by Stark, Peter
Glittering in one of the two drawing rooms of the Astor house may have stood a Christmas tree, an old German custom, although not yet adopted generally by Americans.* There was far less emphasis on Christmas gift-giving in America at the time, although friends exchanged visits between their homes over Christmas and New Year’s, and plenty of revelry and pot-banging raucousness went on in taverns and streets among the city’s coarser inhabitants. Besides, the Astor household, once full of small children, slowly had started to empty. Only three of the five children remained at home for the festivities of 1811.
Four years earlier, Magdalen Astor, then nineteen, had married a Danish, multilingual former diplomat, Adrian Bentzon. Astor lent the newlyweds one of his properties on Manhattan Island—the graceful country estate known as Richmond Hill, occupying a landscaped knoll overlooking the Hudson just south of Greenwich Village (near today’s Holland Tunnel entrance). Richmond Hill had formerly belonged to the high-living Aaron Burr, who, after his duel with Alexander Hamilton, had left politics, survived a trial for treason, and, deeply in debt, finally took off for Europe in 1808. Recognizing a good distressed property when he saw one, Astor purchased Burr’s Richmond Hill estate for cheap and let the young couple live in its airy, pillared main house. Astor soon recruited his urbane Danish son-in-law, with his diplomat’s experience, to travel to Russia to help advance his great plan for the West Coast empire.
Giving Bentzon detailed instructions, Astor used his government contacts to secure his daughter and her husband berths aboard a U.S. Navy frigate bound for Europe. They arrived in Russia in the summer of 1811. Bentzon was to negotiate with Russian authorities the final details of a contract that would give Astor’s ships exclusive right to supply Russian fur posts in Alaska and transport Russian sea otter, seal, and other furs from Alaska to China. For these transport services to China, Astor would receive a healthy commission, in addition to proceeds from his sales of supplies to the Russian posts. The two parties, Russia and Astor, would also agree to stay out of each other’s fur territories on the West Coast. For Adrian and Magdalen Bentzon, the Christmas of 1811 was spent in frozen St. Petersburg, working out these contract details. If their efforts were successful, it would be a generous Christmas present for Magdalen’s father—another large step toward his global fur monopoly.
John Jacob and Sarah’s second son, nineteen-year-old William Backhouse Astor, would likewise miss the family holidays in Manhattan. He was studying abroad for four years at the famed University of Heidelberg, Germany’s oldest, located near Astor’s hometown of Walldorf. Soon he would return and join his father in the fur business. The absence of Magdalen and William left in the household the three other surviving children—the oldest son, John Jacob II, a strange, inward child who rarely left his upstairs room at the back of the house; and his two younger sisters, Dorothea, now sixteen, and Eliza, now ten. The elder of the two, Dorothea—or Dolly—was outgoing and energetic. Embracing the growing spirit of Romanticism among the day’s well-educated youth, she would soon rebel against her staid parents by eloping with an unsanctioned suitor and estranging herself from her father for years.
But, for now, as the holidays arrived, Dolly was behaving properly and Astor’s great West Coast empire was, as far as he knew, progressing splendidly. He would soon sit down to write a long, enthusiastic letter to Thomas Jefferson, recently retired to Monticello after two terms as president. Astor would give his mentor-in-empire a progress report detailing the ships and expeditions sent to the Northwest Coast, the negotiations with rival fur companies, and his diplomatic contacts with the Russians to embrace their Alaskan fur trade. He hoped also to ask the ex-president for political advice. He was, in effect, reporting in to his superior: “Sir . . . Since I had the pleasure of speaking with you first at Washington concerning it, my constant study has been to attain the object. . . .”
Astor had invested a tremendous amount of energy, thought, and money in this risky, infinitely complicated, and far-flung endeavor, but even in the absence of news he managed to maintain a remarkable coolness and rationality. Astor had traveled in the wilderness enough himself, paddling canoes and trekking muddy trails with a pack of trinkets in upstate New York, to know that his Overland and Seagoing parties would have faced plenty of hardships en route. In the absence of any other information, however, as well as being aware of the long lag time before news could reach him, and given his meticulous planning and careful instructions to his leaders, he assumed that both Thorn’s and Hunt’s parties had by now safely arrived on the Northwest Coast and laid the foundations of the emporium, and reached it before the North West Company.
