by Stark, Peter
For months, Astor waited impatiently in New York as the North West Company partners debated his proposal, one group in Montreal, another at a meeting in July 1810 at the great baronial hall of Fort William on Lake Superior, the major post and staging area that the NWC had built some distance up the shoreline from Grand Portage. A strict decorum prevailed at these North West Company annual July gatherings. The Scottish partners sat at the long polished table before the huge fireplace, while clerks and those of lesser rank occupied wooden tables further back in the Great Hall. A maitre d’ from Montreal oversaw the serving staff, which presented a feast with china and white linen tablecloths. From this elegant hall and simple Council House in the wilderness of Lake Superior, surrounded by all the gunsmithing shops and warehouses and kitchens and other supporting outbuildings of the fort, the Scottish partners of the North West Company controlled the trade in thousands upon thousands of square miles of northern forest.
In considering Astor’s proposal, the partners had huge issues to resolve, and there was much at stake. Not only could the future of the company turn on these deliberations, but the future political configuration of North America itself and the role of the Pacific Ocean in global trade. The debate raged onward, over hours, over days, in formal meetings in the spare Council House. How to split the profits with Astor? How long would it take even to turn a profit? And who took the losses?
Between meetings, the former Highlanders adjourned to the Great Hall next door and feasted on wilderness delicacies such as fatty beaver tail and spit-roasted venison, braised moose heart and smoked whitefish, as well as the roast beef, veal, and legs of mutton provided by the fort’s own farm. They drank French wines, port, Madeira, and brandy, imported by freight canoe from Montreal, along with savory Double Gloucester cheeses as they considered how much of their best fur territory to concede in order to join this endeavor. Would it be worth the risk of giving up half ownership of what they knew to be profitable in the Great Lakes region? It was necessary also to decide whose Pacific “empire” it would be, and whether they could establish a better Pacific fur trade without Astor. But to answer this question, they had to decide who had the better claim to the West Coast. Did the Americans have any rightful claim whatsoever to any lands west of the crest of the Rocky Mountains at the western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase?
The questions were difficult, in many cases unanswerable, and in all cases the outcome remained extremely uncertain. Their sense of doubt—perhaps a legacy from their wind-blasted Scottish Highlands backgrounds—finally prevailed over Astor’s vision, optimism, and drive.
As the wintering partners at Fort William debated the proposal, the North West Company partners who remained in Montreal decided to vote no, their answer arriving first via express messenger at Astor’s offices in New York. Consensus between the two groups was complicated by long lags in communication with the partners at Fort William. Not having received news of the Montreal partners’ decision, wintering partners voted in favor of accepting Astor’s offer, with caveats—he could give them a third of his Pacific enterprise and they would work with him, but they also wanted to guard their own interests on the Pacific side of the Rockies.
Having heard only “no,” Astor now had to reconfigure his plans for the enterprise, rearranging the players he had assembled—who led, and who followed, and who might be loyal to whom. He thought carefully about how to make adjustments, restlessly working over the problem from his offices on Liberty Street. He may have mulled over this great business problem, this continental destiny, when, for exercise and amusement, he rode his horse along country paths of upper Manhattan Island looking at properties to buy, or in the evenings, when he and Sarah attended the opera.
He and Sarah were increasingly well-known New Yorkers. Music lovers who maintained a comparatively modest way of life, they nevertheless had begun to nurture more refined tastes, in the arts, in the company they kept, even in their pride in the Parisian silver tea set they liked to bring out for guests. A driven, focused businessman from the start, John Jacob Astor also was driven by the need to be someone important, to be recognized, to prevail, as he’d pledged when a young man selling bread and cakes. He had chosen a far larger destiny than the life of a butcher’s son in Walldorf. Of all the places in the world, North America compelled him toward it, where the sheer scale and vast wilds of the continent offered an enormous blank slate for someone of his ambition. With his grand plan now launched, he had moved decisively toward putting much of the western half of the continent within his personal domination and profit. He could eventually prevail at a level far beyond the burghers he once envied with their big brick houses on Broadway—indeed, at a level that was global in scope.
