by Stark, Peter
Finally, he considered whether he could engage the U.S. Navy to protect his West Coast emporium. President Jefferson had four years earlier apparently promised him some sort of military protection for his West Coast venture, at least according to Astor. James Madison now held the presidency, however, and he wouldn’t necessarily make good on Jefferson’s verbal promises, assuming Jefferson had made them. And there was another obstacle—one of simple resources. As both Jefferson and Madison ideologically opposed a standing army and navy for the young United States, as the country went to war, the U.S. Navy possessed only a dozen or so ships ready for sea duty. By contrast, the Royal Navy had six hundred.
AS SOON AS THE NEWS OF WAR ARRIVED in Montreal, the North West Company had jumped into action, too. The partners dispatched an express canoe westward carrying a copy of the document. While Astor’s message to his men at Astoria slowly made its way by ship to Canton, the North West Company’s highly efficient message system delivered the news of war in less than a month’s time to the wintering partners at their July meeting at Fort William on Lake Superior. Seeing a great opportunity in the declaration, this time the North West Company partners quickly reached a consensus about John Jacob Astor and his West Coast pretensions.
They voted to send emissaries from Montreal to London aboard their armed company ship, the Isaac Todd. Their agents in London would ask high British authorities for Royal Navy escort ships to sail with their company ship to the Columbia’s mouth. They also sent a light express canoe westward with the proclamation of war and messages for McTavish. He was to head westward toward the Pacific. He and his overland party would gather North West Company recruits from fur posts along the way, cross the Rockies, and descend the Columbia. There McTavish and his group of Nor’westers were to wait for the Isaac Todd to arrive by sea at the Columbia’s mouth, accompanied by Royal Navy escort ships.
Together, as Astor’s land and sea parties had combined to found Astoria, the North West Company’s land and sea parties would combine to crush it.
OTHER PLAYERS HAD NOW ENTERED THE GAME—big players, possessing huge resources. The stakes had climbed still higher for Astor, and so had the risks. He still had no notion what had happened to Hunt and the Overland Party. Manuel Lisa had returned downriver to St. Louis the previous fall of 1811 and predicted that Hunt and his entire party, leaving the Missouri to trek overland, would be slaughtered by Indians. Astor had received confirmation of the loss of the Tonquin, through other ship captains in addition to the newspaper accounts. But no direct word of Hunt’s fate had yet come to New York. Despite all this loss and uncertainty, Astor’s commitment to the West Coast empire had only deepened, and he played his hand surely.
He summoned two of his best sea captains to a secret meeting and wrote them a draft of twelve thousand pounds sterling. Then he sent them undercover to London. Here the two would end up purchasing a heavily armed and very swift British vessel that would be secretly in Astor’s employ. Under the pretense of sailing to Canton, it should have no problem passing the British blockade and heading to Astoria to defend her against possible attack from the British themselves. Or that was the hope. With this secret ship and his other armed vessels, plus a possible U.S. naval escort, John Jacob Astor would, if all went according to plan, possess virtually his own navy in the Pacific.
It was an audacious and clever plan and a major risk, but the time had come to take it. Astor was now not only deeply invested financially in the West Coast empire—it had become the driving passion of this otherwise, cool, calculating man. After four years of steady and meticulous work on top of a tremendous investment to make it a reality, he felt that this West Coast empire would be his life’s legacy. He would be regarded as the founder of what someday would be a great and thriving colony on the Pacific, and his name would be handed down, as Jefferson had put it, “with that of Columbus & Raleigh.”
