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

by Stark, Peter

  Hunt asked the Shoshone many times, communicating with difficulty through Dorion and the Aztecan language barrier, how to get to the Columbia, or “Big River,” as it was known to Native Americans. He finally understood that the Shoshone knew of a large encampment of Sciatoga Indians located near the Big River. The Sciatoga had many horses, he understood. The Shoshone knew a trail that could take Hunt to the Sciatoga camp. But the trail wasn’t easy, and the village wasn’t near. Hunt would spend between seventeen and twenty-one nights on the trail, he would have to cross a large mountain range, and “we would be in snow up to our waists.”

  By now Hunt had learned that without a Shoshone guide he probably would never reach the Sciatoga village. White explorers in North America both before and after him would learn the same basic lesson.

  “I offered a gun, some pistols, a horse, etc., to whoever would serve me as a guide.”

  No one accepted the post.

  “They all replied that we would freeze to death and pleaded with me to remain with them during the winter.”

  Hunt grew desperate. He combed the Shoshone camp searching for a willing guide.

  “I went to every tepee along the river banks, but without success. I could not get along without one, for that meant running the risk that we would all die. But to remain in this place would be still worse, after having come so far and at such great cost.”

  But why would it be so awful to wait out the winter? Wilson Price Hunt was a businessman and brought with him a schedule to lay the foundation of John Jacob Astor’s West Coast empire. He was already running two months late, and he refused to compound the delay by overwintering in a Shoshone camp for another three months until the spring snowmelt. The wilderness did not keep to a businesslike schedule of hours or days, minutes or months, or deadlines for human convenience. The native peoples recognized this, tending to stay put when the weather was bad, to move when it was good, and they wondered why someone would choose otherwise. Even after all his trials, Hunt was still learning to adapt his behavior to an ever-changing environment. He would not yield to the winter.

  Yet for all his strengths and failings, Hunt remained an astute reader of human character. Though he’d always been well mannered and unfailingly polite—“a gentleman of the mildest disposition” was how Bradbury, the botanist, had described him—Hunt now deliberately and forcefully changed his diplomatic tone. In order to hire a guide, rather than appealing to their desire for possessions, he played to their sense of pride.

  “I ended by telling the Indians that they spoke with forked tongues, that they were lying to me. I accused them of being women; in short, I challenged them with whatever expressions would goad them most.”

  And it worked.

  “At last,” he wrote, “one of them found courage enough to volunteer to be our guide as far as the village of the Sciatogas.”

  Photographic Insert

  “Mrs. Astor (from a Miniature).” Sarah Todd Astor as a young woman, married to John Jacob in 1785 (left); John Jacob Astor, after a Portrait by Gilbert Stuart. John Jacob Astor in 1794 as an aspiring fur trader and New York businessman in his early thirties (right).

  Astor’s childhood home in the German town of Walldorf.

  John Jacob Astor by John Wesley Jarvis, ca. 1825. John Jacob Astor as a prosperous American businessman.

  Lieutenant Jonathan Thorn (left), young naval hero who became captain of Astor’s ship the Tonquin, which carried the Seagoing Party to the Pacific Coast; Wilson Hunt Price (right), leader of Astor’s Overland Party to the Pacific Coast.

  Tontine Coffee House, N.Y.C. by Francis Guy, ca. 1797. Tontine Coffee House (left) and Merchant’s Coffee House (center) at the corner of Wall and Water Streets, New York City, where merchants such as Astor gathered to conduct business. Astor’s office and home were a few blocks away.

  Portrait of Alexander Ross (left); portrait of Donald Mackenzie (right).

  Portrait of Ramsey Crooks (left); portrait of Robert Stuart (right).

  Portrait of Gabriel Franchère.

  Portrait of a voyageur.

  Canoes in a Fog, Lake Superior by Frances Anne Hopkins, 1869. Voyageur canoes paddling the inland water route to the North American interior, as Hunt’s Overland Party did.

