Czars and the Frontier : Exhibition at the Autry museum explores Russian influences on the early days of Alaska, Canada and California.

The chief curator of the Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum had to open several huge securi ty doors--unlocking each with a computer encoded card--to get to the storage area where the items for the museum’s next big exhibition were being readied.

There, laid out on long tables, were Eastern Orthodox Church icons, Chinese wooden boxes, handwritten Russian journals and 18th-Century paintings of sea captains. They are not items readily associated with Western heritage, but the curator thinks they should be.

“Part of our mission at this museum is to show people that the history of the West includes contributions by many, many cultures,” said James Nottage, who has been chief curator since the museum opened in 1988. “It’s far more than what people think of as the Wild West--gunfighters and all that. That part of it was only just a footnote. The real story is far richer.”

In accordance with that mission, the museum is presenting “Russian America: The Forgotten Frontier,” a traveling exhibition that opens tomorrow and runs through Sept. 27. It includes more than 600 historic and artistic pieces from the 18th and 19th centuries when Russia had settlements in Alaska, Canada and to a lesser extent, California.

Many of the pieces are examples of the influence of the Orthodox church, which still has numerous followers among native peoples in Alaska, and items such as the Chinese boxes that came to the West through Russian trade.

Several items in the show, including Vitus Bering’s 1741 ship log that includes an entry on what was probably the first Russian sighting of North America, are on loan from museums and archives in the Commonwealth of Independent States. Others came from U.S. agencies, including the actual $7.2-million check used to buy Alaska from the Russians.

And for this stop on the tour, which is the last before the exhibit is dismantled, the Autry museum has arranged to show several additional pieces from Ft. Ross, a former Russian settlement founded in 1812 about 100 miles north of San Francisco.

The Russian America exhibition almost didn’t make it to Los Angeles. “When I first heard about it, I knew I wanted it for the museum,” Nottage said, “but we could not fit it into our schedule.”

The last stop for the exhibit was to have been the Library of Congress in Washington, but because of a shortfall in money, the library could not afford to bring it in.

“That time slot worked perfectly for us, so we got a second chance at it,” Nottage said. The exhibit was curated by historian Barbara Sweetland Smith, who had not previously done a museum show, but she had been working on Alaska history projects for 20 years. When she got the call from the Anchorage Museum of History and Art in 1988 to curate the “Russian America” exhibition, she was just finishing a job for the National Parks Service.

“I was documenting Orthodox church communities in Alaska,” said Smith, 56, speaking from her home in Anchorage.

Smith, who specializes in Russian history, knew of numerous items she wanted for the “Russian America” show, and the staffs of the co-sponsoring institutions--the Anchorage museum and the Washington State Historical Society--helped track down others. She also had a wish list of items that she knew were in what was then the Soviet Union, but she was not optimistic about obtaining them for the show.

“I knew we didn’t have the time to deal with all the bureaucracy I thought we would have to go through,” Smith said, “but I put my wish list together and went. I hoped maybe we could get one or two nice pieces.”

That wish list had about 100 items. Smith got them all.

“It was spectacular luck,” she said. “I got there at just the right moment when things were opening up in the spirit of glasnost. “

A change in Russian attitudes was not the only political transformation to affect the exhibition.

“The story we tell in this exhibition would have not been a popular one in our own country just a few years ago, during the Cold War,” Smith said. “We didn’t want to hear anything that was good about the Russians.”

Smith said the Russians, who came to North America as traders, were at first almost as imperialistic as just about any European country with outposts in the New World. Alexander Baranov, the Russian government-appointed head of that country’s business enterprises in North America from 1790 to 1818, was known to be an enterprising businessman but was harsh on the natives, seizing land he wanted for commercial ventures and exploiting the resources.

During the Baranov administration, businessman Nikolai Rezanov visited the Russian outpost in Sitka and found that food and other supplies were running dangerously low. He sailed down to the coast of California in 1806 to make trading arrangements with Spanish officials. He met with little success until he proposed marriage to the Spanish commandant’s 15-year-old daughter, Concepcion Arguello.

In celebration of the betrothal, Rezanov gave her family two hand-carved ship chairs, dated 1787, which much later ended up in the collection of Elizabeth Waldo of Northridge. The Autry museum has borrowed them for the exhibition.

Rezanov died at age 45 on his return voyage to Russia, and Arguello spent the rest of her life in a nunnery.

When Baranov was removed from his post, the Russian Imperial Navy took over, and its rule was far more enlightened. Public health policies were introduced, natural resources were managed in a less greedy fashion, education programs were promoted and natives were not forced, as they were in other outposts, to speak the colonizers’ language.

“It was a much more humane enterprise than the ones run by the Spanish or British,” Smith said. The Russian presence at Ft. Ross was important to the enterprise. It’s where food and other supplies were gathered to ship to the more extensive and inaccessible settlements in Alaska. And it was a convenient location for sea otter hunting expeditions.

By the 1840s, the profitability of the Russian ventures had fallen off severely, however. Competition from the United States and Great Britain limited economic opportunities, and Russia’s attentions were focusing more on China as a trading partner.

Ft. Ross was sold in 1841 to John Sutter of the Sacramento Valley, whose fame grew seven years later when the gold discovered at his sawmill triggered the California Gold Rush. Alaska was sold in 1867.

The Russians left behind little in California, and their time here merits only a brief mention in most histories of the state. But in remote areas of Alaska, that culture’s influence is still felt.

“There are still about 80 Orthodox communities in Alaska, including some in places that are small and remote,” Smith said. In addition to the many historical church items in the Russian American exhibition, she has also included relatively new religious items, such as robes and icons.

“It is not unusual to be out in the bush and come across a village that has an Orthodox church,” Smith said. “Then the legacy of the Russian years is clear.”

WHERE AND WHEN What: “Russian America: The Forgotten Frontier.”

Where: Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, 4700 Western Heritage Way, in Griffith Park.

Time: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays from Saturday through Sept. 27.

Price: $6 adults, $4.50 seniors and students, $2.50 for children under 13.

Call: (213) 667-2000.