Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival (4 page)

Barely twenty-five years had elapsed since the Revolutionary War ended. To most spectators milling about the lower Manhattan docks that summer day in 1810 gawking at the voyageurs’ canoe, the North American continent didn’t extend much farther west than the Ohio Valley—the far edge of European settlement. That a West Coast of the continent even existed remained the haziest of notions to them, and that the vast Pacific Ocean reached far beyond it to China lay almost beyond imagination. The idea of colonizing the West Coast—to start a commercial empire or a kind of sister country on the Pacific, as Thomas Jefferson hoped, one that looked west toward China instead of east toward Europe—would make as much sense to most of the New York spectators, had they known about the great plan, as colonizing the stars or building a city on the moon.

As the voyageurs’ big canoe sliced across New York Harbor, headed toward the Brooklyn staging grounds, with its echoing French boat songs and surging prow wave, Astor was pleased with the great scheme that he had set in motion. On this happy, bright Sunday in August 1810, however, neither John Jacob Astor nor Thomas Jefferson, nor anyone who had signed on as a participant, possessed the least inkling of the toll the “grand venture” would exact. It would be a toll in lives, in fortunes, in sanity, and in the ultimate configuration of America.

I
T WAS AN EASY WALK
of six blocks or so from John Jacob Astor’s fur shop at 71 Liberty Street—on today’s Zuccotti Park—to his home at 223 Broadway. Turning up Broadway, he passed three-story brick houses in the Federal style, then the pillared façade of St. Paul’s Church. Astor surely turned his plans over in his head as he made that daily walk. Returning home to his early dinner, and his peaceful game of checkers or solitaire, did he think about the choices he’d made, and the risks he took, and, especially, the leaders he had recruited so carefully for his grand enterprise? As if turning over more face cards in his game of Patience, feeling the reach of his skill and the run of his luck, Astor, in the months ahead, would discover much about his chosen leaders as they staggered under extreme stress—in the roaring Pacific, in the unmapped canyons of the West, and, perhaps most profoundly, in their own minds.

There was Wilson Price Hunt, the young businessman from Trenton, New Jersey. An acquaintance of Astor’s, and an American, and thus trusted by Astor to be wholly loyal to the cause, Hunt would serve as Mr. Astor’s stand-in to head the West Coast colony and emporium, overseeing the entire Pacific Rim trade empire. Leaving from Astor’s offices in Manhattan in early summer of 1810, Hunt traveled to Montreal in company with two Scottish fur traders to recruit those first voyageurs who had canoed so dramatically down the Hudson River. From there he was to lead the Overland Party to the Columbia River. Known almost universally to friends as a kind, thoughtful, and consensus-seeking person with good business sense and a fascination with the West, he had most recently lived in St. Louis selling supplies to the first fur trappers heading up the Missouri into the new U.S. Louisiana Territory. Though Hunt had no experience in the wilderness, Astor had faith that this quick-learning newcomer, who would have the help and company of more experienced fur traders during the journey, could lead a large party across one of the largest, least known, and most rugged wildernesses in the world.

For second in command of the West Coast emporium, Astor chose Duncan McDougall. McDougall was to travel to the West Coast aboard the
Tonquin
as a member of the Seagoing Party. Also a Scottish-born fur trader from Montreal, and thus a British subject, McDougall was short, proud, energetic, and quick to take command—as well as take offense. Astor would have preferred that McDougall and the several other Scottish fur traders he recruited be American citizens, especially in light of rising tensions between the United States and Britain over territorial issues, but Astor wanted to hire the best fur traders in North America. The best in the business, by far, were the Scottish traders and French-Canadian voyageurs in the Canadian trade. Many of these traders were employees of the Montreal-based North West Company, whose sprawling operations stretched over thousands of square miles of wilderness from the Great Lakes nearly to the Rockies, while the Hudson’s Bay Company operated farther to the north.

Astor knew many of the North West Company traders from his fur-buying trips to Montreal and dinners and dances there. He identified several willing to throw in their lot with his bold new enterprise, either because they were unhappy with their roles in the North West Company or enticed by the mind-boggling prospects of Astor’s expedition. He made them a tempting offer. Christening his new entity the Pacific Fur Company and incorporating it in early 1810, he divvied it up into one hundred shares and extended capital up to $400,000. That was just to start—more funding could be made available if needed. If they signed on with him, Astor would give each of these Scottish-born fur traders five of those hundred shares and would name them a “partner” or “shareholder.” Should Astor’s vast plan succeed, they all knew, their shares would be worth a fortune.

