Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival (21 page)
Authors: Peter Stark
W
HEN THE
T
ONQUIN
FINALLY CROSSED THE
C
OLUMBIA
Bar and anchored in the river’s mouth in late March of 1811, the ship had logged 21,852 miles since leaving John Jacob Astor and New York Harbor. Eight men had perished in the attempts to guide her across the Columbia Bar. Wilson Price Hunt and his Overland Party were nowhere in evidence and not expected on the Pacific Coast until sometime in autumn (they were currently pushing their way up the Missouri). Hunt’s absence left a power vacuum wherein other men contended.
Captain Thorn and partner McDougall, whom Astor had appointed second in command in Hunt’s absence, quarreled about the exact choice of sites for the “emporium”—the large trading post and living quarters, wharves and warehouses, that would serve as the heart of the West Coast empire. Once across the bar, those aboard the
Tonquin
found themselves in a river estuary some five miles wide that gradually narrowed as it reached deeper into the continent’s interior. Heavy coastal rain forest—towering cedar and fir trees draped with lichens—descended in a thick green curtain to the river’s edge. They needed to find a site within this wall of forest and broad reach of estuary that offered a cove for landing boats and cargo, enough flat ground to build the establishment, and a hill to give views down to the mouth, as well as up the river, to detect the arrival of friends or enemies. Accessibility by ship and defensibility against attack both stood as key considerations for this nodal point of the Pacific trading empire, in the same way that safe anchorages at Jamestown and Plymouth and Boston Harbor had determined the locations of the first English colonies on the Atlantic Coast of North America.
The Astor partners sent scouting parties from the
Tonquin
upriver, looking for potential sites. In scattered villages on both banks lived several different Coastal Indian tribes. Eager to trade for manufactured goods like knives, beads, and pots, the Indians for the most part greeted the new arrivals with friendliness—white trading ships had been stopping occasionally at the mouth of the Columbia for nearly two decades, since the 1792 arrival of the ships of Captain Robert Gray and Captain George Vancouver.
On April 5, ten days after the
Tonquin
had crossed the bar and anchored at Baker’s Bay, a sheltered spot at the river’s mouth, McDougall and David Stuart, in the longboat, discovered a possible location for the emporium on the south bank, about eleven miles up the estuary from the bar. On their way back to the
Tonquin,
they crossed the estuary and visited a Chinook village of longhouses on the north bank. The Chinooks, led by their elderly, one-eyed chief, Comcomly, known for his canniness, had greeted the Seagoing Party especially warmly.
The wind kicked up, churning large waves on the river. The chief warned them not to row back to their ship over the five-mile-wide river estuary until the wind had died. The partners and their eight men in the longboat attempted it anyway. A large wave broke over the boat, capsizing it. McDougall didn’t know how to swim. He would have drowned had Comcomly not taken the precaution to send two of the village’s large canoes and expert paddlers to follow the longboat and rescue the floundering occupants. The Chinook built a large fire on the shore, dried the clothes of the partners and men, and took them back to the village. There he sheltered them in the cedar-planked longhouses until the rain and gale subsided, three days later.
“[Comcomly] received them with all imaginable hospitality,” recorded Franchère, “regaling them with every delicacy his wigwam afforded.”
Thorn, under orders from Mr. Astor for the
Tonquin
to get under way while spring and summer weather prevailed to trade for sea otter furs along the Northwest Coast, had impatiently chosen his own spot in the partners’ absence. He’d built a shed near the
Tonquin’
s anchorage at Baker’s Bay and begun unloading cargo. But Stuart and McDougall had found a better site, forcing the group to abandon Captain Thorn’s newly built shed. The
Tonquin
sailed a few miles upstream to a cove in the estuary shore where a small ship could anchor fifty yards from land. Above it rose a bluff, affording a sweeping view downriver of the eleven miles to the breaking seas of the Columbia Bar and a gray-blue slice of the Pacific beyond. Upstream, they could see along the dark, forested banks of the estuary as far as a promontory projecting off the south bank, called Tongue Point. Almost directly across the river from their chosen site lay Comcomly’s Chinook village. Here, at the entry point to the western American continent by river, at the shores of the Pacific reaching to Asia, the partners had chosen to stake out the hub of Mr. Astor’s empire.
