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

by Stark, Peter

  They walked naked, upriver, for four days. They spent four nights without fire trying to sleep naked in the chill of early spring. Finally they reached a small Indian encampment. The inhabitants gave them food and bits of clothing. Several days more on foot brought them upstream to the camp of Yeck-a-tap-am, at the Umatilla mouth, who a few weeks earlier had treated them as a father would his sons. According to Ross’s telling of it, the two were preparing to head all the way back to St. Louis via the just-explored overland route when they spotted Stuart’s canoes paddling that morning down the Columbia from the Okanagan post.

  “Come onshore!”

  Five months after their ordeal began, Crooks and Day finally were safe.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  AS THE STUART FLOTILLA OF CANOES CARRYING CROOKS and Day approached Astoria on May 11, a large sailing ship rode at anchor at Baker’s Bay just inside the Columbia’s mouth. As the Stuart party touched at the new wharf under construction at Astoria, to the “great surprise and great joy” of all, they learned that the ship anchored ten miles downstream was the Beaver. Astor had dispatched the vessel the previous autumn to resupply what he hoped—but hadn’t heard—was his new emporium on the Pacific. At 490 tons, nearly twice the size of the Tonquin, well armed, and laden with an enormous load of trade goods, the Beaver had arrived at the Columbia’s mouth only four days before. Its Captain Sowles, a careful man, following Astor’s instructions precisely, cautiously sailed back and forth beyond the Columbia Bar until he could learn whether the emporium existed and remained in friendly hands. The Beaver signaled by firing cannons, until cannons had answered in the distance and Comcomly’s big canoe paddled out to meet it, with an oared boat following behind bearing McDougall and one of the clerks as the official greeting party.

  The Beaver brought a huge boost of energy to the outpost on the Pacific—dozens of men, hundreds of bales of trade goods, arsenals of armaments, good food and live animals, barrels of liquor, and instructions and support directly from the hand of Mr. Astor himself. At Astor’s wish, the Beaver carried many Americans, as he wanted to ensure that his enterprise on the Pacific would be primarily managed and staffed by American rather than British personnel, especially as tensions continued to rise between the two nations in the Atlantic. Aboard were fifteen American laborers, five clerks (“young gentlemen,” as Irving put it, “of good connexions in the American cities”), including John Jacob Astor’s own nephew, George Ehninger, in addition to six Canadian voyageurs. Aboard the Beaver was also another prominent manager in the Astor enterprise, this one of American citizenship like Hunt—John Clarke. Unlike Hunt, Clarke had experience in the American fur trade of the upper Midwest. Astor hoped his American man Clarke, as the Scotsman Ross put it, would stand out as a “brightest star” in the Pacific enterprise.

  A kind of convergence of parties arrived at Astoria all at once. This same day, May 11, that the Stuart party canoes paddled into the settlement from upriver and the Beaver rode at anchor in Baker’s Bay, Donald Mackenzie also returned to Astoria from further explorations up the Willamette River. He brought highly favorable reports of a broad valley between low hills covered with pine and spreading oaks.

  “Between these high lands, lie what is called the Valley of the Wallamitte, the frequent haunts of innumerable herds of elk and deer . . . a very rich country,” Ross wrote.

  Astoria jumped with planning and strategy now that all partners were finally present—among them Hunt, McDougall, the two Stuarts, Mackenzie, and the newly arrived Clarke—as well as scores of men and tons of fresh supplies. Hunt was in charge. As ever, following Mr. Astor’s instructions, he aimed for consensus among the partners and was able to effect an agreement on a comprehensive plan. The partners would send out expeditions in virtually all directions to establish a vast network of posts. These tendrils of John Jacob Astor’s empire on the Pacific would spread out like a giant web from the epicenter at Astoria to capture the fur trade of this entire sector of the North American continent, funnel it through the emporium, and leverage its wealth into a round-the-world global trading empire:

  North—To establish posts beyond David Stuart’s on the Okanagan and counter any activity of the rival North West Company in what they called New Caledonia.

  East—To the interior mountain valleys of the Kootenai and Salish people and to build posts in the Snake River country.

