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

by Stark, Peter

  For the next thirty years after the Astorians discovered it, however, this route remained obscure, even forgotten. There was little American activity in the Northwest. But the idea of American claims to it persisted. In 1815 and again in 1816, the determined Astor pressed the U.S. government through Albert Gallatin once more for a small, shipborne U.S. military force to be sent to the mouth of the Columbia to reestablish the American presence on the West Coast. Gallatin, who was traveling back and forth between Europe and the United States in this period, and who had helped negotiate the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812, brought up the matter to President Madison, yet again. And yet again, nothing happened.

  The first “joint occupation agreement” between Britain and the United States to share the Oregon Country was signed in 1818. But into the 1820s, an outspoken contingent of American politicians strived to bring the region solely to U.S. control, leaning heavily on Astoria as the foundation of American claims to the West Coast.

  “The settlement on the Oregon, connecting the trade of that river [the Columbia] and the coast with the Missouri and Mississippi, is to open a mine of wealth to the shipping interests and the western country, surpassing the hopes of even avarice itself,” argued John Floyd, representative from Virginia, who was distantly related to Sergeant Floyd of the Lewis and Clark expedition (and its only member to die en route), in a speech to the U.S. House in 1822. “The lands of the Oregon are well adapted to the culture of rye, corn, barley, and every other species of grain.”

  Thomas Hart Benton, senator from the newly admitted state of Missouri, was another passionate supporter of taking the Northwest for the United States. Later known to history as a great advocate of what became called Manifest Destiny—that Americans were destined, for any number of reasons, to sweep westward across the continent to the Pacific—Benton asserted in a speech to the Senate in February 1823 that Astoria had “consummated” the U.S. title to the region. He also invoked fears of a British empire on the Pacific.

  “Not an American ship will be able to show itself beyond Cape Horn, but with the permission of England.”

  Congress nevertheless voted down Floyd’s and Benton’s proposals.

  The British fur companies—the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company—took over the former Astor posts. They built more of their own throughout the Columbia Basin. American trappers stayed farther east in the Rocky Mountains. As a result of Astoria’s collapse, and the lack of prompt U.S. action to try to recover it, this huge region remained in question, what came to be known as the “Oregon Country.” It stretched from the northern border of today’s California all the way to Alaska and extended inland hundreds of miles to the Rockies’ crest. For comparison, if a region this size were projected onto the East Coast, it would extend roughly from Jacksonville, Florida, to Boston, and stretch inland nearly as far as the Mississippi River. That entire region—what would have been Astoria, if all had gone according to John Jacob Astor’s plan—continued to hang in limbo for three decades.

  A few wagons in the 1830s followed this route over the Rockies discovered by the Astorians and carried fur traders or missionaries as far as the Snake River. Then in 1840 a few bold American settlers in wagons kept on going, dragging their heavy loads over the Blue Mountains to the Columbia. Under the “joint occupation” agreement they were free to do so even though the British held the fur posts on the river.

  The reports came back to the United States. Near the Pacific Coast lay a virtual Eden—a great valley of rich, moist, impossibly green land, perfect for farming. This was the Willamette. In 1843 the first large group of wagons, known as the “Great Migration,” made for the Willamette from Independence, Missouri, along the route pioneered by the Astorians. When they arrived after their journey of five months they found a few settlers already living in the Willamette. Among them was an elderly Marie Dorion and her third husband.

  “She, from various traditions,” wrote one early Oregon historian, “was looked up to and revered as an extraordinary woman, the oldest in that neighborhood, kindly, patient and devout.”

  Before Marie Dorion died in 1850, the Willamette had become a magnet for the western movement. Thousands of heavily loaded wagons carrying European agriculturalists and their plows and pianos and bedsteads, trailing their cattle behind, rolled through Native American hunting grounds and the easiest passes to the Pacific—up the Platte River, through South Pass, along the Snake River plain, over the Blue Mountains, and down the Columbia. This was the route that had been discovered with great difficulty by the explorations of the Astorians—the Oregon Trail.