On April 12 the first party landed in the longboat with tools to clear the land and establish a camp. After so many months at sea, the prospect of setting foot on land made the men giddy at first, as it had the Jamestown settlers two centuries earlier.
“The spring, usually so tardy in this latitude, was already far advanced,” reported Franchère. “[T]he foliage was budding, and the earth was clothing itself with verdure; the weather was superb, and all nature smiled. We imagined ourselves in the garden of Eden; the wild forests seemed to us delightful groves, and the leaves transformed to brilliant flowers.”
They went to work with energy, Franchère reported, clearing underbrush, burning deadfall, rolling away rotted logs wedged beneath the giant pillars of the still-standing fir and cedar trees, amid glades of mosses and ferns. While they labored, they pondered a name.
Virginia,
India,
Australia
—these had become the world’s great colonies. This rude clearing in the forest symbolized the nexus of a great empire on the Pacific Ocean. And so, as they laid the foundation for the colony’s first structure—fittingly, the initial warehouse to secure trade goods and the furs destined for China—they named the empire-to-be:
Astoria
.
As quickly as possible, McDougall left the ship and moved ashore to a tent, where he could fully assert his authority. He and Captain Thorn, still aboard the
Tonquin
anchored a few hundred yards away, exchanged officious letters. McDougall requested goods currently buried in the ship’s hold, which Captain Thorn found troublesome to fulfill. The captain complained of waiting around while his passengers ashore partook of further “smoking and sporting parties” and planted turnip patches when he needed them to complete the warehouse so he could unload his cargo and get on his way. The Indian canoes crowding around his ship also annoyed him, with their curiosity and light-fingeredness but, so far, only holding up meager offerings of furs to trade. He finally banned Indians from stepping aboard the
Tonquin
.
Clerk Alexander Ross, ashore, marveled ruefully at how unsuited this group of Scottish fur traders, French-Canadian paddlers, blacksmiths, coopers, clerks, and Hawaiians was to fell the enormous trees that stood on the site of the emporium-to-be. Some of these coastal firs and cedars measured fifty feet around, he wrote, and many of the men had never before held an axe.
Assigned four men per tree, they erected scaffoldings eight or ten feet off the ground as platforms on which to stand, then chopped away at the massive trunks, wood chip by wood chip, with their guns propped nearby in case of a surprise Indian attack. It often required two days to fell a single tree, work stopping frequently so the men could investigate suspicious rustlings in the bushes. The tree finally hewn almost through, work stopped “fifty different times” while the axemen studied the tree from various angles and debated which way the giant would fall. At this delicate juncture, the “most impatient or fool-hardy” of these amateur woodcutters would jump back onto the scaffolding and give the tree another whack or two with his axe.
“Much time was often spent in this desultory manner,” reported Ross, “before the mighty tree gave way. . . .”
The men then had to dig out the “monster stumps,” and blast them with powder to shatter them into pieces small enough to remove. One man blew off his hand with gunpowder during this sort of excavation.
“Nearly two months of this laborious and incessant toil had passed, and we had scarcely an acre of ground cleared,” reported Ross.
McDougall, he wrote contemptuously, was next to worthless as director of the enterprise and lived in relative luxury, supplied with the best food and drink from the ship.
“[T]he great pasha,” Ross called him, adding that McDougall was not only vain and self-important, letting the Indian chiefs who visited his “tent of state” be sure to know that he was the great chief of what would be a great enterprise—a king of the Northwest. He was also incompetent. He possessed an “irritable, peevish temper” besides.
Still, work progressed, McDougall handing out liquor rations three times a day to bolster the men’s enthusiasm. With timber framing that had been carried aboard the
Tonquin,
they built a small schooner, the
Dolly,
to work the fur trade on the river. After laying the foundations for the warehouse, sixty feet long by twenty-six feet wide, they raised up its walls of logs, sheathing it with waterproof cedar shakes. They began work on quarters for the men, as well as a powder magazine.