“[A]t all events, I think we must be ahead of them,” he wrote to Jefferson. “By what I can learn there is a great deal of fur on the west side of the mountains, and a considerable business is to be done on the coast with the Russians.”
He continued enthusiastically to Thomas Jefferson, pleased that his Overland Party had apparently found a better route than Meriwether Lewis:
“The party which ascended the Missouri is under the direction of a very respectable gentleman from Trenton, New Jersey, by the name of Hunt. . . . The last account which I had of the party [was] where they left the Missouri, and took . . . a southern course, this being recommended as nearer and easier to the south branch of the Columbia than the route taken by Mr Lewis. . . . The accounts as to their ultimate success were fair and encouraging, and they had no doubt of meeting their friends who went by sea; which I think they must have done in October last.”
Astor couldn’t possibly imagine, as he enjoyed the family warmth of the holiday season, his men staggering through barren plains, gnawing on moccasins and drinking their own urine, or a woman eight months pregnant with her two small children in tow, tumbling down mountainsides in a snowstorm toward the unseen roar of an unknown river in a canyon far below.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CONSENSUS WOULD NO LONGER BE POSSIBLE FOR HUNT. Mackenzie’s and McClellan’s reconnaissance parties had gone ahead a month earlier to find their way to the Columbia, leaving behind the slower-moving main party. The main party had split into two groups traveling on opposite sides of the unknown river, Hunt’s nineteen people on one bank, plus the Dorion family, and Crooks’s nineteen on the other. All were severely weakened; some in Crooks’s party had become so feeble after their foray three days farther downriver into the giant canyon that they could barely walk.
Hunt, after tossing restlessly through the night of December 6, now had to choose among several bleak options: go farther downstream into the mile-and-a-half-deep mountain gorge; abandon the river and climb westward over steep, snowy mountains toward the Pacific; or retreat upriver to the broad lava plain where they’d encountered the more prosperous Shoshone camps in fertile valleys, and hope the Shoshone hadn’t moved in the meantime. But staying here in the deep gorge as winter arrived simply wasn’t an option. It was only a matter of days before they’d grow too weak to travel at all. Then the first would die, and the survivors would have to decide whether to cannibalize their dead.
Despite the fact that Crooks’s party had reached the brink of starvation going forward, Hunt’s initial thought was to follow that path forward into the gorge, so fixed was he on reaching the Pacific according to Mr. Astor’s plan and schedule. Hunt, no doubt urged by Crooks himself, then reconsidered. He’d already had a brief taste of fighting the deep snows that blanketed the mountain slopes above the gorge’s cliffs. The higher they climbed those mountain slopes, the deeper the snow lay. Crooks surely made it clear to his less experienced colleague and partner that far worse lay ahead.
“To my great regret,” Hunt recorded of that morning of December 7 after his restless night, “it was thus necessary to backtrack with the hope of finding some Indians. . . . I counted on buying from them a large enough number of horses to feed us until we reached the Columbia, a move I flattered myself in thinking we could effect this winter.”
Even this deep into trou
ble, Hunt didn’t fully grasp the exigencies of winter travel in the mountains. He very nearly succumbed to the temptation to thrash blindly forward into increasingly desperate circumstances, an often fatal mistake made by lost and hypothermic hikers. But going back had its dangers, too. Since leaving the last Shoshone camp upriver more than a week earlier, on November 29, Hunt’s group had encountered no game whatsoever and found nothing to eat but a few wild cherries. This meant that to reach the lava plain and Shoshone camps on the tributaries they would have to retreat at least a week upriver without any food at all, except the leftovers from the malnourished horse they had killed, which were now feeding forty people and vanishing quickly. Ramsay Crooks—one of the party’s best men, an Astor partner, and an American besides—and the voyageur Le Clerc were so badly weakened by lack of food and their exhausting scouting foray farther downriver that Hunt thought they and several others might simply “break down,” in the parlance of the day, before reaching the Shoshone camps.
