Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival (32 page)

“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.

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.