  The United States and Britain resolved the “Oregon Question” in 1846, finally drawing the border after a great deal of contention. Britain wanted it drawn at the Columbia River (the border between today’s Washington and Oregon), while the more adamant U.S. advocates demanded that the United States take all the Pacific Coast as far north as the Russian posts in Alaska at about 54 degrees, 40 minutes north—thus the rallying cry of the American advocates of Manifest Destiny, “Fifty-four forty or fight!”

  Britain and the United States compromised at 49 degrees north—the current U.S.-Canadian border today across the Northwest. The long period of limbo and joint occupation ended. A great chunk of the West Coast was suddenly stamped “American.” It officially opened to U.S. settlement. Immediately, a relentless wave of settlers crowded out of the East and pushed westward to claim their plots of farmland in the rich Willamette Valley. The Native American Coastal tribes, powerful as they were, were driven out or confined to reservations.

  Britain held on to a five-hundred-mile stretch of Pacific Coast and lands reaching far inland to the Rockies’ crest (roughly today’s British Columbia). But it might have turned out very differently.

  “It is no flight of fancy, but rather a sober and legitimate conclusion, to say that if the Astorian enterprise had succeeded,” wrote historian Hiram Chittenden 1902, “the course of the empire on the American continent would have been altogether different than it has been . . . no part of the Pacific Coast line would now belong to Great Britain.”

  Wrote Charles M. Harvey in a 1911 North American Review essay titled “Our Lost Opportunity on the Pacific”: “[W]hen California came into our hands, in 1848 and when Russia handed Alaska over to us in 1867, we should have had an unbroken coast-line from San Diego up to Point Barrow, far above the Arctic Circle.”

  Whether this great stretch of the western continent would have been called “Astoria,” a separate and a free country, is another question altogether.

  John Jacob Astor lived just long enough to see part of the Oregon Country become U.S. territory. He died at age eighty-four in 1848, two years after Britain and the United States settled the issue. He was by then the richest man in the United States, worth $20 million, or $110 billion in today’s dollars by one calculation, which ranks him fourth on the list of the all-time wealthiest Americans. Astor personally controlled wealth equivalent to about 1 percent of the nation’s gross national product at that time. Much of the fortune derived from furs and real estate, especially property in Manhattan. He left most of his fortune to his second son and business partner, William Backhouse Astor, a powerful and successful businessman in his own right. (John Jacob and Sarah’s eldest son remained mentally incapacitated his entire life.) At his death, John Jacob Astor came under criticism from some quarters, like educator Horace Mann, for not showing more generosity to charity than the half million dollars he gave. His largest bequest amounted to $400,000, which went to found the Astor Library—forerunner of the New York Public Library.

  While John Jacob and Sarah left many descendants from their five surviving children, the bulk of actual fortune followed primogeniture of a sort in the male line. One branch of the family moved to Britain, taking the control of a great deal of the fortune with it and became titled there. In the United States, the last of the direct male Astor line (which included John Jacob Astor IV, who went down on the
Titanic but left children behind) ended with Vincent Astor. He and his third wife, Roberta Brooke Russell Astor, had no children, nor had he any offspring with his previous wives. Upon his death in 1959, his fortune went to his charity, the Vincent Astor Foundation. The money that this foundation gave away to schools, hospitals, the arts, and countless other causes could be said to date back to the original John Jacob Astor, the young German immigrant selling cakes on the streets of late-eighteenth-century Manhattan. All its funds finally spent, as intended, it closed in 1997. Brooke Astor died in 2007 at age 105.

  Not long before her death, a crab fisherman in Clayoquot Sound, on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, snagged his traps on something protruding from the sandy bottom of Templar Channel. Divers sent down discovered that the traps had become enmeshed on the shaft of an old anchor. The ten-foot-long, thousand-pound anchor was hauled to the surface, and, upon analysis, found to date to a late-eighteenth- or early-nineteenth-century sailing ship. It is believed to be the anchor of the Tonquin, further confirmed by Clayoquot oral history identifying the spot of the Tonquin’s destruction. Remarkably, the anchor was encrusted with blue glass beads of the kind the Tonquin used for trading for furs with Coastal Indians. The anchor represented the first archaeological evidence confirming the destruction of the Tonquin. Further searches of Templar Channel’s bottom have not yet turned up other remains of the ship.

