On the afternoon of October 18, 1867, on a rock above Sitka Harbor, the Russian flag came down and it would not come down.
The rock is about sixty feet of stone. The Tlingit called it Noow Tlein, and families of the Kiksadi clan lived on it. Alexander Baranov took it in 1804, and after the six day Battle of Sitka the Tlingit ceded the hill to the Russians, who built a governor's house on the summit: two stories of brick with a cupola on top. The flagstaff stood in front of that house. The paper that moved the whole territory had been signed in Washington on March 30, 1867, ratified on April 9, by men who had never seen the place. Seven point two million dollars, about two cents an acre.
The commissioners arrived in October. Brigadier General Lovell H. Rousseau for the United States, Captain Alexei Pestchouroff for the Tsar, Prince Dmitrii Maksutov, who had governed Russian America, standing by with his wife Maria, who was twenty two. Two hundred fifty American soldiers were formed up on the hill. When the moment came, the two commissioners spoke in what one reporter called a tone of common conversation, and almost nobody in the crowd heard the words that changed the country they were standing on.
Then the flag.
The Alaska Historical Society collected fourteen eyewitness accounts of that ceremony. The flag snags in all of them, and it never snags the same way twice. A correspondent for the New York Herald wrote that “the flag would not come down,” that it tore its entire width at the halliards and hung from the cross trees some forty feet up. Captain George Emmons, in his journal, has it winding itself around the crosstrees and tearing loose from the signal halyards, “apparently determined to not come down.” Another account has it caught a third of the way down. Three Russian sailors climbed the guy ropes and failed. A fourth was hauled up in a boatswain's chair and, according to Rousseau's own report, did not hear Captain Pestchouroff below calling for him to bring the flag down with him, and dropped it instead, so that “in its descent it fell on the bayonets of the Russian soldiers.” Peter Kostrometinoff, writing sixty years later, decided the soldier “must of misunderstood the order.” A newspaper man with a taste for the dramatic said it dropped “as if seeking a home with those who were its appointed defenders.” One account says the wind took it and caused “a sensation in every heart.”
So a man was sent up a rope to solve a rope problem, and whatever went wrong took less than a minute. Then the American flag went up, hoisted by Rousseau's fifteen year old son, and the guns fired, and the ceremony was over.
A minute is not much. Look at what the century did with it. In 1913 Century Illustrated Monthly printed Jay Hambidge's drawing of the moment, a Russian marine dropping his nation's flag over the heads of his fellows standing at attention below. It ran again in 1942 on the cover of the New York Journal-American. That is the image most people have seen, if they have seen any. Maria Maksutov did weep when the flag came down. The detail that she fainted and had to be helped to her rooms is, by the editor's own note in that collection, spurious. It spread anyway.
The flag's stubbornness survived because it is the only part of the ceremony that cannot be settled. The treaty is in the archives. The minute is not.
There is a harder thing in the same set of accounts. A correspondent in Sitka described a Tlingit chief who, after the transfer, kept a Russian flag flying in front of his house, and recorded it with contempt, as the stubbornness of an old man. The chief's position, as the correspondent relayed it, was that his people had given the Russians permission to live there and trade, not title to the land, and that “they have no right to make any cession or sale.” He was reading the ceremony more accurately than the men conducting it. The Kiksadi had already lost that hill in 1804. In 1867 two empires signed over everything else, and the people who lived on it were not a party to the paper. The chief flew the flag of the empire that had been evicted over the land it never owned.
Alaska Day is a legal holiday in the state, and Sitka still performs the ceremony on the hill every October 18. The flagstaff stands. The governor's house burned in 1894. In 1959, after Alaska became a state, the first forty nine star flag was raised on the same summit, which means the rock has spent more than a century being asked to mean something by whoever happened to own it that year.
The record is thin exactly where the story is thick, and the thick part is the part that travels: one object that would not do the one thing the ceremony needed it to do, in front of everyone who mattered, and then a small scramble that nobody, in fourteen tries, could describe the same way.
