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

by Stark, Peter

  Colter pointed to Meriwether Lewis as being at least partly responsible for the Blackfeet’s vehemence toward whites. On the return trip from the Pacific, Lewis and a small party had taken a scouting foray in what is today northern Montana. Several young Blackfeet tried to steal the Lewis party’s rifles and horses. In the altercation, one of Lewis’s men stabbed to death one of the Blackfeet, and Lewis shot and probably fatally wounded another. In his anger about the cheeky raid, Lewis had left a Jefferson peace medal around the neck of the dead man, to show to all who had killed him.

  Before the main bands of Blackfeet could exact retribution, Lewis and his scouting party fled day and night on horseback to the Missouri. Here he rejoined another contingent of his men who were in canoes and together they paddled at high speed down the Missouri and out of Blackfeet territory. The Blackfeet, one of the fiercest of the Plains warrior tribes, with a strict code of vengeance for the death of their own, hadn’t forgotten five years later. Lewis had been lucky, but whatever American who followed would pay the price.

  Colter strode along the bank for several miles as Hunt’s boat laboriously made its way upstream toward the winter camp at Nodaway. He seemed to miss the excitement of the wilderness, reported botanist Bradbury, and appeared tempted to join the Overland Party, even though he’d only returned from the Rocky Mountains the previous spring, had since married, and had started a homestead of his own. Colter warned the party to take all possible precautions when traversing Blackfeet territory, even suggesting they might find a different, safer route than the Lewis and Clark route. The one he proposed left the Missouri River and skirted south below the extremely dangerous Blackfeet territory.

  Finally Colter turned away from the riverbank and back toward his cabin where his bride, Sallie, waited. Hunt, with his boatload of additional recruits, continued upriver for the Nodaway camp, pondering Colter’s idea of a new, untested, and possibly safer route to the Pacific.

  By mid-April 1811, after wintering at the Nodaway camp, the full Overland Party readied themselves for the big push up the Missouri and over the Rockies to the Pacific. They now numbered around sixty people—about forty French-Canadian voyageurs, several American woodsmen, the two British botanists, the interpreter and his family, a ledger-keeping clerk by the name of John Reed, and five shareholding partners including Hunt and Donald Mackenzie, along with Hunt’s friend from their St. Louis days, twenty-four-year-old Ramsay Crooks. Crooks, like Hunt, was known to be steady, even-tempered, and considered—even gentle. Opposite in temperament to this pair was a fourth partner in the Overland Party, Robert McClellan. The small, wiry, intense McClellan, with piercing, deep-set, dark eyes, was of Scottish heritage but born in frontier Pennsylvania. Considerably older than most of the Overland Party, at just over forty, he had fought in the Ohio Valley Indian wars in the late 1700s. Like a land-based version of Captain Thorn, he was known both for his acts of bravery under fire and for his hair-trigger personality.

  Joseph Miller was the fifth shareholding Astor partner traveling with the Overland Party. Born in Baltimore to a respectable family, having benefited from a good education, the adventurous Miller, in a dispute over leave time, had quit an officer’s position in the army to come west as a fur trapper and trader. The previous spring he had ascended the Missouri with Crooks and McClellan to establish a trade with the Indians but had run into problems with a band of six hundred Teton Sioux. McClellan, the former Pennsylvanian Indian fighter, was convinced that rival businessman Manuel Lisa, a New Orleans native, had incited the Sioux to stop the competing trading party. Now based in St. Louis and known as an aggressive businessman, Lisa had established a few trading posts partway up the Missouri. McClellan swore that if he ever encountered Lisa in the wilds beyond the reach of law, he would shoot him on sight.

  Hunt had encountered the greatest difficulty in hiring an Indian interpreter for his Overland Party, tangling in St. Louis with Manuel Lisa over who would get Pierre Dorion. Dorion’s father, Old Dorion, had served as a Sioux interpreter on the Lewis and Clark expedition. His son, Pierre Jr., part Sioux, part French, had interpreted for Lisa on a trading foray up the Missouri. Lisa claimed that Dorion still owed him for a large liquor bill from that journey. Dorion disputed the bill as wildly inflated.