Four signed on, filling the roster of Astor partners with a tangle of Scottish clans: in addition to Duncan McDougall, there were Donald Mackenzie, Alexander McKay, and David Stuart, who would split his shares with his young nephew, Robert. Three other partners, two of them also of Scottish descent, would join en route.

The third of Astor’s chosen leaders was an American patriot and U.S. naval hero, Captain Jonathan Thorn. Astor referred to Thorn as his “gunpowder fellow.” A thirty-one-year-old lieutenant taking a leave of absence from the U.S. Navy, Thorn would captain the
Tonquin
and command a crew of twenty-three. Sailing around Cape Horn, captain and crew would carry aboard the
Tonquin
as passengers the first wave of Scottish fur traders and French-Canadian voyageurs to start the emporium on the Northwest Coast. Thorn had made a name in 1804 by sailing directly into enemy fire off Tripoli in the Mediterranean during a fierce battle against North Africa’s Barbary pirates, who had attacked American shipping there. While the youngish Captain Thorn had never commanded a civilian ship before, his utter fearlessness in battle and his unquestioned American patriotism—as well as his strict adherence to orders—appealed to Mr. Astor. Astor had confidently assured his Scottish partners that if there was fighting at sea to be done to establish the West Coast empire, Captain Thorn would “blow all out of the water.”

According to Astor’s plan, his chosen leaders would recruit other participants en route. Many would play prominent roles: fur trader Ramsay Crooks, Virginia hunter John Day, and an incredibly tough Native American woman leading her two toddlers. Known by her Europeanized name, Marie Dorion, she would stumble out of the wintry wilderness many months later with an incredible story to tell.

By August 1810, when that first canoe of recruited voyageurs landed at the lower Manhattan docks, John Jacob Astor had been laying his plans for more than two years. He had allowed for every possible problem. He had backup plans for his backup plans. He had worked diplomatic channels from Washington all the way to St. Petersburg, Russia. He had received the enthusiastic endorsement of Jefferson and his pledge of “every reasonable patronage & facility in the power of the Executive.” He had proposed partnerships with his potential rival, the North West Company. His emissaries were convincing Russia with its Alaskan fur posts to use his ships to carry Russian furs to China, hoping to lock up a world monopoly on fur, or something close to it. He had interviewed recruits, chosen leaders, and instructed his agents to recruit still more voyageurs and hunters, Hawaiian swimmers, and Indian interpreters. He was prepared to put tremendous capital behind this epic undertaking, one of the greatest business ventures the world has known: a global trading empire, a colony—perhaps even a country—of his own.

In all his meticulous planning and preparation, however, Astor had not allowed for one major factor. Mountain climbers talk about “exposure,” meaning one’s level of physical risk in a particular situation—on a very narrow ledge on a cliff face, for instance—when a small mistake can result in major consequences. In 1810, when John Jacob Astor launched his great endeavor, this far, wild edge of the North American continent—with its brutal North Pacific storms, hostile natives, extreme remoteness, difficulty of communication, vulnerability to foreign empires, dense rain forests, and surf-battered coasts—was as exposed as any habitable place on earth.

Nor was it possible to predict the powerful distorting effect that this degree of exposure would have on the personalities and leadership abilities of the men Astor had chosen to head his West Coast empire. Under extreme stress, each leader succumbed to his own best and worst traits.

For anyone who stood to gain from it, however, Astor’s vision was too mesmerizing not to embrace. His great trading scheme harmoniously and profoundly joined the dreams of two powerful and far-seeing men. Astor would dominate the world fur market, the Pacific Rim trade, and reap fantastic profits, as would his fur-trader partners. Through John Jacob Astor’s powerful global trade network and West Coast colony, President Jefferson and his successors would establish a democratic outpost on the dim, distant Pacific Coast. Jefferson’s vision embraced the entirety of North America and accorded Astor’s enterprise a powerful role in shaping the continent’s political destiny.

