by Stark, Peter
When the combined Stuart, Clarke, and Mackenzie parties reached Astoria on June 12—six canoes and two boats, for a total of fifty-three people and 119 packs of beaver—they held an extremely tense reunion with McDougall.
“Two days were spent in mutual recriminations,” wrote Ross.
McDougall was incensed that these upriver parties had not purchased horses from the Indians, as he had instructed, so they could all abandon Astoria in July, a month from now, and head back overland to the East. He would now have to spend an entire year more at this godforsaken outpost. Stuart and Clarke were enraged that McDougall had single-handedly, with Mackenzie’s urging and consent, decided to shut down the West Coast enterprise.
The bitter argument raged in the partners’ quarters over whether or not to abandon Astor’s West Coast emporium. Hanging like a vulture over the proceedings was McTavish of the North West Company. He, too, had recently arrived at Astoria from far upriver with his own party. He had set up camp a short ways down the shore, awaiting what he was sure would be the imminent arrival of the armed company ship, Isaac Todd, to claim the whole place.
McDougall and David Stuart, the two Scotsmen and Astor partners, went head-to-head. The American partner, Clarke, sided with Stuart to stay the course. Their territories on the northern tributaries were rich with furs. The empire would succeed, they claimed. McDougall demanded immediate abandonment. War had been declared. British warships were on their way. Sell out now to the North West Company while the selling was good.
Where, however, were the threatened warships? McTavish had originally claimed that the Isaac Todd and an armed British convoy would arrive at the Columbia’s mouth in March. Now it was June. They were still nowhere to be seen. Was this all a bluff on the part of the North West Company? But if the British Royal Navy convoy did appear it could simply take Astoria as a prize of war, along with its valuables and furs.
And Astor’s supply ship? Where was that? Had the British blockaded the U.S. ports and prevented it from leaving New York Harbor? And Wilson Price Hunt and the Beaver? Had they utterly disappeared?
Mackenzie stood off to the side while the cedar roofing of the partners’ quarters reverberated with angry words and accusations. The recriminations reached a standoff. Mackenzie spoke up. He’d prepared his argument as carefully as a barrister, in Alexander Ross’s detailed recounting of the moment.
“ ‘Gentlemen,’ said he, ‘why do you hesitate so long between two opinions? Your eyes ought to have been opened before now to your own interests. In the present critical conjuncture, there is no time to be lost. . . . We have been long enough the dupes of a vacillating policy. . . .”
Mackenzie then enumerated the ways that the Americans John Jacob Astor and Wilson Price Hunt had wronged the British citizens who were supposedly equal partners in the West Coast enterprise:
First, at Montreal, Hunt had refused to hire enough Canadian men because they were not Americans.
Second, Astor’s “private missive” to Hunt at Nodaway winter camp had given the American Hunt exclusive leadership of the Overland Party and had given offense—“umbrage”—to all the other (in other words, British) partners.
Third, Mr. Astor had sent orders to Hunt aboard the Beaver regarding Astor’s American nephew, clerk George Ehninger, also traveling on the ship, that he be placed in charge of all the other clerks. “Could there be anything more impolitic and more unjust . . . more at variance with the spirit of the articles of agreement?” asked Mackenzie to his fellow Britons.
Fourth, Mr. Astor’s orders to his American ship captains, such as Thorn of the Tonquin and Sowle of the Beaver, served to “annihilate the power and authority of the partners.”
And fifth, the two Astor supply ships, Tonquin and Beaver, had sailed off from Astoria carrying all the most valuable trade goods still aboard, leaving only the poorest articles for the British partners remaining at Astoria to use to buy furs. Additionally, this year, “there is no ship at all!”
“Has it not been obvious from the beginning that under Astor’s policy we can never prosper?”
Mackenzie admitted that certain circumstances lay beyond Astor’s control, such as the U.S. declaration of war. Likewise, it was not a question of prosperity of the country, he argued. The country was rich with furs. “[B]ut Astor’s policy, and a chain of misfortunes, have ruined all.”