  View from Floyd’s Grave, 1300 Miles Above St. Louis by George Catlin, 1832. A Missouri River scene. The Overland Party worked its way in riverboats up this same stretch of river.

  Stu-mick-o-súcks, Buffalo Bull’s Back Fat, Head Chief, Blood Tribe by George Catlin, 1832. Portrait of a chief of the Blackfeet Confederacy, the Native Americans whom Hunt’s party feared and veered south to avoid.

  Sha-kó-ka, Mint, a Pretty Girl by George Catlin, 1832.

  Mih-Tutta-Hangkusch, a Mandan Village by Karl Bodmer, 1841. Hunt’s party witnessed a scene similar to this, with women in bullboats on the Missouri River hauling firewood for their village. These are women of the Mandan peoples, several hundred miles upriver from the Arikara villages where Hunt’s party left the Missouri.

  Buffalo Chase over Prairie Bluffs by George Catlin, early 1830s. Hunt’s Overland Party witnessed and participated in buffalo hunts on the prairies.

  The Interior of the Hut of a Mandan Chief by Karl Bodmer, ca. 1832. A contingent from Hunt’s party traveled to the Mandan villages to acquire horses for their long overland trek into unknown terrain.

  “The American Falls of Lewis Fork,” from a report by later explorer John Charles Fremont. Hunt’s canoes ran into trouble here, along the “Mad River,” known today as the Snake River.

  Hell’s Canyon of the Snake River, where Wilson Price Hunt and his party struggled on foot as winter arrived.

  Entrevue de l’expedition de M. Kotzebue avec le roi Tammeamea dans l’ile d’Ovayhi, Iles Sandwich by Louis Choris, 1827. The royal court of Hawaii, as it greets a party of Europeans. A party from the Tonquin was also greeted at the royal court here.

  Sea Otter, engraving by S. Smith, after John Webber, the illustrator who traveled with Captain Cook on his voyage to the Northwest Coast. This is the mammal whose fur provided the “soft gold” that brought so much attention to the Northwest Coast.

  “Tenaktak canoes,” early photograph by Edward S. Curtis. These are typical of the large cedar canoes of the Northwest Coast.

  Interior of Whale House of Chief Klart-Reech, Klukwan, Alaska. c. 1895. Many of the peoples of the Northwest Coast had longhouses decorated with elaborate carvings and paintings.

  “Tluwulahu mask—Tswatenok,” photograph by Edward S. Curtis. The peoples of the Northwest Coast had an elaborate ceremonial culture.

  Ka’heit’am (Stone Club), pre-1778, from Yuquot village, Nuu-chah-nulth (Vancouver Island area). Meticulously shaped from stone, with what appears to be a wolf’s head and thunderbird design, this was one of many types of clubs used on the Northwest Coast both for killing animals and for dispatching human enemies.

  Northwest Coast Art—Yéil X’eenh (Raven Screen), ca. 1810, from Klukwan village, Tlingit people. Screens like this stood in traditional longhouses separating family living quarters. From the house of a clan associated with the Raven, this screen shows the Raven’s head looking straight ahead at the very top, center. Its tail feathers appear below the round opening at the bottom, which served as the ceremonial entrance to the “house master’s” treasure room. The Raven’s wings drape down the sides of the screen.

  It was images like this one that gave Wilson Price Hunt pause when choosing a route across the continent for Astor’s Overland Party. Robert McGee (pictured here), like Edward Robinson—the trapper and survivor who advised Hunt to avoid hostile Blackfeet territory—was a survivor of scalping.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  IN FACT HUNT WAS ABLE TO SHAME THREE SHOSHONE INTO guiding his party. Those three now led them from the safety of the large Shoshone village down the small tributary river westward, back to the banks of the Mad River. As there were no native reed canoes to ferry across the river’s swirling current, Hunt killed two
of the horses he’d bought from the village and crafted a horsehide canoe, delicately ferrying the party a few at a time across the channel, four hundred yards wide and running with spinning chunks of ice. They felt cheered finally to put to their backs the river they had followed for two months and whose unexplored, mile-and-a-half-deep crack in the earth—Hells Canyon—had for weeks blocked their westward progress to the Pacific.

