Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  But by early November they had cleared the Columbia Gorge and reached tidewater. “Great joy in camp,” Clark wrote on November 7. “We are in view of the ocean, this great Pacific Ocean which we have been so long anxious to see. And the roaring or noise made by the waves breaking on the rocky shores (as I suppose) may be heard distinctly.”

  In fact they were not in view of the Pacific Ocean, but of the estuary of the Columbia; the roar they heard was not of the surf, some twenty miles distant, but of the wind. And the wind never stopped roaring for the next three weeks, making the final twenty miles as vexing as any stretch of comparable length during the whole journey. The gales raised canoe-swamping waves, pinning the explorers to the north bank of the river; they also delivered a constant, cold, drenching rain that had them all within a few degrees of hypothermia.

  But finally, after two thousand miles in boats and on horses, Lewis and Clark scrambled the last mile on foot. On December 3, they climbed a cape that jutted into the stormy Pacific. Each carved his name on a tree. Clark added: “By land from the U. States in 1804 & 1805.”

  II

  A SKIN FOR A SKIN

  5

  ASTORIA

  AS PROUD AS THEY WERE ON REACHING THE PACIFIC, Lewis and Clark were disappointed at not meeting any trading vessels near the mouth of the Columbia. American or European witnesses to their feat would have made it more satisfying and lent the accomplishment greater weight in the balance of the international competition for control of Oregon. In later decades, sympathizers with the plight of the Native Americans would imagine an alternative history in which the Indians had been left to enjoy their lands in peace. Leaving aside that the different Indian tribes regularly battled against one another, this was never a plausible option. If the United States had failed to advance its claim to Oregon, that region would have been snapped up by an international competitor: Britain, Spain, or Russia. The nineteenth century was the great age of empire, with European powers and the United States scrambling to seize parts of the world unable to defend themselves against the imperialists’ technology. In North America, the scramble had been going on since the sixteenth century, and it was reaching its climax about the time Lewis and Clark carved their names on the cape overlooking the Pacific.

  A ship, moreover, would have spared some of the expedition’s members the toil of retracing their steps across the continent. Jefferson had provided Lewis letters of credit to purchase passage home. The president had also directed Lewis to send by ship a copy of the expedition’s journals, lest, having survived the outbound hazards of Indians, cataracts, portages, hunger, accident and illness, the priceless documents be lost in a reprise of the perils.

  But no ship was seen, and the expedition spent a dismal winter on the gray Oregon coast. In nearly four months, rain fell on all but twelve days. Come spring they reversed their course, this time with the advantage of knowing where they were going. They made much better time than they had heading west, and despite engaging some Blackfeet in a skirmish in which two of the Indians were killed, losing half their horses to Crow rustlers, and having to float a gauntlet of angry Tetons, they reached St. Louis in September 1806.

  “I received, my dear sir, with unspeakable joy your letter of Sep. 23 announcing the return of yourself, Capt. Clarke & your party in good health to St. Louis,” Jefferson wrote Lewis by way of congratulation. “The unknown scenes in which you were engaged, & the length of time without hearing of you had begun to be felt awfully.” Indeed, many of those who knew of the expedition had given its members up for dead, and their seemingly miraculous return was celebrated as a triumph of American courage and acumen. Publishers clamored for rights to the official journals of the expedition and to the diaries Patrick Gass and others had kept. Word of mouth told of the rich resources of the region beyond the Missouri.

  Yet there was disappointment within the triumph, at least for Jefferson, the founding father of America’s westward expansion. The length of time the Lewis and Clark journey took had hinted to the president that the West would be a harder nut to crack than he had thought. The journals confirmed those hints. Lewis and Clark had broken through the Sioux blockade of the upper Missouri, but they hadn’t broken it. Jefferson’s attitude toward trade in the West was the diametrical opposite of his approach to trade generally. For a decade the British and French had been preying on America’s Atlantic commerce, but Jefferson did little to defend that commerce. Indeed, not long after the return of Lewis and Clark, Jefferson essentially surrendered the commerce, persuading Congress to embargo all American overseas trade. Yet he was determined to promote American trade in the West, by force against the Sioux if necessary. Not for the last time, dreams of the West warped the views and even the principles of a person who could be reasonable on most other subjects. Jefferson had turned one political somersault to justify purchasing Louisiana, another to launch the federal government on a career of supporting scientific research; in this third cartwheel he reversed his course on trade to become its most aggressive advocate. Yet his agents, Lewis and Clark, had made no observable headway.