Within this grand vision, the issues Astor had to contend with day by day were nonetheless practical ones: With the merger off, would the North West Company now make a run at the rich Pacific Rim sea otter trade, too? What about the interior Northwest trade, and the Missouri River trade? Could he trust his own men who had formerly worked for the North West Company to stay loyal to him if a fierce rivalry unfolded on the West Coast and across the Pacific? Would his empire and fleet end up staring down the cannon barrels of the world’s most powerful fighting force—the British Royal Navy?
Astor wrote to Hunt, who was at the time in St. Louis trying to gather more recruits to take to the Nodaway winter camp. He told Hunt that as any partnership with the North West Company was no longer possible, he had demoted Donald Mackenzie and promoted Hunt to sole leader of the Overland Party. International tensions continued to rise with Great Britain over the boarding of ships in the Atlantic and other territorial issues, and without the North West Company merger, Astor wanted to ensure that the leadership of his Overland Party and West Coast empire stayed with the loyal Mr. Hunt of Trenton, New Jersey, rather than with a British subject, former North West Company employee, and Highlander like Donald Mackenzie—no matter how expert the latter was in the wilds.
Once its Montreal partners had voted down the proposed partnership with Astor, the Montreal headquarters of the North West Company did, in fact, begin to make its own countermoves. Its Scottish fur trading partners weren’t about to give over the entire western continent to John Jacob Astor. Their own trader Alexander Mackenzie, after being the first European to reach the Pacific Coast overland from Canada, had written that whichever country first established settlements at the Columbia River would control a vast empire. As far as they were concerned, the Columbia River basin was British, not U.S., territory. They claimed it on the strength of the earlier coastal explorations of Captain Cook, George Vancouver, and Alexander Mackenzie himself, thus laying their own claim to a chunk of the Pacific Rim the size of France—and possibly far larger.
“No establishment of the [United] States on that river or on the coast of the Pacific should therefore be sanctioned,” the Montreal partners had earlier warned authorities in London.
The “wintering” partners at Fort William dispatched their “maybe” after meeting on the Astor proposal. But, instead of east to London, they dispatched it and instructions accompanying it westward by express canoe out on the chain of rivers and lakes that led into the wilderness beyond Lake Superior. The message was addressed to David Thompson, already a legend for the thousands of square miles of unknown terrain in interior North America he’d explored and mapped for the North West Company. The Indians knew him as “Koo-koo-Sint”—“Star-Looker”—in reference to the many celestial observations he’d made with navigational instruments. With an aptitude for mathematics, refined mapmaking abilities, and expert skills for surviving in the wilds, David Thompson was a professional where Hunt was a beginner.
While the wintering partners at Fort William had voted to consider joining forces with Astor in some way, they also very much wanted to protect their own interests on the West Coast. The message from the North West Company wintering partners at Fort William ordered Thompson to proceed directly to the mouth of the Columbia
.
The game for Astor had shifted. It no longer resembled solitaire, arranging and rearranging the cards, but rather another game he played frequently on his outdoor portico—checkers. He now had a tenacious opponent working the board across from him with thousands of square miles of North American terrain and the Pacific Rim empire at stake, as well as fortunes—and lives—that would be made or lost based on the fitness of his strategy.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BY LATE MAY 1811, HUNT’S OVERLAND PARTY, FOLLOWING the Lewis and Clark route across the wilderness of the western continent, had ascended well up the Missouri from their Nodaway winter camp, where they’d been stuck since the previous November. On the morning of May 26, the party pulled over to the riverbank for breakfast, as they routinely did after an early start. As they sat on the bank, eating, smoking, and resting from their early morning exertions, they were surprised to spot three white men in two canoes riding swiftly downstream on the Missouri’s spring current.
They fired a rifle to signal to the distant boats, which paddled across the current to the shore. One of canoeists was well into middle age and wore a bandana wrapped around his head. Underneath the bandana, he bore a massive scar. He had been scalped.