He would soon write his trusted Mr. Hunt—who he assumed had reached Astoria and would be in charge of its defense against British attack—these impassioned instructions, sending his letter aboard the Lark, his fast, armed supply ship departing from New York:
Were I on the spot, and had management of affairs, I would defy them all; but, as it is, everything depends on you and your friends about you. Our enterprise is grand, and deserves success, and I hope in God it will meet it. If my object were merely gain of money, I should say, I think whether it is best to save what we can, and abandon the place; but the very idea is like a dagger to my heart.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
WITH THE FREEZING ALFRED SETON HUDDLED IN THE canoe, Mackenzie’s party left the upriver posts in early January 1813 and paddled fast down the Columbia toward Astoria. Mackenzie carried a copy of the surprise U.S. declaration of war that the rival North West Company’s McTavish had delivered to him with such flourish. In the misty dusk of January 16, the canoes pulled alongside the new wharf at Astoria. As they disembarked, Mackenzie and his party received their own bit of shocking news from the settlement. They were told that the Beaver, with Mr. Hunt aboard, had disappeared.
In early August, the ship had crossed the bar and left the Columbia’s mouth. Its mission was to head up the Northwest Coast to supply the Russian posts in Alaska, as Astor had worked out with the Russians, and load thousands of Russian furs. Then, according to plan, in October the Beaver would return to Astoria to drop off Hunt, and he would take charge again. The ship would load still more furs from Astoria’s warehouses and sail with its cargo for the rich markets of Canton.
But something had gone badly amiss. Wrote Franchère, clerk at Astoria: “The months of October, November, and December passed away without any news of the ‘Beaver,’ and we began to fear that there had happened to her, as to the Tonquin, some disastrous accident.”
Late fall had been difficult. As during the first autumn at Astoria, it had rained in cold torrents. The Indians had retired to their camps deeper in the forest. The Astorians again ran short of food. No Indian hunters or salmon fishers could supply them in this season of scarce game. Without fresh meat and greens, scurvy set in. Men fell sick. The days shortened with early northern darkness. The emporium’s grounds turned to a swamp of cold mud.
McDougall himself, largely confined to the post and not working physically like the others, may have been suffering from scurvy. Early European explorers in North America long before had noted a relationship between scurvy, listlessness, and depression. The listless and negative members of an expedition tended to succumb more readily to scurvy. Likewise, once scurvy set in, it afflicted its victims with a sense of hopelessness.
“He no longer evinced the bustling confidence and buoyancy which once characterized him,” wrote Irving of McDougall. “Command seems to have lost its charms for him; or rather, he gave way to the most abject despondency, decrying the whole enterprise, magnifying every untoward circumstance, and foreboding nothing but evil.”
The Beaver was missing. The Tonquin was gone. McDougall thought he heard the whispers of certain Indian attack. It was as if he’d become trapped on the bad-luck coast. The arrival of Mackenzie’s canoes in mid-January should have been a happy moment for McDougall. It wasn’t. Mackenzie climbed out of his canoe bearing the copy of the U.S. proclamation of war. With it came the threat of British warships. Surely it would mean a blockade of Astor’s supply ships to Astoria. And with Mackenzie also came twenty men—twenty more mouths to feed from the dwindling supplies.
Mackenzie, too, was done with his post. He let McDougall know it. He had burned it to the ground. There was no good fur territory there, he had decided. He was ready to move on.
Together, the restless Mackenzie and depressive McDougall produced a kind of synergy of negativity.
“The intelligence [of war] thus brought,” wrote Irving, “completed the dismay of MacDougal, and seemed to produce a complete confusion of mind.”
This vortex of bleakness intensified through the last half of January 1813. It upwells between the lines of McDou
gall’s log of the daily doings at Astoria:
January 16—“That part of the country in which he [Mackenzie] had began an establishment did not answer for the ends expected, and for this reason left it. . . .”
January 23—“[O]ur small stock of provisions will not warrant keeping so many people as we have here at present. . . .”
January 24—“Comcomly . . . now tells us that the Indians from the Northward . . . intimated their designs of destroying us. . . .”
January 25—“We are now under the necessity of stopping from most of our men two meals a day. . . . We cannot purchase a sufficiency to support the people.”
And again the same day—“Events from every quarter wear unfavorable appearances.”
January 28 appears to have brought a breaking point. “An Inventory being consequently taken of the Goods and Stores at this place, it was found far short of what would be necessary in the present crisis; it is therefore Judged prudent for the safety of so large a party as we now form in all the Columbia to suspend all trade except what may be necessary for our support. . . .”