  Today the name Astor mostly conjures images of New York society, luxury hotels, the later John Jacob who went down on the Titanic. The momentous drama of John Jacob Astor’s great Pacific enterprise has largely been forgotten by the general public, although it is still studied by western historians. A century and a half ago, when the nation was still coalescing geographically, it was a well-known and oft-cited chapter of American history. Irving’s book was a bestseller in 1836 and, it is said, required reading in New York schools.

  The prominence of the Astorians and their story has been in some ways overshadowed for decades by the much-vaunted successes of Lewis and Clark. Americans love heroes and winners. In Astoria, there are few clear-cut winners and no unblemished heroes. Although the story has been largely supplanted in American folklore by sturdier icons, a powerful legacy nevertheless remains from John Jacob Astor’s attempt at a West Coast empire.

  Whatever else one can say about him, it’s hard to deny that John Jacob Astor, as well as Thomas Jefferson, had a far-reaching vision of the Pacific Rim. By many measures, they were two hundred years ahead of their time. Only in recent decades, and increasingly in recent years, has the Pacific entered fully on the world stage as both an economic and political nexus in the way that the Atlantic was for several centuries previously. Astor and Jefferson envisioned what we now call a global trade that crisscrossed the Pacific and linked the countries bordering its shores.

  The Astorians served as that first push of American settlers across the continent, finding the route, placing an American presence on the Pacific Coast, and bringing the idea of settlement into consciousness. Without them, the shape of the nation might look very different. If Astoria hadn’t put down roots in the Northwest, would a foreign power more easily have controlled the entire West Coast? In a way, John Jacob Astor did finally achieve his dream of a West Coast empire. But it wasn’t his. It was everyone’s.

  A less tangible but equally powerful American legacy derives from the nature of John Jacob Astor himself. His personal drive and vision served as a template for later American entrepreneurs. Astor possessed the resilience and confidence to fail, along with the focus and drive to keep going despite failure.

  In this, Astor’s attempt at a West Coast empire echoes the story of the early European settlement of the East Coast. It required a visionary and risk-taking leader to take the first leap. In many, if not most, cases, that first visionary leader failed. Raleigh’s Roanoke Colony failed, as did the first French colonies in Acadia and elsewhere in eastern Canada. These founders were willing to expose themselves and their people to huge risk. They left wreckage in their wake. They had to fail first—leaving colonists exhausted, broke, dead, or all three—in order for those coming later to succeed.

  It makes sense, then, to give a follower of one of these visionaries the last word. This comes from Robert Stuart, the bold young Scotsman who led the Return Overland Party, bearing messages for Mr. Astor in Manhattan. On Tuesday, October 13, 1812, Stuart and his party, which included the long-suffering Ramsay Crooks, were failing from starvation in the high country of what’s now southwestern Wyoming, just short of the crucial pass they were about to discover. They figured they had not many days to live. One of the voyageurs traveling with them proposed drawing lots, shooting the loser, and eating him. Stuart, horrified, put an end to the proposal at gunpoint. But for the first time in his life, he couldn’t sleep at night, amid all his tossing and troubled thoughts.

  Some of these thoughts Stuart recorded. He may have directed them at humankind in general. Or he might have addressed them obliquely to the visionaries who sent forth this expedition that was causing such suffering, John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson, living in comfort on the eastern seaboard. Wandering starving in these uncharted lands, Stuart came to understand that enormous wealth, such as Astor’s, meant nothing here. Lofty political ideals about liberty and equality, such as Jefferson’s, took on an entirely different meaning in a barren wilderness. Here one is humbled by freedom—either find sustenance, or die.