Mackenzie pointed out that the original agreement between the partners and Astor allowed the partners, within five years of signing, to abandon the West Coast enterprise if it wasn’t profitable or practicable. Now he was arguing that it was neither, and that Astor, “with all his sagacity, either does not or will not understand the business.”
“We owe it to Astor—we owe it to ourselves . . . to deliver the whole back into the hands from which we received it—and the sooner the better.”
Mackenzie said, in short, that Astor favored the Americans over the British partners, that Astor’s policies were doomed from the start, and that the outbreak of war would end it all anyway. Stuart and Clarke thought it over and eventually agreed with Mackenzie and McDougall. They would pull up stakes and abandon Astor’s West Coast enterprise.
Another tough question arose: How?
It was now June. There was no way to pack up their goods and cross the Rockies before winter. They would have to spend another winter at Astoria. Furthermore, McTavish and the North West Company were encamped nearby, waiting for their armed ships to seize everything. But McTavish was anxious, too—growing desperately low of supplies and trade goods while waiting for the promised ships. Everything hung in stasis. What had been a jostling rivalry between the two companies, amid a certain professional collegiality, had become a high-stakes standoff that awaited the arrival of mutually hostile and heavily armed ships and the possibility of a bloodbath for control of the West Coast, Columbia Basin, and Pacific Rim trade. There was also, thanks to Clarke’s decision to execute the thief upriver, the possibility of Indian attack.
McDougall made a proposal for the upcoming year. It’s impossible to know if behind this proposal simmered some backroom deal struck between McTavish of the North West Company and McDougall of Astor’s company. Likewise, when McTavish had first showed up at Astor’s Spokane post with the proclamation of war, it’s impossible to know if McTavish had pulled Astor partner Mackenzie aside to deliver some tempting and whispered offer to sell out Astor and to join his firm, the North West Company, bringing Astor’s assets with him.
Whatever the case, McDougall and McTavish now came to an official agreement to cover the upcoming year until the Astorians abandoned the settlement. McDougall would sell some of Astoria’s trade goods to McTavish to resupply the North West Company. The two companies would further agree to split up the fur posts already established in the Columbia Basin—striking, as historian Robert F. Jones has put it, a “market-sharing agreement.”
It was a temporary reprieve both for the stretched McTavish and, although McDougall didn’t necessarily intend it that way, the grand plan of John Jacob Astor. With this agreement in place until the next spring, when the Astorians would abandon the settlement, the various parties dispersed back up the Columbia to their respective winter posts.
Astoria emptied out again. McDougall led the small contingent that remained. A palpable sense of uncertainty and anxiety hung over Astoria during that summer of 1813. British attack? Indian attack? The Indians at the Walla Walla continued to promise revenge and those at Astoria heard stories from posts upriver of the way Indians tortured their enemies.
Ross Cox, working as a clerk on the upper tributaries, described in his memoir how a captured Blackfeet Indian was tortured by the Flatheads, the two tribes mortal enemies. While Cox’s story may have been exaggerated or even apocryphal, it illustrates whites’ fear of Indian torture. The Blackfeet warrior, tied to a tree, unceasingly taunted his torturers as they pressed a red-hot rifle barrel to his body, cut out his fingernails, and severed his fingers joint by joint. Cox asked a tra
nslator what the Blackfeet was saying.
“You can’t hurt me. . . . You are fools. . . . You do not know how to torture. . . . We torture your relations a great deal better, because we make them cry out loud, like little children. . . .”
Then turning to a one-eyed Flathead warrior.
“It was by my arrow you lost your eye.”
Whereupon the Flathead warrior “darted” at the bound Blackfeet and scooped out an eye with his knife. And so it continued—“I killed your brother, and scalped your old fool of a father”—the taunting and retribution, the stoic display under excruciating pain, until the Blackfeet warrior was scalped, and finally shot through the heart by the enraged Flathead captors. Meanwhile, writes Cox, the Flathead women directed the torture of the female Blackfeet captives in a manner too gruesome to describe.
