Sitka, and its ocean/island world

Sitka, one of Alaska's most historic cities, and certainly a city situated in one of the North's most spectacularly beautiful settings, was at one time truly the "Capital of the Pacific"...Chicago was just a blockhouse in a swamp and San Francisco was still a sleepy mission, when Sitka was a bustling center of North Pacific commerce. Founded in 1799, destroyed by the local Indians in 1802, rebuilt by Alexander Andreievich Baranov in 1804, Russian until Alaska's sale to the United States in 1867, Sitka is as Sitka was...a place where the sea boils and surges out of the empty horizon to the West, where Indian and white man still live together, taking their livelihoods from the sea and forest, and where the history of the centuries is yet evident all around, and the magic of life is accentuated by the timeless beauty of the land.… (more)