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

by Stark, Peter

  In other words, the explosion of the Tonquin in those very first months set the mood of life on the Northwest Coast—the anxious, paranoid, exposed life in the dripping rain forest, along the swashing tidal rivers and surf-pounded headlands. This was not a warm, friendly place. In this dank, dark setting, fringed by violent death, personalities like McDougall spied malevolence lurking behind every tree.

  Through Irving, Astor also criticized Wilson Price Hunt for wandering off on the Beaver, around the Pacific, to Hawaii, then to the Marquesas, again in direct contradiction to instructions and Astor’s overall plan. These wanderings produced “a series of cross purposes disastrous to the establishment” and kept Hunt away from Astoria “when his presence was of vital importance to the enterprize.”

  The eruption of war complicated everything, making it extremely difficult and risky for Astor to supply his emporium on the Pacific. The United States could have helped greatly but the government dallied in its response and finally wouldn’t provide armed escorts. The Lark might have saved Astoria single-handedly, but she shipwrecked off Maui. Astor’s stealth ship, the Forester, made it as far as Hawaii, and there the crew, perhaps hearing of the various disasters that had preceded them aboard the Tonquin and Lark, apparently mutinied. If Astor had had either the commitment of his leaders or the protection of the U.S. government, his vision might have succeeded. So spoke Astor through Irving.

  Some of his leaders didn’t understand Astor’s vision and commitment, Irving wrote. Others were loyal not to Mr. Astor but to the rival North West Company and switched allegiances once war was declared. If Mr. Hunt hadn’t been off wandering about the Pacific, he would have prevented Astoria from being sold out by McDougall, Mackenzie, and the others.

  “It was [Astor’s] great misfortune that his agents were not imbued with his own spirit,” wrote Irving.

  Yet neither Irving nor Astor acknowledges a central fact: John Jacob Astor wasn’t there. While Astor was vastly exposed, his exposure was purely financial. His men, in contrast, were exposed to the constant proximity of a violent death. How would John Jacob Astor himself have fared in the remote rain forest on the Pacific Coast rather than a solid-brick, double row house on Lower Broadway?

  So much of Astoria’s fate, and the future of the Pacific Coast, ultimately hinged on a few individual personalities, its leaders, coming under the severest kind of strain—their fight for physical survival.

  Captain Thorn, both the simplest example and the shortest-lived of Astoria’s leadership, brought a rigid system of values and narrowly defined worldview when he arrived among the native peoples of the Northwest Coast, along with a macho arrogance and a volatile temper. It was a combination almost fated to go wrong. Astor recognized this possibility in advance and gave Captain Thorn fair warning and detailed instructions, but even these couldn’t prevent the inevitable clash. Why did Astor hire him? Astor wanted a “gunpowder man” capable of destroying enemy European ships. Surely Astor thought of the trade-offs. He didn’t believe Captain Thorn was so rash as to trigger a violent confrontation with the native peoples at his very first unsupervised meeting with them. While Astor wanted the bravest man he could find, Thorn illustrated that there lies a point when bravery shades into arrogance, and arrogance shades into idiocy.

  Yet one can also maintain some sympathy for Thorn, the object of endless ridicule, tricks, and insubordination by the clannish Scottish traders and their frisky clerks aboard the Tonquin. They played mind games with Captain Thorn, working him into a frenzy of paranoia and anger. By the end of the voyage Thorn seethed with frustration. When confronted with what he considered more insouciance from the natives of the West Coast, he erupted. He carried a fixed hierarchy and rules of engagement derived from Atlantic naval battles, which he tried to impose through sheer fierceness on others—first with the Scottish fur traders during the voyage and then with the Coastal Indians while trading. The more fiercely he forced his own rigid sense of order upon the intricacies of other, more fluid, cultures, however, the more likely it was to be subverted.