  South—To establish posts in the great rich valley of the Willamette.

  Overland—To fetch the supplies cached at Caldron Linn, and to set off overland to St. Louis with the messages for Mr. Astor that had been stolen on the first attempt.

  Sea-ward—To collect sea otter furs, exchange trade goods with the Russian posts in Alaska, and load Russian furs. On this mission, Astoria’s leader, Wilson Price Hunt, would board the Beaver and sail up the Northwest Coast.

  THREE THOUSAND MILES AWAY, on May 12, 1812, the day after that happy arrival at Astoria, John Jacob Astor opened his newspaper, the New York Gazette and General Advertiser. A prominent item on the second page confirmed vague rumors he’d been hearing recently, emanating from ship captains on the tarry wharves of New York: The Tonquin, and its crew, had been lost.

  A letter from Mr. Nathaniel Woodbury of Danvers, dated Kegharni (in the South Sea), Sept. 5, 1811, contains the following melancholy report: “That in June last the ship Tonquin, Thorn, master, was lying at anchor, at a village near Nootka Sound . . . for the purpose of trade—that a great number of Indians were on board, when, on some misunderstanding, they suddenly attacked the crew, killed all on board except the captain and one more, who [fled to] the magazine, and seeing no possibility of escape, chose to be their own executioners, and accordingly put fire to powder, which blew the ship to pieces, and destroyed many Indians. . . . The ship brought out a large number of persons, part of a company who have commenced a settlement on the Columbia River—and the place where she was taken is not more than two degrees north of the place where she landed her settlers.”

  That night, John Jacob and Sarah Astor attended a play, as they often did. Performed on the Manhattan stage that week were two romances, The Child of Nature: A Dramatic Piece, from the French of Madame the Marchioness of Sillery and The Lady of the Lake: A Melo-Dramatic Romance, based on Walter Scott’s poem. Astor ran into a friend in the audience. The friend consoled him about the stunning news in the Gazette. According to Irving’s account of the incident, the friend remarked that he was surprised to see Astor out at the theater after so severe a blow to his enterprise.

  “What would you have me do?” Astor replied. “Would you have me stay at home and weep for what I cannot help?”

  It was a shock, to be sure, this sudden and violent end to his ship, captain, and crew the previous summer. But he was not about to give up of his dream of empire over the loss of a single ship. Rather the Tonquin’s loss seemed to harden his determination and prepare him to deepen his already staggering investment. His eminent business practicality trumped whatever sentimentality he felt for the loss of life. He had known all along he was in this for the long haul and that there would be difficult obstacles to overcome. He knew it would take several years at best for the West Coast empire to turn a profit.

  A few weeks after he read the grim account of the Tonquin, Astor received good news. Reports started coming in from other sea captains of his ship Enterprise nearing New York Harbor after her two-and-a-half-year voyage to the Northwest Coast and China. The Enterprise’s cargo, when finally tabulated, returned John Jacob Astor his initial investment in cheap trade goods many times over. Based on the Enterprise returns, he estimated that $20,000 worth of trinkets in New York could be traded for furs on the Northwest Coast that would bring $80,000 to $100,000 from the merchants at Canton—and another huge jump in profit beyond that when he used those returns to purchase Chinese luxury goods and sell them in New York.

  It had worked. The Pacific Rim and transglobal triangle trade had made the kind of immensely profitable returns for which h
e’d hoped. The pieces of his West Coast empire were coming together, although he still didn’t know exactly what had happened to the Overland Party. He frequently wrote to St. Louis with inquiries as to any news.

  What worried him most now was not the explosion of the Tonquin. Rather, in this May and June 1812, it was the fast-escalating tension between the United States and Great Britain. Britain was fighting Napoleon and needed a steady supply of fresh recruits to send into battle. The British Royal Navy had taken to stopping American commercial ships on the Atlantic Ocean, boarding them, dragging off crew members who were thought to be British subjects, and conscripting them into the British armed forces.

  U.S. president James Madison declared this and other obnoxious British practices and encroachments had to stop. But they didn’t stop.

  Astor suspected trouble was on the way.

