Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival

by Stark, Peter

  “[D]elighted with the vivacity and dexterity of the two men,” a witness reported, “he gave them an eagle to drink his health.”

  The ten-dollar coin, a half ounce of solid gold, represented a small fortune. John Jacob had come a long way from his start as a baker’s boy. He turned to a group of gentleman acquaintances.

  “Six Americans,” he told them, “couldn’t do what these two brawny fellows just did.”

  Proud Yankee wharf rats jeered. His prosperous New York acquaintances took issue. But the voyageurs’ leader, the Scottish fur trader McKay, spoke up to challenge the crowd: They would race any boat in New York Harbor over a three-mile course at ten-to-one odds.

  No one stepped forward.

  Satisfied that he had hired the best in the business, taking pride in their skill and strength as a harbinger for the success of his bold, continent-changing undertaking, Astor directed his French-Canadian voyageurs across New York Harbor to his Brooklyn staging area. Here more of his recruits would assemble to board his ship, Tonquin, bound in a month for the Pacific Coast, to lay the first foundations of the great empire.

  No exact record exists of that meeting between President Jefferson and John Jacob Astor two years earlier at the president’s house. Jefferson was so passionately engaged in the possibilities of the western continent that he was known to crawl around on hands and knees in the president’s office studying maps spread out on the floor. It’s clear that Astor and Jefferson fueled each other with their mutual enthusiasm and vision of the West Coast’s limitless possibilities. Jefferson was a philosophical idealist (but practical statesman) possessed of a continent-wide vision and deeply committed to the concept of nations living free from royal rule. Astor was an extremely focused and yet far-seeing businessman whose deepest loyalties, besides to his family and closest acquaintances, were to his business empire: extending it as far as possible, preferably in the form of a monopoly, while maximizing his bottom line. For these two energized individuals meeting in Washington, the Pacific Coast hovered over the western horizon like a giant blank slate—a tabula rasa for statecraft on a hemispherical scale and trade on a global one.

  “A powerful company is at length forming for taking up the Indian commerce on a large scale,” Jefferson wrote to Meriwether Lewis after his meeting with Astor. Lewis was governor of the Louisiana Territory and based in St. Louis at the time. “It will be under the direction of a most excellent man, a Mr. Astor, merch’t of New, long engaged in the business, & perfectly master of it.”

  After their meeting, Astor had framed his global commercial vision into an overarching strategy and meticulous business plan that dovetailed with Jefferson’s geopolitical thinking. As soon as possible, in 1809, Astor would dispatch his first ship, the Enterprise, to test the profitability of his transglobal trading scheme with a quick stop at the Northwest Coast. The following year, in 1810, he would send two advance parties—one around Cape Horn by sea on the Tonquin and one across America by land. The Overland Party would begin to lay out a vast network of fur posts reaching up the Missouri River, over the Rockies, and to the Pacific Ocean, and open a “line of communication” across the continent along which both messages and furs could travel.

  The two advance parties, Seagoing and Overland, would meet at the mouth of the Columbia River. Here, overlooking the Pacific, they would construct the first American colony on the West Coast. This great trading “emporium” would gather furs from the western half of the North American continent. It would form the apex of an elegant and fantastically profitable triangle trade between three continents that employed a fleet of Astor’s ships continuously circling the globe. From manufactories in London and New York the ships would carry inexpensive trade goods valued by the Indians—knives, blankets, pots, beads—around Cape Horn to the Northwest Coast. Here, along two thousand miles of the forested, indented Pacific coastline, Astor’s agents would exchange the trade goods with Coastal Indians for valuable furs such as sea otter. They would also load the ships with furs funneled to the emporium from Astor’s interior network of trading posts, which covered tens of thousands of square miles, as well as gather furs from Russian posts on the Alaskan coast.

  Then the Astor ships would transport the heavy fur packets—sea otter, beaver, lynx, bear—across the Pacific. His captains would sell them at a tremendous markup in Canton, where a powerful demand existed from wealthy Chinese. Then, in China, Astor’s ships would load porcelain, silk, tea, and yellow nankeen cloth and sail these cargos around the other half of the globe (or return via the same route, depending on conditions) to the markets of London and New York, completing the circumnavigation and reaping another astronomical profit from fashionable and eager European and American consumers of Chinese luxury goods.