By the end of May, construction had progressed far enough that Captain Thorn could unload supplies and trade goods from the
Tonquin
into the warehouse. He prepared to sail up the Northwest Coast to Vancouver Island, where the Coastal Indian villages were known to have rich supplies of sea otter furs.
On June 1, Captain Thorn weighed anchor from the cove at Astoria, with the
Tonquin
manned by his Yankee crew, minus those lost on arrival, and sailed the eleven miles down to the river’s mouth. There he waited in Baker’s Bay, just inside the mouth, for a favorable wind to propel him across the Columbia Bar to the open Pacific. Captain Thorn lacked officers. In addition to having lost its first mate and one of the expedition’s ablest sailors, the missing and presumed drowned Mr. Fox and Job Aiken, the
Tonquin
now also lacked its second mate, Mr. Mumford. Often at odds with Thorn, Mumford was left behind at Astoria to command the
Dolly
. Captain Thorn carried three passengers aboard the
Tonquin
for the trading journey up the coast: Astor partner Alexander McKay, the trader who had crossed the continent with explorer Alexander Mackenzie of the North West Company and was expert at dealing with Indian tribes; a clerk from New York by the name of James Lewis; and, as attendant to partner McKay, a young Canadian, Louis Bruslé.
Before boarding the
Tonquin
for the coastal voyage, McKay took Alexander Ross by the hand in the forest clearing at Astoria. According to Ross’s account, McKay asked Ross to look after his teenage son, Thomas, whom McKay was leaving behind at Astoria. Wrote Ross of the conversation: “ ‘You see,’ said [McKay], ‘how unfortunate we are: the captain, in one of his frantic fits, has now discharged the only officer on board,’ alluding to Mr. Mumford. ‘If you ever see us safe back, it will be a miracle.’ ”
On June 5, 1811, a favorable wind arose. The
Tonquin
uneventfully crossed the bar and sailed free out into the open ocean, headed northward along the Northwest Coast. She was expected to return to Astoria within several weeks, laden with the first cargo of sea otter pelts to be shipped to China to inaugurate John Jacob Astor’s emporium on the Pacific.
With the emporium’s first foundations dug, its first vegetable plots tilled, its first pigsties fenced, and its first coastal trading expedition under way, Astor’s instructions called for smaller advance parties to establish the sprawling inland network of fur-posts. These were to extend up the Columbia River, branching out along its tributaries like a great web, reaching deep into the western continent’s largely unexplored interior. On July 15, a party of nine under David Stuart loaded canoes alongside Astoria’s new little wharf for a journey up the Columbia and along unknown tributaries. The group was actually stepping into their two big Chinook cedar canoes when someone spotted another large canoe paddling hard around Tongue Point. They made out eight voyageurs pulling at the paddles, and, to their great surprise, an ensign flying from the stern—the British flag!
At full speed the big cedar canoe sliced toward the beach, and landed.
“A well-dressed man, who appeared to be the commander, was the first to leap ashore,” reported Franchère. “[A]ddressing us without ceremony, [he] said that his name was David Thompson, and that he was one of the partners of the Northwest Company.”
Even among rivals of opposing nationalities, a formal cordiality often prevailed in distant wilderness outposts. Thompson was invited to lodge in their living quarters, which were temporarily housed in one end of the long log-and-cedar-shake warehouses while a building for regular sleeping quarters remained under construction. After being served food and drink and given the customary hospitality, Thompson remarked that he had been sent here, to the mouth of the Columbia, by the wintering partners of the North West Company.
He stayed for a week while the Astorians puzzled over his visit. This was not just any trader who had wandered in. Thompson was a tremendously accomplished explorer, mapmaker, and partner in a sprawling company that could be either Astor’s potential partner or potential rival on the Pacific Coast. A subtle dance unreeled between Thompson and the Astor partners, perhaps over glasses of port, under candlelight, inside the newly hewn log walls that were fragrant of sweet-sharp cedar and mellow wood smoke. Thompson likely wore his best, while the Astor partners in residence, McDougall and the two Stuarts, surely did likewise. The kilts may have come out. A great deal lay at stake in this pageant of Scottish formality under the towering trees of the coastal wilderness. Among the prizes was the possession of the Northwest Coast, the Columbia Basin, the trade with China, an empire on the Pacific.