| Summary: | In 1829 the directors of the Russian American Company chose the thirty-four year old Ferdinand von Wrangell to govern their distant colonies in Alaska and California. The young man had achieved a brilliant reputation as Arctic explorer and circumnavigator and was to prove himself an able administrator as well. Most of Wrangell's reports concerned Alaskan natives but all, like the following excerpt on the Indians of upper California, were published in the work compiled by Karl E. von Baer, Beitruge zur Kenntnis der ressischen Reiches und der angrezenden Lander Asiens (St. Petersburg, 1839). Wrangell's observations on the California natives have not previously been published in English.
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