  The scale of the plan was staggering. As of this date, 1810, the entire tradable wealth of largely unexplored western North America lay in its furs. There was no gold. There were no commercial fisheries. There was no wheat grown or timber harvested. Astor, this still-young and very ambitious immigrant, had conceived a plan that funneled the entire tradable wealth of the westernmost sector of the North American continent north of Mexico through his own hands. It was, as the early accounts described it, “the largest commercial enterprise the world has ever known.”

  Barely twenty-five years had elapsed since the Revolutionary War ended. To most spectators milling about the lower Manhattan docks that summer day in 1810 gawking at the voyageurs’ canoe, the North American continent didn’t extend much farther west than the Ohio Valley—the far edge of European settlement. That a West Coast of the continent even existed remained the haziest of notions to them, and that the vast Pacific Ocean reached far beyond it to China lay almost beyond imagination. The idea of colonizing the West Coast—to start a commercial empire or a kind of sister country on the Pacific, as Thomas Jefferson hoped, one that looked west toward China instead of east toward Europe—would make as much sense to most of the New York spectators, had they known about the great plan, as colonizing the stars or building a city on the moon.

  As the voyageurs’ big canoe sliced across New York Harbor, headed toward the Brooklyn staging grounds, with its echoing French boat songs and surging prow wave, Astor was pleased with the great scheme that he had set in motion. On this happy, bright Sunday in August 1810, however, neither John Jacob Astor nor Thomas Jefferson, nor anyone who had signed on as a participant, possessed the least inkling of the toll the “grand venture” would exact. It would be a toll in lives, in fortunes, in sanity, and in the ultimate configuration of America.

  IT WAS AN EASY WALK of six blocks or so from John Jacob Astor’s fur shop at 71 Liberty Street—on today’s Zuccotti Park—to his home at 223 Broadway. Turning up Broadway, he passed three-story brick houses in the Federal style, then the pillared façade of St. Paul’s Church. Astor surely turned his plans over in his head as he made that daily walk. Returning home to his early dinner, and his peaceful game of checkers or solitaire, did he think about the choices he’d made, and the risks he took, and, especially, the leaders he had recruited so carefully for his grand enterprise? As if turning over more face cards in his game of Patience, feeling the reach of his skill and the run of his luck, Astor, in the months ahead, would discover much about his chosen leaders as they staggered under extreme stress—in the roaring Pacific, in the unmapped canyons of the West, and, perhaps most profoundly, in their own minds.

  There was Wilson Price Hunt, the young businessman from Trenton, New Jersey. An acquaintance of Astor’s, and an American, and thus trusted by Astor to be wholly loyal to the cause, Hunt would serve as Mr. Astor’s stand-in to head the West Coast colony and emporium, overseeing the entire Pacific Rim trade empire. Leaving from Astor’s offices in Manhattan in early summer of 1810, Hunt traveled to Montreal in company with two Scottish fur traders to recruit those first voyageurs who had canoed so dramatically down the Hudson River. From there he was to lead the Overland Party to the Columbia River. Known almost univers
ally to friends as a kind, thoughtful, and consensus-seeking person with good business sense and a fascination with the West, he had most recently lived in St. Louis selling supplies to the first fur trappers heading up the Missouri into the new U.S. Louisiana Territory. Though Hunt had no experience in the wilderness, Astor had faith that this quick-learning newcomer, who would have the help and company of more experienced fur traders during the journey, could lead a large party across one of the largest, least known, and most rugged wildernesses in the world.

  For second in command of the West Coast emporium, Astor chose Duncan McDougall. McDougall was to travel to the West Coast aboard the Tonquin as a member of the Seagoing Party. Also a Scottish-born fur trader from Montreal, and thus a British subject, McDougall was short, proud, energetic, and quick to take command—as well as take offense. Astor would have preferred that McDougall and the several other Scottish fur traders he recruited be American citizens, especially in light of rising tensions between the United States and Britain over territorial issues, but Astor wanted to hire the best fur traders in North America. The best in the business, by far, were the Scottish traders and French-Canadian voyageurs in the Canadian trade. Many of these traders were employees of the Montreal-based North West Company, whose sprawling operations stretched over thousands of square miles of wilderness from the Great Lakes nearly to the Rockies, while the Hudson’s Bay Company operated farther to the north.