“I view [your undertaking],” Jefferson would write to Astor, “as the germ of a great, free and independent empire on that side of our continent, and that liberty and self-government spreading from that side as well as this side, will ensure their complete establishment over the whole.”

CHAPTER TWO

T
HE BICKERING ABOARD THE
T
ONQUIN
STARTED THAT
first night out of New York Harbor, on September 8, 1810. Captain Thorn, following his naval discipline, ordered all lights out at 8:00
P.M.
His salt-hardened crew diligently obeyed. But the four clannish, woodsy, Scottish fur traders on board as passengers hadn’t finished their socializing on deck, chatting and smoking their pipes as if sitting around a campfire. Nor had the dozen sinewy, French-Canadian voyageurs. Nor the eight literate young men from Canada who had signed on as clerks with Mr. Astor, some of them scribbling away in their journals.

The argumentative Scottish fur traders flatly refused Captain Thorn’s order for bedtime. Mr. Astor had made them
partners
in the great scheme, they retorted. They held a financial interest. That meant, as shareholders, they
owned
part of the
Tonquin
. How could Captain Thorn tell them what to do aboard their own ship? they demanded.

Another question arose: Who would sleep where? The 300-ton
Tonquin,
ninety-six feet long, square-rigged with three masts, a newly built and fast-sailing ship, was crammed full of the crew of twenty-three plus the twenty-six passengers plus mounds of supplies for the emporium’s warehouses-to-be. Captain Thorn had assigned to the Spartan quarters before the mast the passengers known as “mechanics”—the blacksmith, carpenter, and cooper for the West Coast emporium—as well as several clerks-in-training. Here they would share quarters with the
Tonquin’
s common sailors and help out with sailors’ duties. The Scottish partners and clerks took this as an insult. They confronted Captain Thorn and asked him to move their mechanics and clerks-in-training aft to the more luxurious main cabin with the other clerks.

“He was a strict disciplinarian,” wrote one of the clerks, Gabriel Franchère, who kept a journal, “of a quick and passionate temper, accustomed to exact obedience, considering nothing but duty, and giving himself no trouble about the murmurs of his crew, taking counsel of nobody, and following Mr. Astor’s instructions to the letter. Such was the man who had been selected to command our ship.”

Astor had anticipated that the mossy, comradely, forest-grown hierarchy among the passengers aboard the
Tonquin
might collide headlong with Captain Thorn’s iron chain of naval command. He had written out detailed instructions to his chosen leaders before the voyage began. To Thorn, Astor had written that the captain needed to pay careful attention to the health of all aboard, and foster harmony and good humor aboard the ship.

“To prevent any misunderstandings,” Astor wrote to Captain Thorn, “will require your particular good management.”

But “good management” was a phrase open to interpretation. The captain refused to budge to the partners’ request. The mechanics would stay where he had assigned them—in the forecastle with the common sailors—and work as he ordered.

McDougall, the small, proud Scottish partner, was incensed. It was McKay, however, who served as their de facto spokesman. At forty years old, the former North West Company employee was deeply respected in fur-trading circles for having crossed the continent to the Pacific with Alexander Mackenzie in 1793. Known for his expertise in scouting wilderness trails and working harmoniously with Indians, he was described by clerk Franchère as both “bold and enterprising,” while also “whimsical and eccentric.”

Perhaps incited by the short, feisty McDougall, McKay now stepped forward from the Canadian contingent to address Captain Thorn.

“We will defend ourselves rather than suffer such treatment.”

Captain Thorn, just then turning to leave, suddenly spun around on his heel to face McKay.

“I will blow out the brains of the first man who dares disobey my orders aboard my own ship.”

“In the midst of this scene,” wrote another clerk, Alexander Ross, “Mr. David Stuart, a good old soul, stept up, and by his gentle and timely interference put an end to the threatening altercation.

“This was the first specimen we had of the captain’s disposition,” Ross continued, “and it laid the foundation of a rankling hatred between the partners and himself.”

And so went the great venture’s first hours at sea.