  McDougall, in contrast, possessed the flexibility to adjust to these fluid cultural situations, which he did, relentlessly, to his personal advantage. That he had a talent for strategizing—or scheming, depending on how one might look at it—is obvious from his plans for the smallpox-in-a-bottle, from his marriage to Comcomly’s daughter, from his taking control so thoroughly of Astoria at the colony’s outset and ultimately selling the place out. Even Franchère, one of the most generous of the Astoria chroniclers and a fellow Canadian besides, finally takes to calling the Scotsman “the crafty M’Dougall” and declares that the “charge of treason will always be attached” to Astoria’s leadership.

  While some secret backroom deal transacting between McDougall and the North West Company—if you sell us Astoria we’ll in turn make you a partner—certainly seems plausible, it has never been proven. McDougall might have resisted selling to the NWC if he had felt more secure at Astor’s emporium on the Pacific. Barricaded in Astoria’s fort, building up its palisades, often ill, McDougall succumbed to the worst imaginings, some real, some exaggerated—everything from Indian attack to starvation. His sense of vulnerability deepened during the rainy coastal winters, when upriver trading expeditions thinned the numbers at the fort. His strategies served as his defense against surroundings he saw conspiring against him. But McDougall’s own nature provided a dark lens on the world that he glassed beyond the fort’s palisades. He could see conspiracies everywhere in part because he was constantly concocting his own.

  Among Astoria’s leaders, Wilson Price Hunt remains the most complex character who has come down to us through the various journals and accounts and the one who responded in the most nuanced way to extreme exposure and risk. He neither lashed out aggressively like Thorn nor conspired darkly like McDougall. Accounts agree almost universally that he was a man of upstanding character and loyalty. He clearly remained faithful to Astor, and, by his own nature and by Astor’s instructions, attempted to lead in the most inclusive way possible. But he lacked a sense of urgency at key periods, and lacked a firm hand when one was sometimes called for. His greatest strength may have proved his greatest flaw—one that finally sunk John Jacob Astor’s West Coast empire. Wilson Price Hunt vastly preferred cooperation to confrontation.

  Almost immediately Hunt left Astoria aboard the Beaver. Arriving at the Russian fortress on the Alaskan coast, he let himself be manipulated by Count Baranoff. He wouldn’t stand up to Captain Sowle. When the captain swung the Beaver from Alaska toward the Sandwich Islands—Hawaii—for repairs, Hunt either would not or could not demand firmly enough that the ship first return to Astoria to drop him off. His penchant for avoiding confrontation in favor of compromise played a pivotal role, right then, in Astoria’s fate. Ship repairs offered a plausible reason to defer to the authority of Captain Sowle and depart from Astor’s instructions. Or was this less a plausible reason than a reasonable excuse? Instead of returning to Astoria for a dark, rainy, uncertain winter, he would spend it on Hawaii. Hunt had traveled hard and nearly steadily for the last two and a half years, crossing the continental wilderness of North America, leading a party that had nearly starved to death. Young and vigorous though he may have been at the start, by this point Hunt may have simply been exhausted. Maybe he needed a break.

  And maybe it wasn’t just Hunt. Maybe all the Astorians had finally exhausted themselves. In an age-old tradition, young men had flung themselves at the wilderness, measuring themselves against it. Yet on the Pacific Coast lay a wilderness of unimaginable size and power and remoteness. Finally there comes a point—after one year? two years? three years of naked exposure?—when you have had enough.

  Whichever it was, Hunt’s decision left him absent from the mouth of the Columbia at a crucial time and left the door open for McDougall to sell out. If McDougall acted with stealth and subterfuge, and Thorn by direct confrontation, it seems that Hunt often made choices by default. The result was
that Astoria lacked a strong leadership loyal to John Jacob Astor. Instead it had a “crafty” leadership loyal to its own interests. Foreshadowing certain American business practices two centuries in the future, McDougall, in the absence of anyone present to tell him no, fashioned himself and Mackenzie a “golden parachute.”

  Then he bailed out.

  TWENTY-TWO YEARS LATER, in the fall of 1835, Washington Irving moved in with John Jacob Astor and grandson at Astor’s country estate overlooking the spinning currents of the East River. Known as Hell Gate after the river strait on which it sat, and located at what is now East Eighty-Eighth Street but was then Manhattan Island countryside, the graceful, pillared, two-story mansion was designed in the neoclassical style. Also in residence were Astor’s personal secretary and de facto advisor on all things literary and artistic, the witty and charming poet Fitz-Greene Halleck, and at times Irving’s nephew Pierre. His every need provided by a staff of servants, free to do as he pleased, Irving called the Hell Gate mansion “a kind of bachelor hall.”