So read the official language. McDougall kept the official log. In a way, he whitewashed it. Franchère tells it differently, or certainly more completely.
“We held, therefore, a sort of council of war,” wrote Franchère.
Clerks like himself were invited to attend but had no vote. Only the partners could vote—in this case, McDougall and Mackenzie.
“Having maturely weighed our situation,” wrote Franchère, “after having seriously considered that being almost to a man British subjects, we were trading, notwithstanding, under the American flag; and foreseeing . . . the impossibility that Mr. Astor could send us further supplies or reinforcements while the war lasted . . . we concluded to abandon the establishment in the ensuing spring, or, at the latest, in the beginning of the summer.”
Alexander Ross put it more bluntly: “M’Dougall and M’Kenzie, weighing circumstances, concluded all was hopeless.”
ACROSS A VAST WILDERNESS and three thousand miles distant, Astor was meeting at almost the same moment, in late January 1813, with U.S. secretary of state James Monroe in Washington, D.C. Through every channel he could think of, Astor was attempting to get word to President Madison of the towering importance to future U.S. national interests of protecting his West Coast emporium and colony. Astor’s intelligence agents in London had told him that the North West Company was sending its armed ship, the Isaac Todd, to the West Coast, and trying to enlist armed escorts from the Royal Navy.
During their meeting, Astor explained to Secretary Monroe how deeply the West Coast and its fur trade mattered both economically and strategically. In a polite follow-up letter, Astor asked Monroe, in effect, if the United States planned to claim this rich country,
the Northwest, or let the British have it: “[I]t becomes very interesting to know . . . whether it will be deemed expedient for the government to take possession of a country which will afford wealth and comfort to many. . . .”
He suggested sending a naval ship to cruise the waters off the Columbia for British ships, and also land forty or fifty troops at the settlement itself or a barracks nearby to protect it.
Secretary of State Monroe didn’t reply.
Astor once again approached his friend Albert Gallatin to get word to the president. Gallatin made a proposal to Madison: a U.S. frigate could be sent to cruise the waters off Canton. En route to doing so, it could drop off a contingent of marines at the mouth of the Columbia, “so as to embrace this opportunity of taking possession.”
There was still no response. As historian James P. Ronda points out, President Madison had many other urgent matters before him, with an increasingly unpopular war going poorly. “Madison and others in his administration must have found it difficult to think seriously about the West at a time when the tide seemed to be running against American survival,” Ronda writes.
Astor could wait no longer for a reply, and for official naval escort. He ordered the Lark to put to sea. He had managed to acquire both Russian and American papers for her, so she would be able to avoid either British or American harassment.
On March 6, 1813, the fast, armed Lark sailed from New York for Astoria. A few weeks later Astor received word from his agents in London that the Isaac Todd, the North West Company ship, was preparing to sail from Portsmouth, England, for the mouth of the Columbia. Although she was known to be a slow sailer, she was also carrying heavy guns. At the same time, Astor’s stealth ship, named the Forester and under British flag, was preparing to sail from Portsmouth, too.
AT ASTORIA, once McDougall and Mackenzie made the decision to abandon the whole enterprise, they summoned partners David Stuart and John Clarke from their upriver posts. Traveling separately, the two of them headed downriver in spring 1813 in canoe flotillas low to the water with heavy packs of furs—thousands of furs. It had been an extremely profitable winter at their upriver posts. They saw no need to abandon the West Coast enterprise. They felt it had a great future, and, in Irving’s words, “considered it rash and pusillanimous to abandon, on the first difficulty, an enterprize of such great cost and ample promise.”
They planned to tell Mackenzie and McDougall so.
Another dark cloud fell over that bright future, however, while they were heading down the Columbia.
