Eldikan

The ground later known as Eldikan lies on the right bank of the Aldan, within the eastern Siberian world incorporated into Russia during the seventeenth century. Sakha migration northward from Lake Baikal introduced a pastoral economy among older hunting and reindeer-herding populations.

Russian conquest followed the eastward movement beyond the defeated Khanate of Sibir. In 1632 Pyotr Beketov founded the fort that became Yakutsk; Moscow made it the centre of a new administrative unit in 1638. Later Russian settlers sometimes adopted Sakha customs, forming the community remembered as Lena early settlers.

The imperial administration separated Yakutsk Oblast from Irkutsk in 1805. The Aldan was part of the river route to Okhotsk: in 1639 Ivan Moskvitin ascended the Aldan and Maya rivers and crossed to the Ulya to reach the Sea of Okhotsk. Against this regional sequence, the Aldan bank was a river landscape of Evenk and Sakha hunters, herders and fishers.