Despite the tension, the
Tonquin’
s passage was relatively uneventful until she had sailed from New York Harbor well down into the Southern Hemisphere. As the horizon of the East Coast dropped from sight and they sailed out into the Atlantic, Franchère sensed just how deeply into the wilds he was headed. It would be nine thousand miles and three and a half months to Cape Horn, and that would mark only the halfway point to the Northwest Coast. He admitted that, as a sensitive person, he would have abandoned the venture right then if it were possible.

“One must have experienced it one’s self,” he wrote, “to be able to conceive of the melancholy which takes possession of the soul of a man of sensibility, at the instant that he leaves his country and the civilized world, to go to inhabit with strangers in the wild and unknown lands.”

By September 14, only a week out of New York Harbor, the first flying fish, indicating warmer tropical waters, zipped through the ship’s rigging and fell to the
Tonquin’
s deck. Ten days later the crew and passengers caught two dolphins and cooked them, a delicious break from the monotony of hard bread, salt beef, and salt pork. On October 5, sailing southeast across the Atlantic toward Africa to take advantage of the trade winds, they spotted the hazy, rocky headlands of the Cape Verde Islands, off Africa’s coast.

Some of the younger passengers asked Captain Thorn to land at the islands so they could claim they had touched Africa. Captain Thorn refused what he thought a frivolous request, despite the chance to refill the
Tonquin’
s emptying water barrels. They sailed onward toward the equator. A few days off Cape Verde, a large ship fell in at a distance behind the
Tonquin
—a brig carrying twenty cannon but no identifying flag. As the big, threatening mystery ship shadowed them, Captain Thorn, glassing the vessel from afar, believed she might be a British warship preparing to board the
Tonquin
.

It was a growing problem and festering point of irritation for the young, proud U.S. republic, having fought free of its British colonial bonds barely twenty-five years earlier. British warships cruising in the Atlantic recently had boarded American commercial vessels to search for British subjects aboard as crew or passengers—of which there were often many, as in the case of the
Tonquin
. The British ships dragooned these errant subjects of the Crown into the ongoing war against Napoleon, where Britain needed all available men. The young U.S. government deeply resented this British “stop-and-search” interference in American shipping, a resentment that would only grow. Captain Thorn had steered clear of the Cape Verde Islands in part to avoid British vessels that might be lurking there.

Now came the game of cat-and-mouse, and Captain Thorn played it to his strengths. Known as a fast and well-constructed ship, Astor’s
Tonquin
was only three years old, and her hull was sheathed in copper, which kept it free of boring worms and clinging weed growth, and gave her extra speed compared to a simple wooden hull. She carried ten guns, plus gunports that made it look as if she carried twenty, plus two fake guns in her bow. She also carried on this voyage a great number of available hands in the form of crew plus passengers, to load and fire the guns in rapid succession if it came to a fight. This gave Captain Thorn an advantage, as the other ship appeared to carry a small crew to man its guns.

First trying to outrace the big brig, Captain Thorn ordered all sails set. The wind blew fair as he coaxed from the
Tonquin
maximum speed. All day the stranger easily stayed with the
Tonquin
. As dusk fell, she broke away and vanished into the quick tropical night. It appeared they’d finally shaken the ominous vessel. When dawn broke, however, they spotted the twenty-gun stranger still trailing them, even closer, seeming to want the
Tonquin
to identify herself without it doing likewise. Captain Thorn showed no American colors, knowing this could provoke a boarding, with many of his passengers then hauled off to fight Napoleon.

The foaming prow of the big mystery brig now closed to a mere cable’s length, or about two hundred yards, from the wake swashing off the
Tonquin’
s stern. This sudden nearness of the ship, Franchère reported, put Captain Thorn in a state of “some alarm.”

But this was also precisely why Astor had hired naval hero Thorn. Astor’s “gunpowder fellow” now came into his element—bristling confrontations between armed ships in the lawless reaches of the open sea. Realizing the
Tonquin
couldn’t outsail the brig, Thorn, as daylight brightened, ordered all crew and passengers on deck and had the ship’s drum “beat to quarters”—the rhythm that signaled to prepare the gun decks—and make as if all crew and the many passengers were loading all cannon. The mystery ship could hear the beat of the drum and see the scurry of activity toward the guns.