“What a prospect!” Hunt wrote.
To make matters worse, the river still separated Hunt’s and Crooks’s groups. The bullboat had somehow got loose from its moorings and drifted away, so Crooks’s group remained on the left bank (looking downstream) while Crooks himself was stuck on right bank with Hunt.
That morning, having made the decision to retreat upriver, Hunt’s group attempted to improvise a Shoshone-style canoe of bound bundles of reeds, so they could deliver both Crooks and Le Clerc and more horse meat to Crooks’s men on the far bank. When it turned out that the frail craft couldn’t buck the powerful current, they abandoned it. Grasping the precariousness of their situation, and unwilling to waste any more time, both parties started upriver toward the Shoshone camps that day, traveling on opposite banks.
But soon the parties began to fragment. Ramsay Crooks and Le Clerc soon staggered far behind the rest of Hunt’s group, stumbling among boulders that littered the few flat sections of the river’s shore or dragging themselves up cliffy hillsides where the banks fell sheer to the water. Hunt slowed his party, believing they should stay with the collapsing men. Not wanting to wait, small groups and lone travelers pushed ahead, hoping to reach food and safety before they, too, gave out. Among these were the Dorion family, who possessed the party’s single remaining half-starved horse. Except for a few beaver skins, it was the group’s last remaining source of food.
The next day, December 8, members of Hunt’s party who still remained with him tried to float another reed raft so Crooks and Le Clerc could ferry themselves to their own party across the river. The pair tried repeatedly to force the craft into the river channel, but the swift current and their own weakness defeated them again, shoving them back to the riverbank. Hunt waited patiently as they fumbled on the cold eddies and frigid currents. The voyageurs at his side now realized their own hopes were slipping away—burdened by Crooks and Le Clerc, weakening each passing moment themselves, and anchored in place by Hunt’s obstinate insistence that he stay with the failing men.
The voyageurs bitterly harangued Hunt.
“They said that we would all die from starvation,” he recorded, “and urged me by all means to go on.”
Hunt’s carefully cultivated unity now unraveled under the pressure of profound hunger. Finally, only Hunt and five men remained with the failing Crooks and Le Clerc, the rest having pushed ahead in ones and twos and threes. Hunt and the stragglers camped together that night of December 8. During the night, Crooks fell very ill. Only three beaver skins remained for food. The sheer instinctive necessity of survival was stripping away whatever authority Hunt possessed. Yet he felt weighted by a deep sense of personal responsibility. What had started out as a series of business decisions for this “very respectable gentleman from Trenton, New Jersey,” had now evolved into naked choices over life and death. Reading between the spare lines of his journal, one can hear his tortured thoughts.
Where was he needed more? By the side of a good but failing man along the trail? Or with his party leading them and negotiating for food when—and if—they reached the Shoshone camp? Loyalty to a partner? Or loyalty to the success of the mission? How could he abandon one of Mr. Astor’s primary partners to die of starvation in a river gorge a thousand miles or more from the nearest white settlement?
Hunt finally chose again: He would go ahead. But he didn’t abandon his weaker men entirely—not yet. He left two of the three beaver skins for them to eat, and two men to help Crooks and Le Clerc along the trail.
For ten days they retraced their steps upriver, hoping to find the prosperous tipi village of the Shoshone Indians in the fertile tributary valley. After pausing with Crooks and Le Clerc, Hunt hurried to catch up with his group. He found that some of them hadn’t eaten a single thing in four days of hard, cold trekking over boulders and skirting cliffs. Hunt proposed they kill and share Dorion’s family horse. Dorion refused to give it over. Surprisingly, the voyageurs backed Dorion, wanting to save the scrawny animal in the event they didn’t find Shoshone tipis ahead. Hunt agreed.
Later that day they had a stroke of luck, spotting a new collection of Shoshone tipis along the riverbank, surrounded by a herd of twenty horses. The band apparently had emerged from a tributary mountain valley since Hunt and company had passed the spot downriver. Fearing the Shoshone would flee or hide their horses at the bizarre sight of white men, Hunt approached gingerly and managed to buy (Hunt’s account) or grab (Irving’s account), or some combination thereof, five of the horses before the Shoshone and horses could scatter. He ordered one horse slaughtered on the spot, and meat delivered on the back of another horse downriver to the ailing Crooks and Le Clerc. The starving group devoured the remainder.
