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

by Stark, Peter

  After listening to the case for leaving the Missouri and detouring south of Blackfeet territory, and hearing a similar opinion from two other wide-ranging trappers who had recently joined the Overland Party, Benjamin Jones and Alexander Carson, Hunt wrestled with this new alternative. He bore a deep sense of responsibility both to Astor and to the party under his own leadership. Were their interests the same in this case? What would Mr. Astor have him do?

  Hunt had been the sole leader of the Overland expedition since his stay in St. Louis. It was there, while visiting the settlement from Nodaway winter camp to recruit more men, that Hunt had received a letter from Astor in New York. Unnerved by political tensions between the Americans and the British, and unable to come to an agreement with rival trapping companies, Astor decided he’d rather an American citizen take sole charge of the Overland Party, relegating the Scot Donald Mackenzie to an equal status with the other partners. Wilson Price Hunt, in effect, had riding on his shoulders alone the welfare of the sixty-person Overland Party and much of the fate of John Jacob Astor’s West Coast empire.

  They camped together on the night of May 26, on a beautiful stretch of the Missouri, amid gentle grassy hills, abundant feeder streams, and stretches of willow-fringed bottomlands. The next day the Overland Party resumed its upstream push, now accompanied by the three Kentuckian trappers. The wind blew fair that day from the southeast and the weather held warm and sunny. The party hoisted the boats’ sails and made good mileage, reported Bradbury, despite the protests of the voyageurs, who, accustomed to controlling a canoe’s every movement with their paddles, grew panicky whenever the riverboats heeled in the brisk breeze.

  “O mon Dieu! Abattez le voile!” Oh my God! Stop the sail!

  Meanwhile, the eccentric young Nuttall leapt for the shore at every opportunity in his head-down pursuit of new plants, to the ignorance of all else, including personal safety.

  The voyageurs had taken to calling him le fou.

  Ou est le fou? Where is the fool?

  Il est après ramasser des racines. He is gathering roots.

  The four boats made good progress upriver under sail that day and camped that night, May 27, 1811, on Little Cedar Island. They were now an estimated 1,075 miles up the Missouri River from St. Louis. The island was a botanical wonderland—a grove of cedar trees grew in its center surrounded by gardenlike beds of vines and flowers. Voyageurs and woodsmen chopped new boat masts from the cedars to replace damaged ones, while Bradbury and Nuttall scrambled about collecting plants. Hunt, however, was distracted by his own problems. He had to decide, and soon, whether to turn away from the Missouri.

  “[T]he best possible route . . . became a subject of anxious enquiry,” wrote Bradbury of that night camping on Little Cedar Island.

  Hunt closely questioned the three Kentuckians about their proposal. He consulted with the two other trappers who had traveled the Upper Missouri, Carson and Jones. Mr. Astor had instructed him to try, whenever possible, to reach consensus among the partners. Hunt polled them, as he would throughout the journey, on their opinions about which way to go.

  One pictures Hunt’s party camped on the grassy bank of the narrow island—islands in the river granted a certain safety from Indian attack—with a large fire of long driftwood logs throwing yellow sparks up toward the diamond-bright prairie stars. The sixty men, one woman, and two children press in toward the fire’s warmth and comfort. Perhaps Hunt moves between the fire and his tent, interviewing and deliberating. What lay out there, in the vast prairie night, in the whole western continent, beyond this tiny glowing circle of warmth and humanity? Which mountains would let them pass, which rivers, which tribes that roamed unseen in the continental darkness? On Little Cedar Island, Wilson Price Hunt, for the first time, tasted the unknown. Though its flavor might intoxicate an eager, lone young man like John Colter, Hunt, responsible for a large group of people and the expectations of great men, probably found it neither exhilarating nor romantic. On the one hand there were the Blackfeet warriors that surely awaited him on the known route up the Missouri. On the other lay the route that left the Missouri and struck overland, skirting south of the Blackfeet, where his party might wander lost over snowy mountain ranges and through the starvation deserts.

  What might have come as a startling revelation about striking out into the unknown is that though the questions confronting one are often mundane—this route or that, this river drainage or another—the implications are profound, and sometimes fatal.

  By morning, Hunt had decided.