  Another result of the Lewis and Clark expedition was perhaps more disappointing. Jefferson had known, in rough geographical terms, how far Oregon was from the American East, but until he read the journals he hadn’t appreciated how hard it was in human terms to reach it. There would be no water link between the Mississippi basin and Oregon; from what Lewis and Clark reported, even building a road fit for wagons might be a daunting task. This meant that Oregon would never—or at least not in Jefferson’s lifetime—become an organic part of the United States. The force of gravity, acting on water, had turned Jefferson’s attention to New Orleans and Louisiana in the first place; that same force, Jefferson now realized, would pull Oregon away from the United States. In an earlier decade Jefferson had wondered if nature might have destined America’s trans-Appalachian region to spin off the United States and form a Mississippi Valley republic; now he had to take seriously the possibility that nature had destined Oregon—and perhaps Spanish California—to form a Pacific republic. As president of the United States, Jefferson wasn’t about to relinquish America’s claim to Oregon, but as a scientist he had to acknowledge that any president’s powers might fail against those of nature.

  The disappointments attached to the Lewis and Clark expedition set the pattern for many disappointments to follow. Time and again Americans would project their dreams onto the West and be disappointed. Jefferson dreamed of a water route to the Pacific and of America capturing the trade of the upper Missouri; other Americans would dream of opportunities and riches of different sorts. A few would realize their dreams, but many more would endure danger and hardship only to come up short. Yet so broad was the West, and so great its promise, that there were always others with dreams as yet undashed.

  JOHN JACOB ASTOR READ THE LEWIS AND CLARK JOURNALS and drew his own conclusions. Astor might have become a butcher had his father made more of the meat trade in the German town of Walldorf, where Astor was born, but the family business struggled, and Astor decided to try his chances in America. He landed in New York just after the Revolutionary War, when commercial relations between the fledgling United States and British Canada were resuming. Astor heard that Canadian furs commanded high prices in New York, so he set off up the Hudson River to find out for himself.

  He discovered that the fur trade was not for the frail or timid. He endured sub-Arctic winter weather, hostile Indians and cutthroat—literally, in some cases—competitors. But he also learned that a man of hardy ambition might make a fortune catering to the taste of New York’s upper and striving classes for headgear made from the processed fur of beavers. He bought beaver pelts from Indian and French Canadian trappers, carried them to New York and tallied his profits.

  Astor’s ambition grew, and he sought fresh opportunities. He met merchants who brought tea and silk from China, and he supposed he could do the same. He reckoned that the fur trade and the tea trade might comp
lement each other. He bought a share in a ship carrying thirty thousand pelts from New York to Canton; these were swapped for tea and other luxury items, and when the ship arrived back in New York, the profits inspired Astor to put all his capital into this new version of his business.

  He was sketching a plan when Lewis and Clark returned from the dead, as it seemed. Their successful crossing of the continent inspired Astor to focus on Oregon and the untapped fur resources it was said to contain. He plotted an invasion of Oregon from two directions at once: by land from the Mississippi Valley and by sea from the Pacific. He would dispatch a party of trappers and traders who would cross the Rockies and establish connections with the Indian tribes on the western slope. The Indians and Astor’s men would gather furs for transport down the Columbia to its mouth, where Astor’s seaborne contingent would establish a command post near Lewis and Clark’s wintering spot.