  “La maudite riviêre enragée,” the voyageurs called it, bidding farewell. “The accursed mad river.”

  On the far bank, Hunt and company met the remaining thirteen men of Crooks’s ragtag party, still waiting, after their struggles in the great gorge, for food and leadership.

  “[They] told me that since we had left they had not seen either Mr. Crooks or the two men who were with him,” wrote Hunt. “All of Mr. Crooks’s men were extremely weak and exhausted, four of them even more than the others.”

  Three of these weakened voyageurs told Hunt they didn’t have the strength to go onward. It’s a measure of their deprivation and extreme exertion along La maudite riviêre enragée that these workhorse-like men, routinely happy to paddle canoes eighteen hours per day and haul two-hundred-pound loads over portages, singing all the way, had simply stopped. Frail, spectral versions of their former selves, they had decided to stay in the wilds rather than with their companions, taking their chances of survival at the Shoshone villages. The fourth frail and exhausted man, Michael Carriere, opted to proceed westward into the mountains with Hunt as best he could.

  It may have been easier for Hunt to go on while Crooks was still out of sight in the canyon than to have to say goodbye to his friend and weakened business partner before heading west toward the Pacific. Hunt was torn by the tension between the unity of the group and the success of the mission. He had hesitated in the gorge: Should he stay with his good but failing man beside the trail? Was his devotion to his men or to the success of the mission? But in many ways the success of the mission depended on the loyalty of the men, and the loyalty of the men depended on Hunt taking care of them. It was a dilemma that offered only difficult answers.

  Hunt had, however, now irrevocably made the decision: The success of Mr. Astor’s enterprise trumped the welfare of the straggling men. He had provided as best he could for Crooks, leaving two men by his side in the gorge, including John Day, the lanky, friendly, forty-year-old Virginian hunter. Hunt had also sent horse meat back to his failing friend. Should he make it out of the gorge alive, Crooks could take shelter in the same Shoshone village and recover his strength. But it was also true that Hunt could have chosen to stay all winter in the Shoshone village and let Crooks and the others catch up and recover. Instead, he chose to go on.

  Mr. Astor’s Overland Party, once sixty strong, had splintered again. On Christmas Eve, 1811, Hunt left his weakest men and the Mad River and headed west over big, rolling country toward distant mountains.

  “My group,” Hunt recorded, “was now made up of thirty-two white men, a woman eight months pregnant, her two children, and three Indians. We had only five puny horses to feed us during our trip over the mountains.”

  For three days they trudged westward, led by the Shoshone guides. The trail proved a good one that was well traveled by Indians in the warmer months. They could make about fifteen miles per day walking through intermittent showers of rain and snow, as they crossed up and down over dry, open hills and rounded grassy ridges not quite sharp enough to be called mountains. But the trudging climbs and descents still took their toll. On the third day the exhausted voyageur, Carriere, simply lay down, unable to walk anymore. Hunt gave Carriere one of the five scrawny horses to ride.

  They worked their way westward from valley to valley. Skiffs of snow clung to the steep, shady north faces. They followed winding stream bottoms bordered by fringes of dwarfed cottonwoods and waded through the frigid water. Strained beyond endurance by yet another set of hills, the voyageur La Bonté, once capable of hauling inhuman weights but now too emaciated to hold his own body upright, also “broke down.” Hunt propped him up on another of the horses. When he realized the horse didn’t have the strength to carry both La Bonté and La Bonté’s twenty-five-pound pack, Hunt added La Bonté’s pack to his own.

  The rolling terrain gradually rose. They crossed a taller ridge that topped out in pine groves and snow. As they descended the far side, a broad, snowless valley opened up where six Shoshone tipis clustered. Trading two old guns, a tomahawk, and a cooking pot for four horses, three dogs, and edible roots, Hunt’s party feasted with immediate relish, preferring dog meat to all else. The Shoshone people in the camp pointed toward a snowy ridge of mountains rising to the west. This was the barrier. They indicated a gap where Hunt would find a pass. They told Hunt he had three more nights to cross those mountains before reaching the camp of the Sciatogas. On the pass, they told him, he would not find much snow.