  Let him but visit these regions of want and misery; his riches will prove an eye sore, and he will be taught the pleasure and advantage of prayer—If the advocates for the rights of man come here, they can enjoy them, for this is the land of liberty and equality, where a man sees and feels that he is a man merely, and that he can no longer exist, than while he can himself procure the means of support.

  FATE OF THE ASTORIANS

  WILSON PRICE HUNT—Served for many years as postmaster of St. Louis, where he upheld an impeccable reputation both for honesty and for the conscientious delivery of the mail.

  DUNCAN MCDOUGALL—Stayed at the Fort George (formerly Astoria) post, appointed a North West Company partner in 1816. The following year he traveled East and took charge of the NWC’s Winnipeg district, where, from unspecified causes (one suspects retribution by a wronged party), he soon “died a miserable death.” Seeking the last word, he claimed in a codicil to his will that the “malicious and ungenerous” conduct of his former associates at Astoria had unjustly damaged his reputation.

  RAMSAY CROOKS—After Crooks had quit Astoria and returned overland to the East, the tireless Astor recruited him to build his next large fur enterprise. Crooks would eventually run operations for Astor’s American Fur Company, which covered a great deal of the Great Lakes and West during its height. Though a fierce competitor, Crooks was regarded as a principled and tactful individual and a devoted family man. He died peacefully in New York City in 1859.

  CHINOOK NATION—Chinook reservation lands were designated in 1851 by the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Oregon Territory in their traditional homelands along the lower Columbia and on the Pacific Coast. These reservation lands were not ratified at the time by the U.S. Senate. The Chinook refused to move to reservations elsewhere. The federal government thereafter ceased relations with most of the Chinook bands in 1954. The Chinook tribe, of which there are 2,700 members, are currently seeking federal recognition as a tribe. They appeared to have won recognition in 2001 but the decision was reversed in 2002. Christopher Stevens, the ambassador to Libya slain in 2012 during an attack on U.S. consular offices in Benghazi, was a member of the Chinook tribe through his mother, and closely related to Chinook tribal elders.

  CLAYOQUOT NATION—Known today as the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, it is part of a confederation of fourteen First Nations along the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, numbering a total of about 8,000 people, about 900 of them Tla-o-qui-aht, and maintaining cultural ties to their past. The village of Opitsaht, where Captain Gray dest
royed two hundred houses and countless carvings by cannon fire (one of the cannonballs recently unearthed), still exists and as of 2006 had a population of 174. Oral tradition among the Tla-o-qui-aht places the explosion of the Tonquin off the former village of Echachis. The trade blankets scattered by the force of the explosion were much valued and known as claokwahitshe.

  “The Martin family of the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation,” according to the 2005 archaeological report about the finding of the Tonquin’s anchor, “state that it was their ancestor, Chief Nuukmiis that led the attack on the Tonquin, prompted not only by an insult perpetrated on Nuukmiis by Captain Thorn, but also by previous acts of treachery on the part of American traders, as well as Chief Wickaninnish’s desire to obtain an armed vessel.”

  As part of the research for the 2005 report, a Tla-o-qui-aht tribal historian was asked why previous researchers had not cited the abundance of traditional Tla-o-qui-aht knowledge regarding the Tonquin incident.

  “No one ever bothered to ask us,” he replied.

  ROBERT STUART—Only a month after returning from his brutal overland journey across the continent and his three years in the wilds, Stuart married the former Elizabeth Emma Sullivan in New York, with whom he would have nine children. With friend Ramsay Crooks, he soon joined John Jacob Astor’s next fur enterprise, the American Fur Company, and served for many years as Astor’s resident agent at Michilmackinac Island, where, at the operation’s height, he oversaw four hundred clerks and traders, in addition to two thousand voyageurs. Known as a fair but exacting man, he was said to have brought his quick temper to bay after a spiritual awakening during a revivalist movement in the late 1820s. He died peacefully in his sleep after reading a book in front of the fireplace of his Chicago hotel room in 1848, his wife beside him.