  It’s not surprising that in the choice between a near-certain, violent confrontation with the Blackfeet and venturing out into a great stretch of unexplored terrain, Hunt, avoiding conflict, finally chose the latter. One could call it a bold choice in the true spirit of exploration, or cowardice, a retreat into fear for the safety of his party, and for himself. Whatever an expedition member’s perspective, Hunt had made the fateful decision: The Overland Party would leave the Missouri and veer to the south of the planned route, avoiding the Blackfeet, and trek, on foot and horseback, into the great swath of uncharted terrain.

  The decision made, Hunt sat down to write Mr. Astor of his change in plans.

  CHAPTER NINE

  MEN SHOUTED, CURSED, AND SANG PARTING WORDS above the heaving of horses and creaking of packsaddles as the long procession of the Overland Party left the Arikara villages, mounted the Missouri riverbank, and strode onto the great, grassy plains. Wilson Price Hunt had made his decision after that restless night on Little Cedar Island: The Overland Party would avoid the Blackfeet territory, leave the Missouri and the known Lewis and Clark route, and strike across a great stretch of unknown terrain, guided by the three trappers, in search of the headwaters of the Columbia.

  With the decision made, Hunt had to worry about whether they would find enough horses for the journey. Did the three trappers know where they were going? What other tribes might they encounter besides the Blackfeet? How long would it take to reach the Rocky Mountains and then the Pacific?

  But what Hunt didn’t seem to feel was any sense of urgency. With his lack of wilderness experience, Hunt had never seen winter in the mountains and how difficult travel there could be.

  After his restless night on Little Cedar Island and his decision to leave the Lewis and Clark route and head into the unknown territory, his party worked their way another two weeks upstream on the Missouri by riverboat until they reached the riverbank opposite the Arikara villages on the morning of June 12, 1811. Though this was to be their jumping-off point across the prairie, Hunt lingered there for nearly five weeks.

  Just as Hunt’s party arrived opposite the Arikara villages, Manuel Lisa’s party landed nearby. Lisa’s big riverboat, its voyageurs pulling for all they were worth in the thousand-some miles since St. Louis, had a week earlier caught up with the Hunt party. It had rained during the night and soaked both parties’ bedding. While their blankets and bison robes dried in the sun, an Arikara chief called from the villages across the river to both parties. The chief’s powerful Indian oratorical voice, the syllables of speech accented evenly and clearly, carried easily across the half-mile-wide Missouri. He invited the whites to cross the river for a council.

  The rival parties had previously agreed, using as intermediaries Bradbury and his friend in the Lisa party, Henry Brackenridge, to arrive at the Arikara villages at exactly the same moment. This way neither would have won a trade advantage by getting there first. But, even as the two parties prepared to cross the Missouri simultaneously to the villages, suspicions lingered.

  “M’Clellan, in particular, carefully watched [Lisa’s] motions,” wrote Bradbury, “determined to shoot him if he attempted to cross the river before us. . . .”

  The rival riverboats shoved off—oars dipping into the Missouri’s surface, which swirled with spring snowmelt from the distant mountains. Brackenridge, an ambitious young St. Louis journalist and lawyer in Lisa’s boat, described seeing Arikara women bobbing d
own the Missouri’s pillows of current in circular boats as they crossed. The boats were made of a single bison hide stretched over a willow frame, known as “bullboats,” and helped the women tote bundles of firewood for their hearths. Hunt’s and Lisa’s riverboats touched simultaneously on the opposite bank, where a crowd of Arikaras met them. The Arikara chief, known to French fur traders as Le Gauche—“Left-Handed”—escorted them through the village’s two hundred or so conical earthen lodges to the council house. Inside they were seated ceremoniously on bison robes. The further progress of the Overland Party to the Pacific would pivot on this council between Le Gauche, Manuel Lisa, and Wilson Price Hunt. Could Hunt obtain from Le Gauche horses to carry the sixty people in his party and their tons of supplies for the long trek across the plains, over the Rockies, and to the Columbia headwaters?

  Or would Manuel Lisa, the rival trader, somehow sabotage Hunt’s efforts with the Arikara, undermining Astor’s grand plans for the Rocky Mountain and Pacific fur empire?