  Hunt remained skeptical.

  “They . . . had so often given me erroneous reports that I did not take this news seriously,” wrote Hunt. “On every side of us snow blanketed the mountains.”

  While still in camp early the next morning, December 30, Marie Dorion, at eight months pregnant, went into labor. She was an Iowan woman with a part-Sioux husband and about to give birth in a Shoshone camp; whatever the exact tribal tradition she followed, pregnancy in traditional Native American culture was considered a sacred state for a woman and giving birth a sacred act.

  “Silence and isolation are the rule of life for the expectant mother,” wrote Charles Alexander Eastman, or Ohíye S’a, a Santee Sioux born in the mid-1800s on the plains who eventually studied Western medicine at Dartmouth College and Boston University. “She wanders prayerful in the stillness of great woods, or on the bosom of the untrodden prairie, and to her poetic mind the immanent [sic] birth of her child prefigures the advent of a master-man—a hero, or the mother of heroes. . . . And when the day of days in her life dawns—the day in which there is to be a new life, the miracle of whose making has been intrusted to her, she seeks no human aid. She has been trained and prepared in body and mind for this her holiest duty, ever since she can remember. The ordeal is best met alone. . . .”

  Marie Dorion, however, was on something of a forced march in Hunt’s party during her pregnancy. How had she been thinking about the life gestating inside her? Were the endless walks and climbs, the hardships and privations, all contributing to her unborn child’s spiritual power? Had she even assumed extra hardships to give her child power? The men on the expedition were constantly amazed at how much, and how easily and uncomplainingly, pregnant Marie Dorion walked instead of rode a horse.

  The six-tipi Shoshone camp in the broad valley offered a convenient place to give birth before the Hunt party embarked over the snowy mountains. Perhaps it was induced. Meriwether Lewis reported in his journal how Sacagawea underwent a difficult and painful labor at the Mandan villages with her first child. A Mandan medicine man was enlisted, who, saying the method had worked many times before, took two rings from the rattle of a rattlesnake that Lewis possessed, crumpled them into water, and gave it to Sacagawea to drink. She gave birth within ten minutes. (Lewis admitted to some skepticism that the rattle made the difference.)

  As Marie went into labor early that morning at the six Shoshone tipis, Pierre Dorion told Hunt to go on ahead.* The Hunt party set out again across the broad and open valley. The following day the Dorion family overtook the main group. Hunt was stunned to see them so soon and so relaxed, Pierre walking in front.

  “His wife rode horseback with her newly born child in her arms,” wrote Hunt. “Another child, two years old and wrapped in a blanket, was fastened by her side. One would have thought, from her behavior, that nothing had happened to her.”

  It was New Year’s Eve, 1811. Voyageurs typically rang in New Year’s Day with singing, dancing, drinking, and feasting.

  “My people asked me not to travel on the 1st of January without first celebrating the new year,” wrote Hunt. “I a
greed to the idea willingly because most of them were very tired from having daily no more than a meager meal of horse meat and from carrying packs on their shoulders while crossing the mountains.”

  On January 2 they resumed their march, climbing steadily into the mountain range that rose like a long blue wall to the west, first ascending a small river valley, then the fork of a creek. Leaving the creek’s head, their Shoshone guides led them clambering up snowy ridges, forested with pine trees, that rose to mountain peaks—today’s Blue Mountains in northeastern Oregon. On the heights, the trees thinned and the snow lay deeper. They plowed through it, halfway up their legs, to break a trail. In places they plunged through wind drifts or dropped into hollows, sinking up to their waists.

  With two days of climbing in the deep snow, on January 4, 1812, Hunt’s party dragged themselves to the frigid crest of the range, capped with icy gray cloud.