Little is known about Stankevich's life because he preferred not to talk about himself and the information is contradictory.
He was born in St. Petersburg in the family of military Ivan Stankevich and his wife Sophia Lanin. At an early age, he lost his father, an officer, who died in the Crimean War. He entered the Cadet School, hoping to build a military career, but was transferred to the Faculty of Oriental Languages due to his language skills, in order to become a military translator in the future. Because of his poor health, he left the military field and went into science.
At the Stankevich Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, he helped Professor Otto Nikolaevich Betlingku to compile the Sanskrit Dictionary and studied Sanskrit and Armenian antiquities and literature. In 1847-1848, he was accompanied by Professor Maria Ivanovich Brosse to a two-year expedition to Georgia and Armenia to study epigraphic monuments. To popularize the results of the research, Brosse sent Ivan Stankevich to France with excerpts and articles from the report for the French scientific world. Petrov planned to stay to study the culture of American peoples, assist Professor St. Hilaire, but did not get a place and in the summer of 1861 boarded the ship to the United States.
IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
In the United States, Stankevich first worked for the French-language newspaper Le Courier des Etats Unis. He then joined the army, reached the rank of lieutenant, was twice wounded and awarded for his courage. According to Stankevich's daughter, he joined the army under the name of John Mayer. This name, indeed, appears in the documents, noting "21-year-old Russian from St. Petersburg, who was recruited in 1863 as a volunteer and deserted a little over a year later in 1864. According to some documents, in 1867 Stankevich was under arrest on Vancouver Island for secondary desertion, but then was released and sent by an interpreter to the Kenai peninsula in the old redoubt of St. Nicholas to establish contact with the Russian-speaking population. After the sale of Alaska, Ivan Stankevich became a US citizen.
His contemporaries described him as "a tall, skinny blonde, silent and restrained, but also a bright, intelligent and professional translator. All his life Stankevich was filled with an adventurous spirit.
In 1865-1870, he worked for the Russian-American company in the Gulf of Cook. From 1874 he collaborated with Hubert Howe Bancroft and became the author of the book "History of Alaska from Bancroft".
In 1876, Ivan Stankevich settled in San Francisco, married an American woman, Emma Stanfield, who gave birth to a daughter, Olga.
By 1878, Stankevich was a popular foreign journalist in the "San Francisco Chronicle". Readers of the newspaper, in which he published on his own behalf notes on the Russian-Turkish war, Stankevich was found to have misappropriated articles from European newspapers, which undermined his reputation as a journalist in San Francisco.
In 1878, Stankevich translated the travel notes of Russian travelers, studied documents in Sitka, which, according to historian Terrence M. Cole, were fake.
Alaska's research
Stankevich was appointed Alaska Census Commissioner in 1880. In June, he departed from the shores of San Francisco to the north to the Pribylova, Aleutian, Shumagin Islands and on July 13, he sailed by kayak on the Yukon River.
Stankevich travelled extensively across Alaska, visited places previously unknown to Europeans and later prepared a 189-page Alaska Report on Population, Industry and Resources, published in 1884. At that time nobody knew exactly the size of Alaska, there were no roads, but only a few Indian paths, there were only two army posts (in Sitka and on Wrangel Island), the post office came to Sitka once a month, there were no newspapers and no municipal administration. In his work, the scribe Stankevich could rely only on himself, listen to the words of the traders, captains of whaling ships, clergymen, missionaries. Stankevich was nicknamed "Hollow Legs" for his indefatigable fatigue in overcoming vast distances by water and foot.
Stankevich's contribution is determined by his ethnographic, botanical, zoological, geological and cartographic records. He demonstrated his ethnographic and linguistic abilities, developed his own classification of local peoples, singling out people of mixed origin - Creoles. In total, Stankevich traveled 14,000 kilometers on kayaks and kayaks and rewrote 33,426 people (430 Europeans, 1756 Creoles, 17617 Inuit, 2,145 Aleuts, 3,927 Alaskan Athabascans, 67,663 Tlinquits, 788 Hyde). The governor of Alaska in 1885-1889 years Alfred P. Sweeniferd (English) named Stankevich the most qualified person on occupied post, and historian Ted C. Hinkley has expressed so:
If Stankevich had about a dozen competent workers and the best land and water vehicles, he could have done his job in five years.
A preliminary version of the report, No. 40, was published in early 1881 and contained a general map of Alaska with a marked route