  Fights and threats had instantly erupted when the two parties first met each other on the Missouri riverbank a week before, when Lisa’s boat had overtaken Hunt’s group. As in St. Louis, Lisa had once again tried to hire the Indian interpreter, Pierre Dorion, away from Hunt by offering him whisky and reminding him of the large whisky debt Dorion still owed Lisa’s Missouri Fur Company.

  Dorion, enraged, had slugged Lisa on the riverbank.

  “O meu Dieu! Ou est mon couteau!” Oh my God! Where is my big knife! Lisa had cried in indignation, recorded the botanist and eyewitness Bradbury.

  While Lisa hurried off to get his weapon, Dorion had grabbed two pistols from Hunt, who didn’t seem inclined to put an end to the frontier melee, perhaps seeing this brawl as a convenient way to rid himself and Mr. Astor of a rival. Both McClellan and Crooks also itched to take on Lisa personally, convinced that he’d incited the Sioux against them on their previous trade journey up the Missouri. As Lisa returned with his big couteau stuck in his belt, Brackenridge tried to stop the violence.

  “I had several times to stand between him and the interpreter, who has a pistol in each hand,” Brackenridge wrote.

  The enraged Lisa, no doubt feeling his honor deeply impugned by the Indian interpreter’s blow, then turned on Hunt, insulting him with an expression, as Bradbury delicately put it, “conveying an imputation upon himself.”

  Whatever it was, Lisa’s insult set off the normally placid Wilson Price Hunt.

  “[Hunt] told Lisa that the matter should be settled by themselves,” wrote Bradbury, “and desired him to fetch his pistols.”

  Duels were still in vogue then among gentlemen and military officers, with the Burr-Hamilton duel fought only seven years before. Many duels never came to actual sword blows exchanged or bullets fired. Honor for both parties could more simply be satisfied on the “field of honor” by each appearing at the appointed hour ready to kill the other man, then employing various techniques for calling it off gracefully. Perhaps both Hunt and Lisa knew that the cooler heads of the botanist and journalist would eventually prevail.

  “I followed Lisa to his boat, accompanied by Mr. Brackenridge,” wrote Bradbury, “and we with difficulty prevented a meeting, which, in the present temper of the parties, would certainly have been a bloody one.”

  From that point forward, Bradbury and Brackenridge served as intermediaries between the Hunt and Lisa parties. (The other young British botanist, Nuttall, or Le Fou, apparently remained focused on finding new plants, oblivious to the threats of violence nearby.) In order to ease suspicions that anyone might angle for position with the Arikara, both parties had agreed to reach the villages at exactly the same moment, although it was anyone’s guess what would happen next between them.

  With both Lisa and Hunt sitting in the Arikara council lodge that morning of their arrival at the villages, an elderly chief, or priest, climbed to the lodge’s rooftop and in that powerful voice summoned all other chiefs to the meeting. With a group of twenty or more assembled in the lodge, the priest lit the long-stemmed pipe. Le Gauche took up the pipe and offered puffs to the Great Spirit—puffs to the sky, to the earth, and to the cardinal directions—then carried it around the group and, in a gesture of respect, pressed it to each person’s lips for several puffs.

  Le Gauche opened with a short speech. His people were poor, he said, and he was glad to see the white traders; he would be happy to trade with them.

  Manuel Lisa replied with a gift of tobacco and said that he would like to trade for bison skins and beaver pelts if the prices weren’t too high. Lisa, reported Brackenridge, pointed to Hunt and his colleagues sitting on the bison robes and told Le Gauche and the assembled chiefs that Mr. Hunt was a friend of his.

  “[Hunt and his party] were going on a long journey to the great Salt lake, to the west,” Lisa told the chief, “and he hoped would meet with favourable treatment; and that any injury offered them, he would consider as done to himself. . . .”

  For Hunt and his fellow partners, this came as a startling departure from Lisa’s behavior the week before.

  “This candid and frank declaration,” reported Brackenridge, also sitting on a bison robe in the council house, “at once removed all suspicion from the minds of the others, who had become seriously apprehensive that Lisa . . . might betray them.”