  Astor knew many of the North West Company traders from his fur-buying trips to Montreal and dinners and dances there. He identified several willing to throw in their lot with his bold new enterprise, either because they were unhappy with their roles in the North West Company or enticed by the mind-boggling prospects of Astor’s expedition. He made them a tempting offer. Christening his new entity the Pacific Fur Company and incorporating it in early 1810, he divvied it up into one hundred shares and extended capital up to $400,000. That was just to start—more funding could be made available if needed. If they signed on with him, Astor would give each of these Scottish-born fur traders five of those hundred shares and would name them a “partner” or “shareholder.” Should Astor’s vast plan succeed, they all knew, their shares would be worth a fortune.

  Four signed on, filling the roster of Astor partners with a tangle of Scottish clans: in addition to Duncan McDougall, there were Donald Mackenzie, Alexander McKay, and David Stuart, who would split his shares with his young nephew, Robert. Three other partners, two of them also of Scottish descent, would join en route.

  The third of Astor’s chosen leaders was an American patriot and U.S. naval hero, Captain Jonathan Thorn. Astor referred to Thorn as his “gunpowder fellow.” A thirty-one-year-old lieutenant taking a leave of absence from the U.S. Navy, Thorn would captain the Tonquin and command a crew of twenty-three. Sailing around Cape Horn, captain and crew would carry aboard the Tonquin as passengers the first wave of Scottish fur traders and French-Canadian voyageurs to start the emporium on the Northwest Coast. Thorn had made a name in 1804 by sailing directly into enemy fire off Tripoli in the Mediterranean during a fierce battle against North Africa’s Barbary pirates, who had attacked American shipping there. While the youngish Captain Thorn had never commanded a civilian ship before, his utter fearlessness in battle and his unquestioned American patriotism—as well as his strict adherence to orders—appealed to Mr. Astor. Astor had confidently assured his Scottish partners that if there was fighting at sea to be done to establish the West Coast empire, Captain Thorn would “blow all out of the water.”

  According to Astor’s plan, his chosen leaders would recruit other participants en route. Many would play prominent roles: fur trader Ramsay Crooks, Virginia hunter John Day, and an incredibly tough Native American woman leading her two toddlers. Known by her Europeanized name, Marie Dorion, she would stumble out of the wintry wilderness many months later with an incredible story to tell.

  By August 1810, when that first canoe of recruited voyageurs landed at the lower Manhattan docks, John Jacob Astor had been laying his plans for more than two years. He had allowed for every possible problem. He had backup plans for his backup plans. He had worked diplomatic channels from Washington all the way to St. Petersburg, Russia. He had received the enthusiastic endorsement of Jefferson and his pledge of “every reasonable patronage & facility in the power of the Executive.” He had proposed partnerships with his potential rival, the North West Company. His emissaries were convincing Russia with its Alaskan fur posts to use his ships to carry Russian furs to China, hoping to lock up a world monopoly on fur, or something close to it. He had interviewed recruits, chosen leaders, and instructed his agents to recruit still more voyageurs and hunters, Hawaiian swimmers, and Indian interpreters. He was prepared to put tremendous capital behind this epic undertaking, one of the greatest business ventures the world has known: a global trading empire, a colony—perhaps even a country—of his own.

  In all his meticulous planning and preparation, however, Astor had not allowed for one major factor. Mountain climbers talk about “exposure,” meaning one’s level of physical risk in a particular situation—on a very narrow ledge on a cliff face, for instance—when a small mistake can result in major consequences. In 1810, when John Jacob Astor launched his great endeavor, this far, wild edge of the North American continent—with its brutal North Pacific storms, hostile natives, extreme remoteness, difficulty of communication, vulnerability to foreign empires, dense rain forests, and surf-battered coasts—was as exposed as any habitable place on earth.