  THE FRENZY OF PLANNING AND PREPARATION at Astoria lasted late into June. The emporium buzzed with more than a hundred men, each assigned a task to forward the grand plan—packing goods for the canoes, preparing food, burning charcoal for the ironworks, clearing brush, erecting structures. Chinook and Clatsop Indians rode canoes to Astoria bearing elk and venison, salmon and furs, to trade for beads and axes, blankets and pots, from the emporium’s warehouses. Plans were laid for a large shingled building to serve as a hospital and a lodgings for the tradesmen, such as the blacksmiths and carpenters who served this first American colony on the Pacific. Amid all this activity were other good tidings. Astor’s potential rival, the North West Company, wasn’t much in evidence in the lower and middle reaches of the Columbia—as if they had withdrawn to the north and left this great unclaimed chunk of the continent to the Americans. The Astorians knew that the North West Company had recently set up posts elsewhere, on some of the Columbia’s northern branches, such as the Spokane River. The partners at Astoria, now under the American businessman Hunt instead of the former Nor’wester and Scotsman McDougall, pledged to build Astor’s posts directly alongside the rival company and compete with the Nor’westers head-to-head on the Columbia’s northern tributaries.

  That early summer of 1812 unfolded as a relatively peaceful and prosperous time at Astoria. But just beneath the surface of this society lay the small fractures of psychological stress. On May 12, the day after Ramsay Crooks arrived at Astoria after his five-month ordeal, he simply threw in his shares of the Astor enterprise and quit. He’d been dragged in a travois, starved in a canyon, poisoned by deathcamas, lost in mountains, stripped by Indians. It didn’t matter to him whether the Beaver had arrived bearing fresh supplies. Likewise for his companion in naked exile, the Virginia hunter John Day. And another Scottish fur trader and partner who’d been with Hunt’s Overland Party, the hair-trigger McClellan, threw in his shares and quit. Several voyageurs had already deserted the previous fall. Joseph Miller had quit near the Tetons, splitting off with a leash of trappers. The immense potential profits were no longer enough to lure them. They wanted only to return east as quickly as possible.

  They were “partners dissatisfied with the enterprise,” Franchère wrote, “and who had made up their minds to return to the United States.”

  The list went on. There was young Mr. Nicoll, one of the educated clerks of good connections from New York, who had arrived aboard the Beaver. He’d hardly set foot on this wild coast of the Pacific when he rudely demanded to Hunt to be taken back to New York aboard the Beaver—“being discouraged,” as one of his shipmates and fellow clerks, Alfred Seton, put it, “by the hardness that the country presented.”

  COLUMBIA BASIN REGION WITH TRADE POSTS

  Hunt said he could go—but due to his rude manners he would have to work as a sailor aboard ship instead of traveling as a gentleman passenger.

  And there was Archibald Pelton.

  “Our Madman (Pelton) continuing the same,” recorded McDougall on June 15, adding a few days later, when Pelton’s bizarre behavior still hadn’t changed. “[T]hat he is in reality insane there is now little doubt and has become an object of compassion.”

  McDougall, too, was frequently sick, withdrawing to his quarters.

  For all the progress at Astoria, it’s not surprising, really, that these profound signs of strain were appearing. The partners who had accompanied the Overland Party, for instance, had survived an incredibly difficult eighteen months overland, with the constant threats of fatal rapids, Indian ambush, starvation, brutal cold, and utter exhaustion, aside from having no idea, for much of the time, where they were. In their sufferings they surely envisioned the rich food, and crackling warmth, the comfort and safety, perhaps even the sense of luxury, that awaited them at their destination—Mr. Astor’s emporium on the Pacific.