  Manuel Lisa still badly wanted Dorion to serve as his interpreter, as he was sending a trading expedition up the Missouri the same spring that Hunt set out upriver with the Astor Overland Party. Lisa’s party was destined for the post he had established at the Mandan villages, some sixteen hundred miles upstream. He also hoped his expedition would discover what had happened to a missing party of trappers sent by his concern, the Missouri Fur Company, almost two years earlier to establish a post at the Missouri headwaters at Three Forks.

  In St. Louis, Lisa tried to detain Dorion over his disputed liquor debt, sending authorities to keep him from joining Hunt’s party. But Dorion, somehow forewarned, slipped out of St. Louis at night and joined Hunt’s riverboat en route. Still another complicating factor intervened when Dorion insisted that his wife and their two young boys accompany the Overland Party. His wife, a member of the Iowa tribe and known by her Anglicized name of Marie Dorion, apparently resisted the idea. Dorion beat her, and she escaped into the woods along the river with her two boys. Hunt dispatched a search party. After a night in the woods, she returned to the riverbank and rejoined her husband and the Overland Party.

  Did Marie Dorion grasp the magnitude of what the Overland Party was about to attempt perhaps more clearly than anyone else on the Astor expedition? Five-year-old Jean Baptiste walking at her side and tiny two-year-old Paul riding on her back contrasted with the vastness of the wilderness and the sprawling ambition of Astor’s enterprise. Marie Dorion may have spoken—and probably did, at some point—directly with Sacagawea herself, wife of interpreter Toussaint Charbonneau of the Lewis and Clark expedition as well as a member of the Shoshone tribe from what today is Idaho. Apparently, Sacagawea was in St. Louis as Hunt’s riverboat departed up the Missouri in March, with its additional recruits and the Dorion family, bound for winter camp. It’s likely Marie Dorion and Sacagawea knew each other: two Indian women in the small settlement of St. Louis, both wives of interpreters in the burgeoning Missouri fur trade.

  What would Sacagawea have told Marie Dorion?

  It will be very long, and very difficult to reach the ocean. . . . You and your children will suffer. . . .

  By then, five years after her journey with Lewis and Clark, Sacagawea had adopted European dress and manners. She may have understood that whites, with their powerful guns and endless numbers and relentless urge for furs and farmland and profit, had just begun their long reach toward the western ocean. She may have understood that these first expeditions heading westward represented the beginning of the end for her people’s ancient, seminomadic way of life.

  One imagines her saying to Marie Dorion, Don’t go. . . .

  Or . . . Yes, join them, because they will come to our homelands whether we join them or not. . . . Or . . . Go. You will see amazing things. . . .

  Organizing into four riverboats laden with approximately twenty tons of goods and equipped with oars, sails, and towropes, the Overland Party embarked from Nodaway winter camp on April 21, 1811, with sails set in a favorable upriver wind. They hoped to reach the Pacific—as Astor expected—in late summer or autumn.

  It rained nearly every day at first. The river flowed high with the spring rains, and the swift current shoved against the prows of the riverboats working slowly upstream. Sitting in rows on benches, the voyageurs pulled the oars in tandem strokes. These experienced steersmen hugged the boats to the inside of the bends where the current ran slack, instead of fighting the full swirling force of midstream. In swift sections they stood and shoved their way upriver with long “setting poles,” or stepped out of the boats onto the riverbank and dragged them upstream, hauling together on 200-foot-long towropes called cordelles.

  The American hunters, amo
ng them John Day, a lanky, good-natured, forty-year-old Virginian, ranged the grassy banks or forested bottomlands stalking deer, bear, and other game to feed the sixty-person party. The botanists, Bradbury and Nuttall, walked ashore whenever they could to study and dig plant specimens. Here on the plains, Indian villages lay at great distances from one another and they encountered few other humans. At night the expedition moored along the grass-and-mud riverbanks or on islands, pitching tents in which partners and botanists and the clerk usually slept, while voyageurs rolled themselves in bison robes or blankets under the stars. Bradbury noted that at night the skies glowed a distant orange from fires set by war parties covering their tracks across the prairie grasses.

