Did Russia Colonize Oregon in the 1790s?

If anyone has any knowledge of the Russian colonization of North America, they at least know that the Russians settled in Alaska and that the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867. If you're a history buff, you might even know when and where Russia settled. However, if you look at any map or timeline of Russian settlements in North America, none of them will show any Russian settlements south of Alaska before 1800. However, there appears to be evidence that the Russians quietly settled in Oregon years before Lewis and Clark got there.

This is another historical rabbit hole I went down. The year after I was trying to figure out who "Little Beaver" was, I was reading about the expedition of John Evans, who reached the Mandan people by way of St. Louis to remind British traders up there that they were in Spanish territory. That was in 1796, eight years before Spain gave Louisiana Territory back to France who promptly gave it to the United States (at least, from the St. Louis perspective, where nobody knew about those events until March 1804). Anyway, John Evans was instructed by the explorer James Mackay to go up the Missouri River to its source, cross the Rocky Mountains, and find the nearest river to follow to the West Coast. That was literally what the Lewis and Clark expedition did after Evans' failure to achieve that goal in full. What is unusual, however, is that Mackay expected that Evans would find at least one Russian settlement when he arrived at the ocean. Mackay was not the only person on the Spanish side who spoke of Russian settlements between Alaska and California. The Baron de Carondelet, Spanish governor of Louisiana at the time, advised that whoever could reach the West Coast by way of St. Louis should not only contact the Russians but have them confirm by writing in the Russian language that the explorer had reached those settlements. 

I highly doubt that Mackay or Carondelet were referring to the Russian settlements of Alaska. That was a far sailing journey from where a hypothetical west-flowing river would be across from the Missouri River, and there were a few Spanish explorers who had seen the Russian settlements of Alaska as far as the Aleutian Islands, so I would think that the Spanish had good knowledge of where the Russian coastal settlements were. Yet, none of those explorers reported any Russians in what is now Oregon. John Evans, meanwhile, trusted Mackay's words so much that on one of his maps, depicting what he supposed lay beyond the Mandan villages, there is a fort shown on the West Coast at about the same latitude as the Mandan villages.

A representation of John Evans' map as seen in W. Raymond Wood's book, Prologue to Lewis & Clark: The Mackay and Evans Expedition. The presumptive Russian fort is on the far-left side of the map.

After James Mackay said that "There is ... a Russian Settlement that they say is to the north of California", he also said that "there is reason to believe that it is not the only one and that the nations of the interior of the continent ought to have knowledge of it". That last part is interesting, because in the book, The Way to the Western Sea, the author mentions that when the Lewis and Clark Expedition conversed with the Shoshone chief Cameahwait in the Rocky Mountains, the chief told them that there were light-skinned men like themselves living near the mouth of the rivers the expedition would row down. On the other hand, the Lewis and Clark expedition never saw any Russians, Englishmen, Spaniards, or any other men "like themselves" when they were in today's Washington and Oregon. How do we solve these paradoxical facts?

One day, as I was looking for any clues in my research, I decided to see what the oldest buildings are in each state. I doubted that any would point me to an answer, but it turns out that the oldest building in Oregon is a mysterious cabin called the Molalla Log House. There are no historical records mentioning the building's construction, nor are there any historical records that assert who built it. However, architectural archaeologists and historians have studied the physical details of the log cabin and concluded that it is likely Russian in origin and was constructed in the 1790s! Here's a link to their 2015 report. The log house was constructed miles away from the Columbia River, where the Lewis and Clark Expedition would have been, and the area is heavily forested. That would explain why Lewis and Clark never found the settlement.

Therefore, my concluding hypothesis is as follows. Mackay's "Russian Settlement" was a small group of Russian colonists who had ventured up the Columbia River and its tributaries in the 1790s. It is plausible that Russians traveled to that location by way of Alaska, were seen and maybe questioned by Spanish sailors near the Columbia River estuary (since the Spanish were regularly commuting between California and Vancouver Island at the time), and then word came to Carondelet by word of those sailors and maybe some other Spanish third parties. Carondelet could have then informed James Mackay of the Russians there for his and Evans’ information. The settlement would have been known to most tribes living in the Oregon Country including the Shoshones, who told Lewis and Clark about them. However, Lewis and Clark would not have seen the settlement since it was not in the Columbia River valley itself. The Russian settlement must have been abandoned or ruined sometime between 1805 and 1840 as American settlement of Oregon began.