Captain Thorn’s ruse worked. The sudden threat of the
Tonquin’
s twenty-plus cannon (or so it looked), manned by a large and energetic crew and a determined captain, apparently daunted the brig.

“[A]bout ten
A.M.
the stranger again changed her course,” reported Franchère, “and we soon lost sight of her entirely.”

As the southern journey progressed, Captain Thorn grew fed up with the “lubberly” whims of his unseamanlike passengers and became ever more rigid in his command. It was as if he were trying to discipline the entire sprawling Canadian wilderness in a sailing ship just one hundred feet long. He forbade the Scottish partners from gathering on the starboard side of the quarterdeck, the ceremonial area near the wheel where commanders of warships customarily stood. He banned the scribbling clerks from the quarterdeck altogether. He was shocked with the casual manner in which the Scottish partners, such as the wilderness veteran McKay or the genial David Stuart, supposedly dignified managers of Mr. Astor’s venture, would sit on deck passing a pipe as equals with common voyageurs, telling stories. When he found his amiable first mate, Mr. Fox of Boston, joining this shaggy Scottish-Canadian social circle, Thorn confined him belowdecks for three days.

Thorn wrote long letters back to his boss, Mr. Astor, to be sent on any passing ship they met or port where they should happen to call, complaining how the partners impeded Astor’s great mission to the Pacific Coast. He railed against the partners’ “effeminacy,” their delicacy of habits, their need for entertainment and luxury, as if they expected “Fly-market on the forecastle, Covent-garden on the poop, and a cool spring from Canada on the main top.”

And they whined about the food—this despite the hams and puddings he had them served in the luxury of the cabin.

“When thwarted in their cravings for delicacies, they would exclaim it was d-d hard they could not live as they pleased on their own ship, freighted with their own merchandise. And these are the fine fellows who made such a boast that they could ‘eat dogs.’ ”

It wasn’t just the partners who drove Captain Thorn wild. He complained in his letters to Astor that the scribbling clerks, far from being educated, had received their learning in barrooms and around billiard tables and had never ventured deeper into the woods than Montreal, except one, a schoolteacher, who was “as foolish a pedant as ever lived.” The assorted artisans or mechanics his ship carried as passengers were as worthless as anyone “that ever broke sea biscuit.” The voyageurs themselves—these wilderness hippies of their era—were a slovenly lot, with their singing and dancing at all hours, their braggadocio, their dirty leather leggings, their overcoats cut from blankets. Like some angry father with teenage sons sleeping until noon after last night’s carouse, Captain Thorn periodically stormed into the forward cabin to roust the voyageurs from their “lubber nests” and make them bathe and get exercise on deck.

This cultural clash aboard the
Tonquin
had its origins in the earliest European settlement of North America. The ship in many ways was a microcosm of the continent itself at that moment in 1810—national boundaries still undefined, and different peoples, even Northern European ones, largely unblended in what would eventually become known as the melting pot.

The earliest French colonists in North America were aristocratic adventurers and entrepreneurs who established a settlement in today’s Nova Scotia shortly before Sir Walter Raleigh’s British colonists founded Jamestown in Virginia in 1607. Where these English colonists at Jamestown, and later, Plymouth, painstakingly chopped the forest acre by acre and planted seed by seed, the French soon discovered that their wealth was not in agriculture, but in the rich harvests of furs—especially beaver—from the millions of square miles of the continent’s vast interior. These fetched high prices in Europe, where the aristocracy increasingly valued furs and beaver felt hats as high-fashion items. Europe’s own wild, fur-bearing animals had been largely depleted by about 1600.

The French in America held two tremendous advantages over the English for reaping that wealth in pelts, one geographic and one cultural. While the English had the Appalachians to cross to travel westward from their Atlantic settlements, no similar geographic barrier stood between the French settlements and the continent’s interior. An easy water route—the St. Lawrence River, the Great Lakes, and chains of rivers and lakes beyond—led directly from the French settlements to North America’s heart. Culturally, the French held an advantage in the fur trade because they, unlike the English, had few qualms about intermarrying with Native Americans and acculturating to an Indian way of life. They learned to hunt deer and moose like the natives, fish, live in the woods, trap the abundant beaver, paddle hundreds of miles by birch bark canoe or, in winter, make their way by snowshoe and toboggan.