291007 - Topic: San Francisco and California

As the 27th broadcast of the Empire Builders series, this episode told a story of early California. It was billed in press accounts as a “flash back to the ‘days of 49’ when California was the El Dorado of the gold seeker, and then will come down to the present time and the riches the pleasure seeker will find there.”

The day after the broadcast, a newspaper recap of the show, printed by the Helena (Montana) Daily Independent, gave this report:

Radio Program Tells of Early Romance in Spanish California

Glamorous Spanish California, in the days when Russia was grasping for control of the west coast of North America, was recalled in a historical romance broadcast last night over the National Broadcasting Company network, as the second of the Empire Builders series being presented by Great Northern Railway.

The dramatization, historically authentic, was the old pioneer's story of the romance of Count Rezanov and Concepcion Arguello. It was located in San Francisco when the Russian nobleman came on the joint mission of securing food for his starving countrymen in Alaska and determining the feasibility of the Russians losing the feeble grip of Spain on the balmy territory of Alta California.

 

Count Nikolay Petrovich Rezanov (1764-1807) was a Russian who was sent to Alaska by the Czar to check the condition of Russian fur trappers. He found them to be in dire straits. This was in 1806. The Count sailed south with his ship, the Juno, to Fort Ross (near San Francisco), the closest port where provisions could be obtained.

Count Rezanov

Rezanov learned that the Spaniards he encountered in California had firm restrictions against trading with foreigners. But the Count fell for the teen-aged daughter of Don José Dario Arguello, the commandant of San Francisco. The Count also negotiated successfully with the Spanish clergy, and managed to secure ample provisions to return to the Russian fur trappers at New Archangel in Alaska.

Maria Concepcion Arguello

The Count left his young lover behind, intending to see to the trappers in Alaska, then to travel across Russia and even to Spain to gain approval (from the Czar and Pope, respectively) of his marriage to the young Catholic maiden. Travelling across Russia on horseback, Count Rezanov fell ill and died in March of 1807. The tragic tale of his romance with Maria Concepcion Arguello was memorialized not only in this episode of Empire Builders, but also in a 1937 novel, “Rezánov and Doña Concha,” by Gertrude Atherton. Much later, a popular rock opera titled “Juno and Avos” (the names of Rezanov’s two ships) debuted in Moscow in 1981.