  For the marine arm Astor built the Tonquin, a three-masted bark capable of carrying nearly three hundred tons of cargo. The ship had a crew of twenty, commanded by Lieutenant Jonathan Thorn, on leave from the U.S. navy, and it mounted ten guns. Astor filled the vessel with trading goods to tempt the natives of Oregon, as well as materials for the construction and provisioning of the fort at the mouth of the Columbia. Also aboard were four subordinate partners of Astor’s, who would direct the commercial affairs of the enterprise from the fort and such additional posts as they saw fit to establish in the interior. These men would be remunerated by shares of the profits. A dozen salaried clerks, several craftsmen and thirteen French Canadian voyageurs, veterans of the Canadian fur trade, completed the ship’s roster.

  Astor doubted the loyalty of the voyageurs, several of whom had lately worked for the North West Company, whose business Astor was trying to undercut. But he couldn’t find Americans with the talents and experience the Canadians possessed, and so he took the chance. He should have doubted the loyalty of the four partners, especially the two of Scots descent who, unbeknownst to Astor, apprised the British minister in America, then visiting New York, of Astor’s project, which was supposed to be a secret. The intelligence was timely, as Britain and the United States were on the verge of war on account of Britain’s continued seizure of American merchant ships and their crews. The British might have seized the Tonquin if Astor hadn’t arranged its escort out of harbor and out to sea by the most storied ship in the American navy, the frigate Constitution. The Tonquin departed New York on September 8, 1810; on Christmas Day it rounded Cape Horn and entered the Pacific. Seven weeks later it dropped anchor in Hawaii, a regular reprovisioning spot for ships in that part of the world. Finally, in March 1811, the Tonquin reached the mouth of the Columbia.

  Meanwhile, Astor’s overland party struggled up the Missouri River. Wilson Price Hunt, another share partner, led four other partners and fifty voyageurs up the Missouri from St. Louis on the same route Lewis and Clark had followed, with an interpreter who was the son of Lewis and Clark’s interpreter. But, learning from their predecessors, the Astor party bypassed the domain of the Blackfeet and turned west well before the Missouri did. They encountered flocks of passenger pigeons that filled the sky from horizon to horizon, and herds of buffalo that covered the prairie. Their southerly route enabled them to avoid the Bitterroot Mountains, which had taxed the men of Lewis and Clark so sorely. They met the Snake River where it comes out of the Rockies, and they judged that it would carry them to the Columbia. But the Snake proved too turbulent, and after the drowning death of one man they abandoned their canoes and struck out overland on horses bought from the Shoshones. Winter caught them in the Blue Mountains, which served as a near substitute for the Bitterroots in terms of hardship inflicted on travelers. Not until February 1812 did they reach the mouth of the Columbia.

  BUT THE TONQUIN WAS NOT THERE, AND NEITHER WERE ITS captain and crew. Seeing no sign of the overlanders, who were still hundreds of miles away, Jonathan Thorn had hesitated to cross the Columbia’s stormy bar, where the powerful current of the river slams into the tides of the Pacific. Instead he dispatched a boat with five men to sound the channel. The first mate, chosen to command the boat, was no more eager than Thorn to risk destruction, not least since the boat’s crew consisted of voyageurs familiar with inland rivers but unacquainted with oceans and surf. Moreover, the mate’s uncle had drowned on this very spot a few years before. Yet Thorn closed his ears to the mate’s misgivings and ordered him to go. The mate took his case to the partners. “I am sent off without seamen to man my boat, in boisterous weather, and on the most dangerous part of the northwest coast,” he said. “My uncle was lost a few years ago on this same bar, and now I am going to lay my bones along side of his.”

  The partners interceded with Thorn, but the captain would not relent. He called the mate’s forebodings cowardice and demanded that the boat be off. The voyageurs pulled on the oars and the craft approached the bar. All hands crowded the rail to observe the progress of the boat, which rose and fell on the surging waves, bobbing in and out of sight. The boat grew smaller and smaller with distance before it suddenly disappeared. Observers from the ship couldn’t tell whether it had gone behind the waves or beneath them.

  Minutes passed, with no reappearance of the boat. Minutes became hours, and still no boat. Daylight waned and night fell. Nothing was seen or heard from the boat.