Slightly fortified, Crooks and Le Clerc managed to catch up briefly with the Hunt group. Crooks’s men, however, were still on the opposite riverbank. “[H]overing like spectres of famine,” as Irving, who interviewed eyewitnesses to the incident, put it, the sight of them repelled Hunt’s own struggling group. Crooks ordered a bullboat constructed immediately and sent a supply of horse meat across the river to his men. Everyone in the starving party received the meat eagerly, but one of the voyageurs in the Crooks group, Jean Baptiste Prevost, had become frantic with hunger. He demanded to be ferried across the river immediately to the Hunt group, saying death was certain on his side. Prevost forced his way aboard the returning bullboat. As it approached the shore where Hunt’s party roasted hunks of horse meat over fires, Prevost leapt up in the bullboat, clapped his hands in delight, and according to Irving’s account, which possibly came from Crooks himself, capsized the fragile craft. The boat’s steersman, Pierre Delaunay, barely saved himself. Prevost did not.
“The poor wretch,” wrote Irving, “was swept away by the current and drowned. . . .”
It was the Overland Party’s second death.
The two groups pushed on upriver toward the tributary stream on the lava plain where they had taken a shortcut three weeks earlier. Again, in the interest of speed, they left behind the desperately weak Crooks and Le Clerc. Hunt gave the pair two horses and part of the meat of a third horse, so they could follow once they had regained some strength.
For the next four days, the two parties continued to struggle upriver on opposite banks. It snowed. The temperature plummeted. Hissing rafts of ice congealed on the surface of the Mad River. Exhausted, hungry, chilled, they finally stumbled out of the mountain gorge and onto the broad lava plain on December 16. They camped that night at a tributary stream they had forded on November 26.
“Thus for twenty days,” lamented Hunt in his journal, “we had worn ourselves out futilely trying to find a passage along the lower part of this river.”
The following day, December 17, Hunt’s group, leaving behind the wretched party on the opposite bank, ascended the tributary through more fertile country and arrived at an entire tipi village of the Shoshone. They found relief—temporarily. Hunt exchanged trade items—an old pewter pot, knives, blue glass beads—for
a few horses, a dog, some dried fish and roots, and pounded, dried wild cherries. These last, along with rose hips, a Shoshone staple that Hunt also foraged, were essential to their survival.
Many species of cherries are extraordinarily high in vitamin C. The Hunt and Crooks parties’ suffering and weakness was no doubt due partly to the onset of scurvy, a debilitating illness that frequently killed early European seafarers subsisting on a diet of salt meat and grains. Scurvy, both at sea and on land during the winter, posed one of the single greatest obstacles to early exploration. Typically setting in after about ten to twelve weeks without fresh food, its early symptoms included fatigue, weakness, and malaise, followed by a swelling of the gums, loosening of the teeth, and opening of old scars as the body’s tough, connective collagen tissues started to unravel. Then the blood vessels and organs began to leak and hemorrhage, followed shortly by death.
Ascorbic acid—vitamin C—functions as a kind of molecular knitting device that tightly binds together the amino acids responsible for producing collagen. Doses of vitamin C can reverse scurvy’s deteriorating effects in a few days or even hours. Widely dispersed Native American tribes had, through millennia of trial and error, discovered different strategies to prevent the onset of scurvy during winter when fresh food was scarce and they might subsist on starchy roots and dried meat as the Shoshone did. Inuit in the Arctic ate raw and lightly cooked seal meat and other organs, high in vitamin C. Ojibwa Indians in what is now eastern Canada relied on an ascorbic-acid-rich tea made from the ground-up bark and foliage of what has been identified as the white cedar, or arborvitae (“tree of life”). The Shoshone had cherries and rose hips. These, like little pills of vitamin C, certainly helped to revive and prepare the Overland Party for the next brutal leg of their journey.
