Fort Ross was established in 1812 on the homeland of the Kashaya Pomo, who knew the area as Metini. The Russian-American Company sought a California base that could supply its Alaskan colonies with grain, livestock, and other provisions while supporting the maritime fur trade. Ivan Kuskov led the founding party north of the Spanish missions, erecting a stockade, blockhouses, residences, workshops, and an Orthodox chapel. The name Ross referred to Russia, but the settlement stood within an already managed Indigenous landscape of villages, food gathering, burning, trade, and sacred places.

The colony was never exclusively Russian. Its population included Russians and other imperial subjects, Alaska Native hunters often described in period records as Aleuts, Creole families of mixed ancestry, Kashaya laborers, and people from other California communities. Alaska Native men brought highly developed sea-hunting skills, frequently under coercive company labor arrangements. They pursued sea otters and seals from skin boats along the coast. Kashaya people worked in agriculture, construction, domestic service, and crafts, sometimes for wages or goods and sometimes under unequal conditions shaped by Russian occupation of their land.

Fort Ross supported ranches, fields, orchards, mills, shipbuilding, blacksmithing, tanning, and scientific observation. Company employees built several vessels at nearby Port Rumiantsev, now Bodega Bay, and introduced windmills and new crops. Yet California farming never reliably solved Alaska's supply problem. Coastal sea otters had already been depleted by international hunting, undermining the fur economy. Relations with Spanish and, after 1821, Mexican authorities mixed unofficial trade with diplomatic ambiguity because Russia never secured broadly recognized sovereignty over the colony.

In 1841 the Russian-American Company sold the settlement's movable property and improvements to John Sutter, while the status of the land remained disputed. Ranching, logging, and private ownership followed. American entrepreneur George W. Call purchased the property in 1873, and his family operated a ranch and preserved surviving structures. California acquired the fort in 1906 as an early state historic property. The San Francisco earthquake that year caused serious damage, and later restoration campaigns reconstructed walls, blockhouses, the chapel, and other features according to changing historical evidence.

The Rotchev House, residence of the final Russian manager, is the principal original building within the stockade. Other structures are reconstructions that help visitors understand the enclosure but should not be mistaken for untouched survivals. Fire destroyed the reconstructed chapel in 1970, after which it was built again. Archaeology outside the walls has expanded attention from company officials to Native neighborhoods, industrial sites, cemeteries, and the broader ranch landscape. Collaborative research with Kashaya and Alaska Native communities has challenged older narratives that portrayed Ross as a peaceful, isolated Russian adventure.

Fort Ross State Historic Park now interprets a rare junction of Indigenous California, Russian America, Alaska Native mobility, Mexican California, and United States preservation. Cultural events and Orthodox services keep some traditions active, while political tensions can affect how Russian heritage is presented. The most responsible history neither treats the colony as a utopia nor reduces every interaction to one pattern. It recognizes innovation, family formation, exchange, coercion, ecological depletion, and dispossession together. Metini remains a Kashaya homeland even as the reconstructed fort records a short but globally connected colonial enterprise.