  Nor was it possible to predict the powerful distorting effect that this degree of exposure would have on the personalities and leadership abilities of the men Astor had chosen to head his West Coast empire. Under extreme stress, each leader succumbed to his own best and worst traits.

  For anyone who stood to gain from it, however, Astor’s vision was too mesmerizing not to embrace. His great trading scheme harmoniously and profoundly joined the dreams of two powerful and far-seeing men. Astor would dominate the world fur market, the Pacific Rim trade, and reap fantastic profits, as would his fur-trader partners. Through John Jacob Astor’s powerful global trade network and West Coast colony, President Jefferson and his successors would establish a democratic outpost on the dim, distant Pacific Coast. Jefferson’s vision embraced the entirety of North America and accorded Astor’s enterprise a powerful role in shaping the continent’s political destiny.

  “I view [your undertaking],” Jefferson would write to Astor, “as the germ of a great, free and independent empire on that side of our continent, and that liberty and self-government spreading from that side as well as this side, will ensure their complete establishment over the whole.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE BICKERING ABOARD THE TONQUIN STARTED THAT first night out of New York Harbor, on September 8, 1810. Captain Thorn, following his naval discipline, ordered all lights out at 8:00 P.M. His salt-hardened crew diligently obeyed. But the four clannish, woodsy, Scottish fur traders on board as passengers hadn’t finished their socializing on deck, chatting and smoking their pipes as if sitting around a campfire. Nor had the dozen sinewy, French-Canadian voyageurs. Nor the eight literate young men from Canada who had signed on as clerks with Mr. Astor, some of them scribbling away in their journals.

  The argumentative Scottish fur traders flatly refused Captain Thorn’s order for bedtime. Mr. Astor had made them partners in the great scheme, they retorted. They held a financial interest. That meant, as shareholders, they owned part of the Tonquin. How could Captain Thorn tell them what to do aboard their own ship? they demanded.

  Another question arose: Who would sleep where? The 300-ton Tonquin, ninety-six feet long, square-rigged with three masts, a newly built and fast-sailing ship, was crammed full of the crew of twenty-three plus the twenty-six passengers plus mounds of supplies for the emporium’s warehouses-to-be. Captain Thorn had assigned to the Spartan quarters before the mast the passengers known as “mechanics”—the blacksmith, carpenter, an
d cooper for the West Coast emporium—as well as several clerks-in-training. Here they would share quarters with the Tonquin’s common sailors and help out with sailors’ duties. The Scottish partners and clerks took this as an insult. They confronted Captain Thorn and asked him to move their mechanics and clerks-in-training aft to the more luxurious main cabin with the other clerks.

  “He was a strict disciplinarian,” wrote one of the clerks, Gabriel Franchère, who kept a journal, “of a quick and passionate temper, accustomed to exact obedience, considering nothing but duty, and giving himself no trouble about the murmurs of his crew, taking counsel of nobody, and following Mr. Astor’s instructions to the letter. Such was the man who had been selected to command our ship.”

  Astor had anticipated that the mossy, comradely, forest-grown hierarchy among the passengers aboard the Tonquin might collide headlong with Captain Thorn’s iron chain of naval command. He had written out detailed instructions to his chosen leaders before the voyage began. To Thorn, Astor had written that the captain needed to pay careful attention to the health of all aboard, and foster harmony and good humor aboard the ship.

  “To prevent any misunderstandings,” Astor wrote to Captain Thorn, “will require your particular good management.”

  But “good management” was a phrase open to interpretation. The captain refused to budge to the partners’ request. The mechanics would stay where he had assigned them—in the forecastle with the common sailors—and work as he ordered.

  McDougall, the small, proud Scottish partner, was incensed. It was McKay, however, who served as their de facto spokesman. At forty years old, the former North West Company employee was deeply respected in fur-trading circles for having crossed the continent to the Pacific with Alexander Mackenzie in 1793. Known for his expertise in scouting wilderness trails and working harmoniously with Indians, he was described by clerk Franchère as both “bold and enterprising,” while also “whimsical and eccentric.”