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The present State of '''Alaska''' within the United States of America was the site of the first Orthodox Christian [[liturgy]] held in the western hemisphere. The liturgy was conducted aboard the ship ''St. Peter'', that was anchored in Alaskan coastal waters, on [[July 20]], 1741, the [[Feast]] day of St. [[Elias]]. For the next one hundred years Alaska was the center of Orthodox evangelization among the indigenous population in Alaska, until the arrival in North America of the Orthodox immigration from the predominantly Orthodox lands of eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century.
During the sixteenth century Russian frontiersmen, called ''promyshlenniki'', advanced eastward from European Russia in search of valuable fur bearing animals for the fur trade. The advance of these fur hunters was followed quickly by fur traders, merchants, and [[missionary|missionaries]] of the Orthodox Church. Sixty years after the Cossack Ermak crossed the Ural Mountains in 1579, the Cossack Dimitri Kopylov reached the Pacific Ocean, in 1639, at the sea now known as the Sea of Okhotsk. The promyshlenniki had traveled within a life time eastward about 5,800 miles, across the length of the Asian continent.
Over the following years, the Russians consolidated their possession of this Asian territory, now known as Siberia, and established trade relations with China, to the south. As the presence of Russians increased so did the Church. As the Russian frontier advanced eastward a fork southward occurred when the Albazin fortress on the Amur River was taken by the Chinese. This defeat in 1685 brought Orthodox Cossacks as prisoners to a settlement in Beijing that led to establishment of a [[Russian Orthodox Mission in China|China Mission]]. The Treaty of Nerchinsk, signed in 1589, formalized Russian trade and boundaries with China and provided an impetus to advance further to the east, on to the peninsula of Kamchatka.
