Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival (33 page)
Authors: Peter Stark
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.
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 M
C
DOUGALL
—
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 destroyed 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.
DONALD MACKENZIE
—Pursued a long and varied career as a fur trader with the Northwest Company and Hudson Bay Company, in the Northwest and in the Red River region, fathering many children first with his “country wife” and then with his children’s young Swiss nanny, whom he married. He retired to an estate overlooking Lake Chautauqua, New York, and died in 1851 after being thrown by his horse.
ALFRED SETON
—After leaving Astoria in April of 1814 with Wilson Price Hunt aboard the
Pedlar,
the young clerk Seton underwent another long and inadvertent series of adventures—drinking bouts with Count Baranoff in Alaska, romances with Spanish girls in California, serious bouts of malaria in Panama. Still trying to make his way back to New York, he was stranded in Cartagena, Colombia, when, as a “gentleman,” he managed to talk his way into a passage with a British Royal Navy vessel to Jamaica, whence he returned to New York, “as poor as a Starved Rat”—this despite having dropped out of Columbia University to make his fortune and reverse his family’s tough financial times by joining Astor’s great venture. After some years as a fur merchant, he and several other partners founded the Sun Mutual Insurance Company, offering ship’s insurance, and became very wealthy, moving to a country home in Westchester County, New York, where he died in 1859. Seton’s lost journal was discovered in 1947 in a cupboard in Washington Irving’s home, “Sunnyside,” in Tarrytown, New York, when the home was undergoing historic restoration.
JOSEPH MILLER
—The former army officer and Astor partner from a “respectable family” in Baltimore, suffering a bodily malady that pained him to ride on horseback, gave up his shares and quit Hunt’s Overland Party just past the Tetons in October 1811. He and a string of trappers that included the three Kentuckians—Robinson, Hoback, and Reznor—were trapped for the winter toward the south, probably in what is today northern Colorado. Twice robbed of goods and horses by Indians, they made their way back north, and were found in August 1812 fishing beside a stream, horseless and nearly starved, by the Return Overland Party. While the three Kentuckians remained to trap in the Snake River country (and later were massacred with John Reed), Miller accompanied the Return Overland Party to St. Louis. He there disappears from the historical record.
ROBERT M
C
CLELLAN
—After struggling overland from Hell’s Canyon to Astoria, McClellan of the hair-trigger temper “threw in his shares” and quit. He then turned around and struggled back to the United States with the Stuart and Crooks Return Overland Party. Within a month of their arrival in St. Louis, McClellan was thrown into prison for unpaid debts. He declared bankruptcy and was freed, then briefly ran a store in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. He gave it up due to poor health, but seems to have purchased two racehorses nevertheless. He died at St. Louis only two and a half years after his arrival from Astoria, nearly impoverished.
ALEXANDER ROSS
—Leaving Astor’s concern, he worked for the North West Company and then for the Hudson Bay Company in the Northwest after the two outfits merged. He became an administrator in the Red River colony in today’s Manitoba, fathered thirteen children with his native wife, and later in life wrote three books on his experiences in the Northwest and West.
ROSS COX
—Worked briefly for the North West Company in the Northwest, returned to the East, and tried unsuccessfully to get a posting with the Hudson Bay Company. Returning to his native Ireland, he worked as a clerk in the Dublin police headquarters and as a correspondent for the London
Morning Herald,
publishing his book,
Adventures on the Columbia River,
in 1831.
GABRIEL FRANCHÈRE
—Returned to Montreal when Astoria was sold and married his sweetheart, whom he had left behind. He remained employed in the fur trade, eventually becoming John Jacob Astor’s chief agent in Montreal for Astor’s American Fur Company, then moved to New York City. After Astor sold his American Fur Company and it eventually went bankrupt, Franchère, said a friend, acted “in an extremely honorable manner, [and] sacrificed his own personal fortune to assist in meeting its liabilities.”
BAPTISTE DORION
,
son of Marie and Pierre Dorion
—Baptiste Dorion served as guide and interpreter to early settlers in the West and for the naturalist John Kirk Townsend.
JOHN DAY
—Irving says Day’s health was broken after his ordeals with the Overland Party and he died within a year, but that appears to be mistaken. Apparently Day went to work as a hunter for the North West Company, and in 1819 or 1820, being “infirm of body,” died in the Snake River country in a place traders called “Day’s Defile” (today’s Little Lost River, Idaho). He is memorialized in both the town of John Day, Oregon, and the John Day River.