  Each day they pushed onward up the Missouri. The spring current undercut the soft, muddy banks, and uprooted cottonwood trees that tumbled into the river. Still attached to the banks by their rootballs, these downed trees, known to the voyageurs as embarrass, or “impediment,” projected from shore like arms reaching into the river and straining out drifting wood from the flow. These partial dams of driftwood sticking out from the banks had the effect of speeding up the river’s current around their projecting ends. The voyageurs worked hard with oars and poles and towlines to round these obstacles or crossed the river to avoid them.

  Although they would have preferred paddles and their lightweight birch-bark canoes to the heavy wooden riverboats and oars, the voyageurs kept up their good cheer and their paddling songs. Bradbury, with a knowledge of Latin and French, translated one of their favorite songs into English, its lighthearted verses about life on the farm back in Quebec contrasting with the enormity and uncertainty of the wilderness that lay ahead:

  Behind our house there is a pond,

  Fal lal de ra,

  There came three ducks to swim thereon. . . .

  One can hear, in the cadence of these lines, the quick, swirling stroke of the oars in the water, the brief, dripping pause after the stroke, followed by the next hard pull and the sudden forward surge of the riverboat, repeated thousands and thousands of times each day.

  They had pulled themselves upstream for two months by that day in late May when, over breakfast, they saw two canoes with three white men coming down the river. The man wearing the bandana over his scalped pate, they learned, was a sixty-six-year-old Kentuckian and former Indian fighter named Edward Robinson. He belonged to the missing party Manuel Lisa sought. Two years earlier, in the spring of 1809, Robinson and the other two Kentuckians in the canoes with him, Jacob Reznor and John Hoback, had ascended the Missouri with a large trapping party sent by Lisa and the Missouri Fur Company to establish a fur post at Three Forks. Rich in beaver and other fur-bearing animals, Three Forks lay near the Missouri headwaters. It also happened to lie in the heart of Blackfeet territory. Robinson and company described how the Blackfeet relentlessly attacked the trapping parties whenever they emerged from the small, fortified post at Three Forks, even to try to negotiate. In various ambushes, they killed an estimated twenty to thirty trappers.

  “The [Blackfeet] Indians were so intensely hostile,” as early furtrade historian Hiram Chittenden described the Three Forks incident, “that there seemed to be no possibility of an interview except at the rifle’s mouth.”

  After several months of relentless ambush, the white trappers abandoned the Three Forks outpost and fled in two different directions. One group headed down the Missouri toward St. Louis with the beaver pelts they’d gathered. Another group, led by Andrew Henry, and including the Kentuckians Robinson, Reznor, and Hoback, scrambled southwest over the nearby crest of the Rockies hoping to escape the Blackfeet and continue trapping. There, in the winter of 1810–11, along a small river, they built makeshift cabins and wintered. They believed this river was a headwater stream of the Columbia River, flowing to the Pacific Ocean.

  After suffering a hard winter, the little party abandoned their mountain hideout and scattered farther, some heading south hoping to reach Spanish territory in Mexico, while Robinson, Reznor, and Hoback headed east, through unknown mountain ranges and broad valleys, back toward the Missouri River. After traversing a huge stretch of unmapped terrain that skirted south of Blackfeet territory, they finally struck the Missouri. They had been paddling downstream on the swift spring snowmelt bound for their Kentucky farms, when, on that morning, May 26, 1811, they ran into Wilson Price Hunt and his party breakfasting on the riverbank.

  Even after all the harrowing experiences they’d undergone—or perhaps because of them—the sight of Hunt’s large Overland Party was too tempting to the three Kentucky trappers, as were the possible riches they might accrue under Astor’s transcontinental scheme. They abandoned their plans to head back to their family farms and signed with Hunt’s and Astor’s enterprise. Immediately after signing, they transferred their baggage to the riverboats and let their empty canoes drift away downstream.