  Then imagine the rude shock of arrival in the coastal winter or early spring: It’s cold, it’s raining—as it is nearly two hundred days a year at the mouth of the Columbia; the infinite gray coastline stretches away, backed by the thick, dark rain forest—soggy, choked with rotting cedar logs, prehistoric sword ferns, and the dark columns of towering fir and spruce whose outstretched limbs are draped with lichen in giant, ghostly cobwebs. This was a far cry from the euphoric expanses and brilliant starry skies of the high plains, or even the snowy sparkle of the Rockies. The great “emporium” you’ve fantasized about for so long turns out to be a muddy clearing—rooting pigs, ragged turnip patches, half-blasted stumps, and a ramshackle log palisade—hacked out of the endless wilderness. You learn that your supply ship, the Tonquin, has disappeared off the face of the earth. After dreaming for months of luxury and comfort and, above all, safety, you’re greeted by this vision of mud and rain, raw logs and squealing pigs, with no other white settlement within a thousand miles, and bands of Indians—who can guess whether for trade or ambush?—always pressing closer.

  Virtually every person involved, starting with Astor himself, grossly underestimated the psychological toll both journey and settlement would take on men and leaders alike.

  On Tuesday, June 30, 1812, the great flotilla meant to establish Astor’s several new posts launched from a staging area at Tongue Point near Astoria and headed up the Columbia. The main body numbered more than sixty men in nine canoes and two bateaux, including thirty-two Canadian voyageurs, twelve Hawaiians, seven clerks, and three partners—Mackenzie, David Stuart, and John Clarke. The Dorion family was among them, Pierre serving as a hunter. This fleet of nine canoes would split into different directions once it reached the Forks of the Columbia. Yet a tenth canoe carried the “Return Overland Party,” which would buy horses at the Forks and head all the way to St. Louis bearing fresh messages for Mr. Astor. Led by bold, young Robert Stuart, this canoe carried two of the three partners who had quit—Robert McClellan and Ramsay Crooks—as well as John Day. Crooks and Day had arrived only six weeks earlier.

  As soon as the flotilla of canoes embarked from Tongue Point, John Day began to act strangely. Formerly cheerful and popular, he had begun to shown signs of “derangement” when wandering lost in the wintry mountains with Crooks, the latter now reported. As the huge canoe party pitched camp in a beautiful grove of oaks and ash late the second day out from Astoria, Day, who had been “restless” the previous few days, “now uttered the most incoherent absurd and unconnected sentences,” reported Robert Stuart.

  “Several spoke to him, but little satisfaction was obtained, and he went to bed gloomy and churlish.”

  The next day, Thursday, July 2, the canoes passed the mouth of the Cowlitz River, which emptied in on the north bank from a source among the high glaciers of Mount Rainier, about one hundred miles away. The parties camped that night on broad, meadowy Deer Island. The weather had cleared since leaving Astoria, and a series of fine days set in—the brief Northwest Coast summer. From certain vantages, they could see the spectacular glacier-capped cones of several volcanoes—Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, and especially Mount Hood, towering to the east above the river’s surface and forested foothills, its glacier-covered pyramid emerging from winter’s cl
oud veil and gleaming white against the summer’s cerulean skies.

  “[T]his gigantic mass appears as a Steeple overlooking the lowest Houses of a City,” is how Robert Stuart described it.

  It should have been a joyous, uplifting sight. For John Day, however, it may well have been what’s known as a “trigger.” The sight of it viscerally reminded him of what lay twenty miles beyond Mount Hood—the Narrows. And he knew that a short distance beyond the Narrows was the spot where he’d been stripped by the Indians and sent naked into the wilds. And still beyond that terrible place began the vast unmapped region where he and Crooks had wandered the previous winter.

  “[D]uring the night,” wrote Robert Stuart of their Deer Island camp, “John Day’s disorder became very alarming, and several times he attempted getting possession of some of our arms, with the intention of committing suicide, but finding all his attempts fruitless, he at length feigned great remorse. . . .”

  Day’s remorse lulled his companions into dropping their guard. The camp slept soundly on the grassy island, with the exception of the new clerks from New York just off the Beaver, who complained about mosquitos whining in their ears. John Day also didn’t sleep. In the hour before dawn, Day quietly managed to get hold of two loaded pistols. He put both of them to his head. He pulled the triggers.

  The simultaneous pistol blasts shook the camp. Sleeping partners, voyageurs, hunters, clerks, Hawaiians jumped up in alarm. They instantly grabbed Day. His aim, as Stuart put it, was “fortunately too high to take effect.”