Alaskan History
https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/alaska-1880-petrof.pdf
Population, Industries and Resources of Alaska, by Ivan Petroff, 1880 Published early in 1881 as House of Representatives Ex. Doc. No. 40, Forty-sixth Congress, third session
Ivan Petroff was born in Russia in 1842, the son of a Russian army officer. He was orphaned at an early age and sent to military school, travelled to America in 1861, and enlisted in the U.S. army shortly after that. When a troop transport ship left Fort Vancouver, Washington, in June of 1868 without him, he was arrested and imprisoned for desertion, but by a strange twist of fate his skill at linguistic interpretations proved his salvation, and he sailed into Cook Inlet in April, 1869. Ivan Petroff’s life became a patchwork of enlistments, desertions, travels, and jobs here and there, but somewhere in his short life he made a study of languages, for he was described as “one of the most accomplished linguists in the United States, if not the world. He speaks and writes with the utmost fluency all the European languages, besides over a dozen American and Alaskan Indian dialects.” In large part due to this unusual skill and a reputation as an authority on Alaska, Petroff landed a position with the government in June, 1880, to take the census in Alaska. An article
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alaskan-history.com