  “I have not had so quiet and delightful a nest since I have been in America,” Irving wrote in a letter to his brother.

  Astor had commissioned Irving, then a famous American author who had lived in Europe for seventeen years, to write the story of his great enterprise, as Irving would come to call it. Irving had enlisted Pierre to research and compile the story from many sources—journals, letters, and interviews with surviving participants, for whom Astor happily sent whenever they needed to fill in a missing part of the story.

  Irving was taken by Astor’s energy, even at age seventy-two, and desire to commit the story to writing. Astor had recently retired, and his wife, Sarah, had recently died. Irving thought Astor was looking for “occupation and amusement” and so launched the project.

  THE WORLD HAD MOVED ON in some ways since the fall of Astoria, and in other ways it had not. The city of New York had climbed up Manhattan Island from the lower tip as far as about Twentieth Street. Astor personally happened to own a great deal of it. He had also been busy over the last two decades building an enormous fur empire east of the Rockies. He had hired both Robert Stuart and Ramsay Crooks as two of his principal fur traders and managers, even though Crooks, battered from his overland ordeal, had initially quit Astoria upon arrival on the West Coast. With their able help and his drive and resources, Astor and his son William Backhouse Astor rolled over the competition (some said ruthlessly) and dominated the fur regions from the Great Lakes to the Rocky Mountains. During the 1820s and 1830s era of the “mountain men” and the great trappers’ rendezvous in places like Jackson Hole, many of the furs ended up in Astor warehouses.

  Astor sold his sprawling fur business to Ramsay Crooks in the mid-1830s and retired. But even then, in the fall of 1835, as Irving worked over his manuscript at Astor’s Hell Gate country house, with the “old gentleman’s” encouragement and enthusiasm, the fate of the Northwest Coast still hung in limbo, as it had for the last twenty-two years. After McDougall sold out Astor in the fall of 1813, Captain Black of the Racoon had declared the whole country a British possession. Therein, however, lay a problem.

  “What the vague term of the ‘whole country’ in the present case meant, I know not,” wrote Alexander Ross. “Does it mean the Columbia? Does it mean all the country lying west of the Rocky Mountains? Or does it merely mean the coast of the Pacific?”

  It remained unclear for decades which nation had strongest claim to the “whole country.” After the War of 1812 came to an amicable settlement in late 1814, in a kind of stalemate, with no territory or borders changed, it was eventually decided between the United States and Britain that the disputed Northwest would remain under “joint occupation” for a period of ten years. But the British had already firmly established themselves in Astor’s former fur posts and started more of their own. Astor still couldn’t quite let it go, although his initial anger had turned to a kind of resignation.

  “[W]hile I breath & so long as I have a dollar to spend I’ll pursue a course to have our injuries repair’d & when I am no more I hope you’ll act in my place; we have been sold, but I do not dispond,” he had written in 1814 to Mackenzie upon receiving the news of Astoria’s sale. Soon Mackenzie came under Astor’s suspicions, too.

  McDougall, meanwhile, remained on the West Coast safely out of reach of Astor’s wrath. The low price he received for his goods particularly incensed Astor.

  “Had our place and our property been fairly captured,” wrote Astor to Hunt afterward, “I should have preferred it. I should not feel as if I were disgraced.”

  Astor later estimated that, through McDougall’s “fraudulent” sellout to the North West Company, Astor’s company had received from the company about $40,000 for what Astor estimated was $200,000 worth of goods.

  Four years later, as the joint occupation agreement started in the Northwest, Astor’s tone had mellowed. “If I was a young man, I would again resume the [Pacific] trade,” he wrote to his friend Albert Gallatin.