He had this message for Wilson Price Hunt and his Overland Party:
Avoid the Blackfeet at all costs.
This was not the first story they had heard about the Blackfeet. Experienced travelers heading into troubled regions have a rule of thumb: From afar, the physical danger often sounds worse than it is up close, as distance tends to darken rumors. This was not the case, however, for Wilson Price Hunt and his Overland Party. As they ascended the Missouri en route to the Pacific Coast, the rumors they heard about the Indian tribes that lay ahead, especially the Blackfeet, grew ever more frightening.
HUNT OVERLAND PARTY, APRIL–JULY 1811
Get more men. So Hunt had been warned by traders like Ramsay Crooks. Crooks, who had joined the expedition back at Mackinac Island, had undergone his own hair-raising encounter the previous year while heading up the Missouri and trying to establish a trade among the Plains Indian tribes. Six hundred mounted Sioux warriors had suddenly appeared on the riverbank and ordered Crooks’s river captains, whose boats were laden with trade goods, to pull over and trade with them. Crooks and company had done as ordered and started to trade, but as soon as the Sioux went back to their villages, they had fled downstream salvaging the goods that they could.
Though he took Crooks’s advice, Hunt had found men in short supply. Throughout the winter, while his Overland Party remained at Nodaway winter camp, Hunt had shuttled from winter camp about four hundred miles downriver to St. Louis trying to boost the party from its original thirty-some members to a full sixty. Besides recruiting, Hunt had to contend with several American hunters who, claiming mistreatment, had quit at the winter camp, and at the same time keep his eye on Mr. Astor’s schedule, which called for him to reach the Pacific Ocean and to establish his line of communication and supply of furs from the interior regions to the coast.
“Mr. Hunt, in his eagerness to press forward,” reported Ross, “was perfectly worn out with anxiety.”
Hunt had finally left St. Louis in early March 1811, bound for his Nodaway camp, and traveling in a ten-oared riverboat that carried his latest batch of recruits. Besides voyageurs at the oars, the boat carried rifle-toting American woodsmen to serve as the Overland Party’s hunters, an Indian interpreter with his wife and their two small boys, and two eccentric British botanists. The latter had been urged into the unexplored West by Thomas Jefferson and his scientific friends back at Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society. Botany, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, had become an exalted science since it was a way of investigating the many newly explored regions of the earth. Wealthy Europeans maintained gardens of exotic and foreign plant species the way the wealthy collect art today. Astor had promised Jefferson to share any scientific information that his expeditions gathered, and, as a result, Hunt was eager to have the two botanists along.
The botanists, for their part, welcomed the opportunity to collect undocumented plant species in the American interior, but they might not have been entirely aware of what lay ahead. As foreigners and scientists—a different tribe of sorts—they may have felt themselves partly immunized from any grudges between Plains Indians and American woodsmen. The young and plant-obsessed Thomas Nuttall, for instance, was known to use his musket barrel as a spade to dig up the rootballs of plants, hopelessly clogging the weapon’s muzzle with mud and rendering it useless in times of danger.
A short ways upriver from St. Louis, Hunt’s riverboat with the new recruits had stroked past a hamlet, La Charette, where an old man stood on the riverbank. Some of the party recognized him. It was eighty-four-year-old Daniel Boone, who had retired here from the too-crowded Kentucky wilderness that he’d originally opened to settlement; he still trapped for beaver pelts farther up the Missouri. Here in the flesh stood what would become a central irony in the exploration of the West—those trailblazers who marked the path for “civilization” to follow still felt an emotional tug to keep it wild and pure, knowing that this wildness, like the native peoples and animals, was diminishing with every passing year. Pulling a few miles farther upstream, Hunt’s riverboat had encountered another American woodsman who, although only in his later thirties, was already something of a legend, too—John Colter.
