1948 at the age of 91.  RL

* Alexander G. Rotchev was in fact the last administrator of Fort Ross, from 1838–1841.

READ MORE – some of Atherton’s novels are available as free ebooks or in fascimile reprints. 

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