Mr. Astor had sent two silver goblets aboard the Beaver under the care of John Clarke to be presented to Alexander McKay. Clarke had discovered on his arrival at Astoria that McKay was presumed dead along with everyone else who had sailed north aboard the Tonquin. Clarke decided to keep Astor’s silver goblets for himself. During his winter at his new Spokane post, the goblets became one of his prized possessions, a bit of elegance in the shaggy wilds.
“He was a tall, good-looking man, and somewhat given to pomp and circumstance,” noted Irving. “He was stately, too, in his appointments. . . .”
As he left his Spokane post, on his way to the Columbia and Astoria, Clarke and his party passed through the nation of the Catatouch Indians, a tribe of the Nez Percé, who had kept the traders’ big canoes safe over the winter. That day, May 30, Clarke held a ceremonial meeting with the Catatouch chief. He took a silver goblet from his traveling wine case and passed it to the chief with a little wine.
The chief drank it.
“[You’re] a greater man now than ever before,” Clarke told the chief, according to Ross’s account.
The chief passed the goblet, like a pipe, to the other warriors in the circle, who marveled at it. Then it was put aside.
In the morning, the silver goblet was gone from Clarke’s tent.
Clarke, said to be normally even-tempered and experienced with Indians, went into a rage. It was as if he’d invested the goblet with the power of Mr. Astor—as Native Americans invested natural objects with spiritual power—and that power now had been stolen from him. He assembled the whole Catatouch camp and demanded the return of the goblet. In his rage, he threatened to kill the thief.
The entire tribe went off, as Ross describes it, returning as a group soon thereafter. The chief was at their head. Spreading his robe on the ground, he placed the stolen silver goblet upon it.
Clarke was still enraged.
“Where is the thief?” he demanded.
The chief pointed to a man sitting in the circle of Catatouch men, according to Ross’s account.
“ ‘I swore,’ said Mr. Clarke, ‘that the thief should die, and white men never break their word.’ ”
The thief didn’t believe him at first, as it was the custom that if property were returned the punishment was excused. But Clarke ordered the thief’s lodge dismantled. He ordered the tipi poles made into a tripod scaffold. He ordered a rope produced, and a noose tied. The thief begged for his life. His tribal companions begged for his life. Clarke’s fellow Astorians told him it was too severe a punishment, but from his boyhood, writes Irving, Clarke “had lived in the Indian country among Indian traders, and held t
he life of a savage extremely cheaply.”
“Mr. Clarke,” wrote Alfred Seton, “was inexorable.”
Farnham, a clerk from Vermont, whose pistol had been stolen, served as executioner. The order came. The noose tightened. The Indian was strung up on the tripod, screaming, kicking, and struggling until all movement stopped.
The many Catatouch Indians watching, according to accounts, said not a word. They mounted their horses and took off.
Clarke and his party continued downriver. At the mouth of the Walla Walla—where less than a year before the Astorians had celebrated with the Walla Walla people, a tribe closely related to the Catatouch—he met with Stuart, also headed downriver with his winter furs, and Mackenzie, who had come upriver to recover his cached furs. Thinking they would be pleased, Clarke told them what he had done to the goblet thief.
“What did Stuart and McKenzie say? What could any man say?” recorded Ross of this pivotal moment near the mouth of the Walla Walla in the first days of June 1813. “The reckless deed had been committed, and Clarke’s countenance fell when the general voice of disapprobation was raised against him. The Indians all along kept flying to and fro, whooping and yelling in wild commotion. At this time, Tummeatapam came riding up to our camp at full speed. ‘What have you done, my friends?’ called out the old and agitated chief. ‘You have spilt blood on our lands!’ ”
Tummeatapam, the chief of the friendly Walla Walla, pointed to an approaching cloud of dust in the distance raised by the Indian horses.
“ ‘There, my friends, do you see them? What can I do?’ ” said the chief, wheeling his horse around and galloping away.
“Taking the hint, we lost no time,” writes Ross. “Tents were struck; some had breakfasted, some not—kettles and dishes were all huddled together and bundled into the canoe, and, embarking pell-mell, we pushed with all haste from the inauspicious shore.”