The botanist John Bradbury, less single-mindedly obsessive about plants than Nuttall, but energetically curious nevertheless, had heard that Colter, in his wilderness wanderings, had discovered the massive fossil of a forty-foot-long fish. Colter had served with Lewis and Clark five years earlier on their journey to the Pacific and then stayed in the Upper Missouri region for several years to trap, before finally returning the previous spring to St. Louis. Summoned from his nearby cabin to the riverbank, Colter told the awaiting botanist that he didn’t know anything about a huge fish fossil. But Colter nevertheless held Bradbury spellbound with other stories from the unexplored Rocky Mountains, which Bradbury wrote down. One of these served as further warning to Hunt’s Overland Party of what lay ahead and has since become infamous in the annals of Western exploration.
Colter and his trapping partner, a man named John Potts, were paddling their canoe one day along a small tributary of the Jefferson’s Fork of the Upper Missouri when, without warning, they encountered a group of some five or six hundred mounted Blackfeet warriors emerging from cottonwood groves on both sides of the river. Colter steered the canoe ashore. As the canoe touched the shore, one of the Indians plucked out a rifle that lay in the canoe. Stepping out, Colter pulled away the rifle from the Indian. Despite Colter’s warnings to stay put, Potts made a start to escape in the canoe. Potts had barely pushed off from the bank when a warrior unleashed an arrow.
“Colter, I am wounded!” Potts shouted.
Leveling his rifle from the canoe, Potts fired at one of the many warriors on the riverbank. The Indian fell over, dead. There was the sudden twang of bows and a whooshing of air. Potts, sitting in the canoe, was instantly pierced by dozens of arrows. His body appeared, as Colter phrased it to Bradbury, who recorded it with a botanist’s precision, as though “he was made a riddle of.”*
After having Colter seized by his warriors, the Blackfeet chief asked Colter if he was a fast runner.
Colter, guessing what was about to happen, told the chief that he was a very bad runner.
The chief had him stripped naked and led Colter out onto a broad and open plain nearby. The several hundred warriors, armed with spears, eagerly waited three or four hundred yards back.
“The chief,” recorded Bradbury, “now . . . released him, bidding him to save himself if he could.”
At that moment, the warriors emitted a piercing scream, and the race was on.
Colter was, in fact, a very fast runner. He sprinted off barefoot across the plain, heading toward the Jefferson Fork of the Missouri, six mi
les away, the Blackfeet equivalent of a ten-kilometer footrace. Prickly pear cactus buried themselves in the soles of his feet as he ran three miles without looking back. The whoops grew fainter and blood began to pour from his mouth and nostrils, as happens with racehorses and athletes when extreme exertion causes lung tissue to hemorrhage. Finally, Colter dared to spin around for a look. He’d far outrun all the warriors except one, in pursuit only a hundred yards back and closing.
Sprinting onward, Colter heard the footsteps and heavy panting draw closer, and expected at any moment to feel a flung spear pierce his back. He abruptly stopped, whirled about, and spread out his arms, displaying a chest splattered with the blood spilling from his nose. The exhausted Blackfeet warrior, suddenly surprised, raised his spear to throw, tripped, fell, and broke the spear. Colter grabbed the blade end and rammed it through the warrior’s body, pinning him to the ground like a skewered fish.
Colter raced onward and, finally reaching the Jefferson Fork, plunged in and hid himself under a logjam. Like a beaver in his lodge, he held his body underwater and his head in the airspace between logs. The Blackfeet, shrieking “like so many devils,” scrambled over the logjam without detecting him, although he feared they might light it on fire. At nightfall, Colter slipped out, stealthily swam downstream, and took to shore. It was a seven-day trek, totally naked, back to an isolated fur post on the Yellowstone River that had been recently founded by St. Louis fur trader Manuel Lisa. Colter, a rugged American hunter, noted Bradbury, survived his trek by eating a root known to the Indians; the botanist, who’d been commissioned by the Linnaean Society of Liverpool to gather American plant specimens, carefully identified the plant by its Latin name, Psoralea esculenta (known today as prairie turnip).