Happy to help. I think the most important thing to know when considering Russian America is that life was profit-oriented. If you've been educated in the American school system, it more closely resembles the wide-ranging trappers and traders of the French and American fur trade than it does the orderly settlements of the eastern seaboard.

The second thing to note is that Russian America encompasses 120 years, from Bering's voyages (note that he was not the first Russian in Alaska, just that his expedition popularized the notion of Alaska) to 1867. For American history, that's very nearly the difference between Plymouth Rock and the American Revolution. In European terms, that's very nearly the distance between the end of the Thirty Years' War and the French Revolution.

The Russian period can be divided into two segments. Before 1799, Russian America was the domain of a handful of squabbling Russian trading companies, interspersed with spotty voyages of exploration by other European nations that drop in and out of the picture.

After 1799, the Russian-American Company was granted a monopoly on Russian America. That changed the picture a great deal.

Before 1799, life was almost universally brutal. The competition among trading companies led to sabotage and spots of violence. The Russians would enslave Native hunters to hunt fur otters and fur seals, which were prized in China and could be traded for Chinese goods valuable in Europe.

The furs were the be-all and end-all of Russian America until about 1830/1840, when prices collapsed and the animals were almost extinct. Cheaper beaver, mink and other furs replaced it.

But it's important to know that before 1799, it was very much a wild west, ungoverned and chaotic.

In 1799, Czar Paul I granted a monopoly to the Russian-American Company. This was something that Natalia Shelikov, widow of Grigory Shelikov, the most successful fur baron, had been searching for for years. During the time of Catherine the Great, Shelikov had promoted the idea that a monopoly would protect the Natives from the worst excesses of the fur trade. Czar Paul, doesn't seem to have cared much either way in that sense, but he realized that a monopoly would make the crown money.

The first years of the monopoly were rough. The RAC was defeated in Southeast Alaska as the organized Tlingit defeated the Russians at the battles of Sitka and Yakutat. Only the arrival of the first around-the-world trip by Russian warships allowed the RAC to counter-attack successfully and capture the site of modern Sitka.

Subsequently, the Tlingit effectively blockaded the Russians in Sitka, preventing hunting parties from gathering many otter skins successfully. This led the Russians to form arrangements with American traders. The Americans would take aboard Native hunters and their kayaks (supervised by a handful of Russians) and go on long-distance hunting expeditions that traveled as far south as Baja California.

With the otters having been hunted to exhaustion farther west, these long-distance voyages enabled the RAC to continue to make a profit, albeit one moderated by the need to give the Americans a cut.

The Russians continued to hold Native slaves and indentured servants until about 1820, when the end of the RAC's first charter arrived. Though the RAC was granted a monopoly, that monopoly had to be renewed every 20 years.

Each successive charter brought more and more liberal policies, paid for by the RAC. The RAC relied upon Natives to do the dirty work of earning a profit, while the foremen, clerks and administrators were Russians. There were never more than a few hundred Russians in America, and that figure includes plenty of Germans, Finns, Poles, Lithuanians and others from Russian America.

As time went on, there developed a solid creole class, the children of Russian men and Native women. These creoles were the backbone of the RAC by the later years of the Russian period, sometimes traveling back to Russia for advanced education (but they tended to be disease-prone, and most died).

The RAC, as part of its imperial charter, was required to pay for the Siberian Line Battalion that provided security (only half the battalion was in Russian America) at the time of the Alaska Purchase, and it was required to pay for much of the upkeep of the Orthodox Church operations in Russian America.

While the fur traders and merchants of the RAC usually traveled in circuits along the coast, stopping in at ostrogs or forts, once or twice a year, the Orthodox Church was the most reliable form of Russian presence in the territory. Parishes held missionaries, priests and monks who evangelized in the territory. Even they never reached far inland, and were situated at best along the lower reaches of the rivers.

To summarize: The Russian presence was a skim of European presence along the coast. American and British whalers and merchants traveled Alaska's coasts as far north as the Arctic Ocean during the Russian period, but not until after the Alaska Purchase and the 1880 discovery of gold at the site of Juneau, Alaska's modern capital, did large amounts of Western influence begin to enter the region.