Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival (31 page)

“[Mr. Astor] assumed the financial risks,” wrote one commentator; “the traders mortgaged their lives.”

“My plan was right,” Astor allegedly said, according to another, “but my men were weak. Time will vindicate my reasoning.”

One could argue that other Americans who built great business empires since John Jacob Astor’s day likewise showed the same deep focus on the vision and were willing to sacrifice almost everything else to see it succeed, often ignoring human costs. Astor does not come across this distance of two centuries as capricious or cruel. Rather, he’s gentlemanly. But he’s also unsentimental—except for his own family—and relentlessly focused.

Astor explicitly parceled out blame, and blame fell directly on his chosen leaders. Irving was undoubtedly speaking for Astor himself in the conclusion to his 1836 account commissioned by Astor, some twenty-five years after the incidents, when he singled out Captain Thorn. The captain had ignored Astor’s orders and “earnest injunctions” about how to approach the native peoples of the Northwest Coast. His poor judgment resulted in “dismal catastrophe” that “prepared the way for subsequent despondency.”

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.

T
WENTY-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.

T
HE 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.