  The next day dawned, with still no sign. The captain ordered another boat launched to seek the first boat. But the seas were almost as high as on the previous day, and the second boat returned before it discovered anything.

  The captain sent out a third boat. This one all but foundered in the waves and made it back to the ship moments before it would have sunk.

  Yet again the captain ordered men into a boat. This time they were to seek the channel, and the ship would follow close behind. The operation succeeded well enough for the Tonquin to cross the bar, but the crash of current against tide nearly swamped the boat. The crew lost control and the boat was swept past the ship to sea, with the crew shouting in vain for help. The Tonquin ran aground and came within a nasty wave or two of breaking up. Before the ship had escaped the shoal and reached a semblance of safety inside the bar, the boat was out of sight and darkness was falling.

  The next morning Captain Thorn sent parties ashore, hoping that at least some of the men from the missing boats had made it to land. The searchers found one of the members of the last boat’s crew staggering disorientedly and clothed in tatters. He told a grim tale, saying that the boat, after being carried to sea, had been battered by huge waves that had washed the crew overboard and filled the craft with water. Two men were lost at once and seen no more. Three others clung to the sides of the boat and bailed out enough of the water to keep it afloat. They clambered back in.

  All three were hypothermic from the cold water and the wind. One expired in the boat, but the other two managed to row through the surf to shore. One of these collapsed, barely alive, upon reaching solid ground; the other was the man the ship’s men found, in shock. He was just able to lead them to his surviving partner.

  The other missing boat was never discovered, nor any of its crew. Eight men had been lost in the last mile of the Tonquin’s eight-thousand-mile voyage.

  YET WORSE WAS TO COME. THE CHIEF OF THE CHINOOK TRIBE that inhabited the lower Columbia was named Comcomly, and he appeared pleased to learn from the Americans on the Tonquin that they intended to establish a trading post. He had dealt with itinerant traders whose ships touched this part of the coast irregularly, and he concluded that having traders always at hand would be a great convenience. He assisted the Astorians; when two of the partners, after a visit to Comcomly’s lodge, ignored his warning that the waves in the estuary had grown too high for them to return safely to the Tonquin, he followed their boat in his own canoe and fished them out of the water when their craft capsized. While laborers from the ship erected the fort, which they called Astoria, Comcomly and his people brought beaver and otter pelts for barter with the
partners.

  The partners were happy for the business, but Captain Thorn was annoyed by the “Indian ragamuffins,” as he called them, swarming about his ship. Thorn was eager to get away and cruise up the coast seeking other trading spots, as his instructions from Astor and his own profit interests directed him to do. Besides, during the long voyage from New York he had fallen into bickering with the partners and wished to be rid of them. Eventually he made his departure, crossing the bar on a fine June day and heading north.

  Thorn sailed the Tonquin to Vancouver Island, where he anchored in a cove near the northern tip. The Indians there were accustomed to trade with visiting vessels, and the Tonquin was surrounded by canoes. Astor had cautioned Thorn against allowing Indians onto the ship, but Thorn thought he knew better. He laid his trade goods upon the decks and let the Indians aboard. They proved harder bargainers than he had expected, and he grew exasperated at their demands for high prices for their otter pelts. His temper got the better of him, and he confronted their chief, shouting in English. The chief didn’t understand, provoking Thorn the more. In his fury, Thorn snatched a pelt from the chief and slapped him in the face with it. He kicked and thrashed at the other pelts the Indians had brought aboard, and in further gestures he made clear he thought the Indians thieves and savages. He ordered them off the ship, punctuating his words with shoves and more kicks.

  The chief was incensed by this treatment, but he ordered the Indians away from the vessel. They took their pelts, climbed into their canoes and paddled to shore. Thorn cursed in satisfaction and declared that the Indians would be back soon and ready to accept his price. But the one partner who had accompanied him told him he must weigh anchor and leave the spot, for he had mortally offended the chief’s pride. Thorn dismissed the caution with a sneer. He pointed to the guns the Tonquin carried and said that if the natives made trouble he’d blow them to pieces.