  Despite their eagerness to join, the three Kentuckians, echoing John Colter, strongly advised Hunt to avoid the Blackfeet. The Blackfeet were implacable and still furious that Meriwether Lewis had killed one of their young men. Hunt and his Overland Party, the Kentuckians claimed, could easily bypass Blackfeet territory. They simply had to continue up the Missouri a few days farther from where they were now, to the Arikara villages. They would have to purchase horses from the friendly Arikara, then leave the Missouri River, and the Lewis and Clark route more generally, traveling overland, due west, across the Rockies, to that unnamed headwater stream of the Columbia where Robinson, Reznor, and Hoback had recently abandoned their winter camp. Once at the stream, the big group simply had to build canoes and the forty voyageurs could paddle the entire Overland Party and its tons of trade goods and trapping equipment downstream to the Pacific—setting up posts along the way—and rendezvous with the Tonquin at the Columbia’s mouth. Not only would the route provide safety from the Blackfeet, they claimed; if they followed certain mountain passes through the Rockies, their way would also prove far easier than the Lewis and Clark route, which included a long and difficult mountain crossing.

  Hunt deliberated. He had never been placed in anything like this situation. The incredible ferocity of the Blackfeet on one hand and, on the other, a great unknown chunk of territory? To choose the latter, he’d have to leave behind the Missouri and his big cargo boats equipped with lethal swivel guns, and travel for many vulnerable weeks on foot and horseback through uncharted lands. More difficult still, he’d have to disregard Mr. Astor’s instructions. The party now numbered at least sixty and possibly could withstand a fierce Blackfeet attack, but the French-Canadian voyageurs, infused more with the spirit of brotherly love than mortal combat, didn’t relish the idea of fighting and surely preferred what amounted to a very long portage. And the Kentucky and Virginia hunters, though happy to fight, didn’t much like the odds.

  The massive scar under the bandana on Robinson’s hairless pate seems to have made a deep impression on Hunt, as if a symbol, in puckered flesh, of what lay farther up the Missouri. Old photographs of scalping victims—survivors were more common than is thought—call to mind circus clowns in the utterly bald, peeled-bare top of the victim’s head, with frizzed tufts of hair protruding on the sides and a narrow fringe of locks running above the forehead.

  Hunt surely also heard how it had been done. To scalp, the perpetrator typically turned his victim—alive or dead—facedown on the earth. With a knife—a stone knife in the pre-European days, and metal thereafter—he scored around the top of the head, cutting through the scalp to the underlying bone of the skull. Seizing a forelock of hair in his hand and placing one knee in the victim’s back, the perpetrator then gave a sharp upward jerk and ripped the large flap of scalp with its hair intact clean off the victim’s skull. Victims who were still alive at this point later reported that the tearing sounded like “distant thunder.” The blood loss, of course, was considerable, but stanching factors, such as cold or the raggedness of the tear, could constrict the blood vessels quickly and slow the l
oss. Edward Robinson, scalped some years earlier fighting in Ohio Valley Indian wars, had been among the lucky survivors.

  Whatever it meant for survivors, for Native American tribes the act of scalping held special meaning beyond simple vengeance. This close personal contact with the enemy and the removal of part of his person allowed the victor to absorb the victim’s power. Once removed, the fleshy underside of the scalp was scraped clean and stretched over a wooden hoop. This was then mounted on a tall shaft and displayed aloft as a ceremonial trophy. Though some suggest that Europeans first introduced scalping to Native Americans, other evidence indicates the practice existed long before white men arrived in Sioux or Blackfeet territory. Archaeologists digging near this same section of the Missouri discovered a massacre site from tribe-against-tribe warfare that dates to the 1300s. It contains nearly five hundred human skeletons. According to archaeological interpretation, most of the skulls display the stone-knife scores of scalping.

  The warrior tribes of the Plains had good reasons to display their ferocity to outsiders who infringed on their territory—whether the outsiders were other tribes, or, later, Europeans like Hunt and his companions. The Blackfeet and other Plains tribes sat atop of—and claimed as their own—one of the largest reservoirs of easily accessible protein the world has ever known: the vast herds of bison placidly grazing on prairie grasses. The Plains tribes, and especially the Blackfeet, jealously guarded these resources—a living storehouse of some 15 billion pounds of meat, as well as the hides to make their tipis and thick winter robes—by instilling in would-be thieves the fear of a terrible death.* Fear was a way to enforce the national boundary of a scattered nomadic tribe.