Iliamna Lake

Iliamna Lake was drawn into the Russian fur trade during the closing years of the eighteenth century. Russian fur hunters plundered villages in the Iliamna–Lake Clark region in 1792. Local resistance followed: in 1800 villagers destroyed a Russian trading post on Iliamna Lake twice, retaliating against this and other mistreatment. The lake's early encounters with the fur trade thus included determined action against the traders.

Relations became more settled over the next twenty years. Religious contacts also grew across the surrounding region. The first Russian Orthodox missionaries arrived in 1794, and by the 1830s travelling priests regularly conducted services and baptisms in the Iliamna–Lake Clark country. Trade, conflict and religious exchange all shaped these early contacts, before the later American exploration and settlement of the region.