  What could have been on the Pacific Coast? Surely Astor thought about it. In those quiet moments on his horseback rides or walks he must have mused on what he could have possessed if not for the odd quirks of his chosen men, the gaps in leadership, the fateful arrival of Pacific storms or Atlantic politics. Would he have possessed the whole West Coast? The region all the way to the crest of the Rockies? From Alaska to Mexico? Would it be a wealthy trans-Pacific trade empire? Or a political entity as well? Would it become, in short, the country of Astoria?

  “I remember well having invited your proposition on that subject,” a retired Thomas Jefferson had written Astor in early spring of 1812, about Astor’s then-thriving colony on the West Coast. “[I] looked forward with gratification to the time when it’s descendants should have spread themselves thro’ the whole length of that coast, covering it with free and independent Americans, unconnected with us but by the ties of blood & interest, and enjoying like us the rights of self-government.”

  Again, a year later, Jefferson wrote to Astor, replying to Astor’s letter confirming the settlement had been established as planned. Wrote Jefferson:

  . . . I learn with great pleasure the progress you have made towards an establishment on the Columbia river. I view it as the germ of a great, free & independent empire on that side of our continent, and that liberty & self government spreading from that as well as this side will ensure their compleat establishment over the whole. [I]t must be still more gratifying . . . to foresee that your name will be handed down with that of Columbus & Raleigh, as the father of the establishment and founder of such an empire. . . . [W]ith fervent wishes for a happy issue to this great undertaking which promises to form a remarkable epoch in the history of mankind, I tender you the assurance of my great esteem & respect.

  Th: Jefferson

  To have these words of encouragement from a former president of the United States, and this possible legacy, was no small thing to relinquish, especially one possessed of a continental vision like Jefferson’s. We’ll never know exactly what vision Jefferson and Astor shared—or what they didn’t share. In their enthusiastic discussions in the president’s house in 1808 they may have left the exact details of a West Coast colony a blank. How large an empire? What kind? Would it become, as Jefferson hoped, “a great, free and independent empire.” In other words, a democracy? Or a sprawling and powerful trade empire controlled by a dictatorial fur and real estate baron based in Manhattan? Or, somehow, would it be a melding of both?

  This schism still lives with Americans today. It is especially pronounced in the nation’s role in lands that lay, as Astoria did, beyond the borders of the United States. In these places is America a beacon of democracy that will unflaggingly support individual rights? Or is it a trade empire looking out for its best economic interests? Which comes first? Where is the priority? If Astoria had become a reality, this was an issue that almost certainly would have arisen—and perhaps been bitterly fought, or even resolved—in
the empire on the Pacific.

  Astor never quite got over his sense of loss about Astoria, embarking two decades later on the literary project to record for posterity what he had created on the West Coast—and what it could have been. But neither Astor nor Irving understood the larger significance of Astoria when writing in 1835. Its most important contributions to shaping the continent’s destiny were still to come.

  The Overland Party’s excruciating journey from the Missouri River to the Columbia in 1811 would prove far more important than what seemed at the time sheer folly and catastrophe. In their wandering, hunger-ridden route, in all their wrong turns and suffering and dead ends, Hunt’s Overland Party happened to discover the best way to cross the last third of the continent. The route finding occurred in the most haphazard, unsystematic fashion—motivated by a drive to profit rather than by exploration or science—but they had done it.

  A year later, in 1812, the Return Overland Party discovered another key piece of geography—the South Pass through the Rocky Mountains. Carrying messages to the East for Mr. Astor and led by Robert Stuart, the Return Party took nearly a year and suffered a journey nearly as harrowing as Hunt’s, robbed by Indians, almost starved, and hiding for the winter from possible ambush. But on October 22, 1812, Robert Stuart and Ramsay Crooks and their companions walked through rolling high country in today’s southwestern Wyoming from one watershed to the next. They realized that they had strolled across the Continental Divide. For the Native Americans, this gentle route over a divide of hills represented simply another of innumerable ways across the Rocky Mountains. But the Indians didn’t use wheeled vehicles. Stuart and Crooks had discovered a place where a loaded wagon could cross the Rocky Mountains and Continental Divide. That crucial discovery, along with the channel Hunt had found cut through the mountain ranges by the Yellowstone hot spot, would become the Oregon Trail.