  It was now Hunt’s turn. Hunt also offered a gift of tobacco to Le Gauche, then spoke. His mission was not to trade with the Arikara, he told Le Gauche and the assembled chiefs, but to meet with his brothers far away at the great salt lake to the west. He would leave the river and travel overland from these villages toward the great body of water. He needed many horses for the journey and had plenty of goods to trade for the Arikara horses.

  Hunt spoke in French to Dorion, who translated his speech into native language intelligible to the chiefs. Bradbury made a point of sitting next to Dorion to get as nuanced a sense of the exchange as possible without understanding the language. While waiting for translation, the scientist and his friend the journalist Brackenridge noted the details of Arikara lodge construction: the roof supported by four tall forked posts planted in the earth, joined by crossbeams, and the whole covered with woven osier branches topped by the thick layer of earth that offered insulation in the cold winters and hot summers and gave the lodge its conical shape. A raised altar in these lodges typically held two elaborately painted bison skulls; displayed above them were consecrated objects like shields and quivers of arrows. While the lodges themselves were snug, and the people bathed twice a day, the Arikara villages sat on a level plain along the riverbank backed by bluffs and suffered from poor drainage. Aswarm with children, and with thirty or forty dogs per family, the villages became, both Bradbury and Brackenridge complained, a stinking pool of unhygienic filth whenever it rained.

  Le Gauche, sitting on his slightly raised dais in the council house, now responded to both Lisa’s and Hunt’s requests. He and his people were fond of white men, he said, and glad they’d come. He needed some time to fix the exact price of bison robes for Lisa; he was currently thinking about thirty loads of ball and powder per robe. For Hunt, however, Le Gauche had bad news:

  “[H]e was certain they could not spare the number of horses that he understood [Hunt] wanted,” reported Bradbury, “and that he did not think they ought to sell any horses.”

  Le Gauche didn’t give a reason why, at least not one that Bradbury reported. Surely McClellan, the Astor partner also sitting on a bison robe in the council lodge, suspected that Manuel Lisa had somehow got word to the chief telling him not to help the Overland Party. A more likely reason, however, is that the Arikara were at war with the Sioux and Le Gauche may have felt the Arikara needed to keep their horses at hand.

  Ten days earlier, the Sioux had blockaded Hunt’s riverboats on their laborious ascent of the Missouri, charging down the bank with five or six hundred warriors to stop them at a narrows. Only after Hunt ordered all swivel guns, howitzers, rifles, and pistols loaded and
aimed at the Sioux warriors, to show his willingness to fight, did the chiefs on the shore wave bison robes signaling their willingness to talk. They let Hunt and his party pass, contingent on Hunt’s promise that he wouldn’t sell arms to their upstream enemies, the Arikara.

  After Le Gauche denied Hunt’s request for horses, another Arikara chief, named Les Yeux Gris (Gray Eyes), spoke up.

  Les Yeux Gris stated, contrary to Le Gauche, that indeed the Arikara could sell many horses to Hunt. The sold horses could easily be replaced, he said, by “stealing or smoking.” Horse stealing was a highly honorable practice among Plains tribes and denoted besting one’s enemies in the most humiliating way possible. Some tribes prided themselves on being absolute masters at it. “Smoking,” on the other hand, as Crooks explained to Bradbury, referred to a custom among tribes friendly to one another. If one tribe lacked in some item—food, horses, whatever—that tribe could send emissaries to the other tribe, smoke together, and ask the other tribe to help provide the missing item. Someday, both tribes knew, the favor would be returned.

  Les Yeux Gris’s idea met the general approval of the gathered chiefs, including Le Gauche. At the right price—and Hunt seemed eager to pay well, including with arms and powder, despite his promises to the Sioux—they would sell horses to Hunt, replacing the horses by smoking or stealing.

  The meeting broke up. Bradbury and colleagues were led off to another lodge for a feast of boiled sweet corn mixed with bison fat, which Bradbury found delicious.

  But there were still delays. Horses had to be found and prices negotiated. Manuel Lisa himself offered to sell Hunt some of his own horses, kept at his post at the Mandan villages, another few hundred miles upriver. A small party from Hunt’s group, including Ramsay Crooks, traveled from the Arikara villages to the Mandan villages to get Lisa’s horses and bring them back.