McDougall’s paranoia seemed to rise in inverse proportion to the number of men with him at Astoria. With only a small contingent remaining at Astoria, McDougall, himself a schemer who constantly saw schemes forming against him, cast about for self-protection. Previously, he had concocted the smallpox-in-the-bottle threat. He now conjured up another insurance policy against Indian attack. He paid a visit to Chief Comcomly of the Chinook in the villages across the river. As was customary in these situations, McDougall laid down offerings of presents to the chief. Then emissaries who accompanied McDougall asked in his name for the hand of Comcomly’s daughter in marriage. Comcomly consulted his daughter and opened negotiations with McDougall over the gifts that would be exchanged.
Early in the afternoon on July 20, according to Irving’s account, a canoe procession of Chinook paddled across the Columbia and landed at Astoria, bearing the anointed bride to McDougall, who received her at the fort. From then on, according to Irving, Comcomly paid a daily visit to his son-in-law’s fort. He kept Astoria’s blacksmith shop busy making various iron implements for him.
Another alliance had been sealed. Duncan McDougall rested more easily at night knowing his father-in-law would protect him and his fort. The fate of John Jacob’s Astor’s western empire, however, still hung in the balance.
A MONTH AFTER MCDOUGALL’S MARRIAGE, on the fresh, sunny morning of August 20, a canoe raced across the Columbia from the Chinook villages on the opposite bank. Comcomly’s son, Gassacop, announced excitedly that his people had spotted a sailing vessel cruising back and forth in the sea off the Columbia’s mouth. The Chinook had sent two canoes out through the crashing surf to discover its identity.
McDougall now jumped into his own dory. He ordered his men to row hard downstream toward the mouth. As they pulled at the oars, a big ship hove into sight at the river’s mouth. It sailed cleanly across the Columbia Bar on an incoming tide and westerly breeze, and flew upriver with full sails along the opposite bank. On the riverbank at Astoria, the tension built. Was she a British ship come to capture Astoria? Was she an American ship come to help? Was she Spanish? Was she Russian?
As McDougall’s dory rowed across the broad river, the ship dropped anchor on the far shore of the Columbia directly opposite John Jacob Astor’s emporium and lowered sails. Only the five miles of the river’s breadth now separated the unidentified ship and Astor’s fort. Glassing her, Franchère and others at the fort spotted an American flag flying. Franchère ordered her saluted with three guns booming from the fort. The ship saluted back with three guns. She was American. But they still didn’t know who she was or why she had come.
The long summer dusk settled over the Columbia’s broad estuary. McDougall’s dory reached the ship. It then turned back across the river toward Astoria bearing extra passengers. Darkness fell. Franchère and company waited nervously. In the darkness, they finally heard the splash of oars as the dory approached the wharf.
She came alongside. Out of the darkness stepped the passenger. To their amazement, it was the long-given-up-for-dead Wilson Price Hunt.
A YEAR EARLIER, Hunt had climbed aboard the Beaver with Captain Sowle for a coastal trading mission to the Russian fur posts in Alaska. Hunt soon had found himself in the heart of a fortress perched atop a rocky promontory on the Alaskan coast, sitting across the table from Russia’s Count Baranoff, futilely trying to match the Count cup of rum for cup of rum. The Count’s stronghold, called New Archangel, possessed one hundred cannon and guns, sixty Russians, and an untold number of Indian hunters paddling canoes and the seagoing kayaks called baidarkas, and commanded a vast network of trade in sea otter and other furs along the Alaskan and Aleutian Island coasts.
Pleased to have company in his lonely outpost, the Count offered full Russian hospitality to whoever happened by. He expected in return, however, that his guest eat, drink, and make merry as hard as he.
“He is continually giving entertainments by way of parade,” Hunt reported in his journal, “and if you do not drink raw rum, and boiling punch strong as sulfer, he will insult you as soon as he gets drunk, which is very shortly after sitting down to table.”
The Count was a cagey businessman as well as a heavy drinker. According to the careful plan worked out by Astor with the Russians, the Beaver was to deliver trade goods from New York to the Count and his fortress. Astor’s representatives aboard the Beaver would be paid for these trade goods in the Russian’s furs. Then the Beaver was also to load the Count’s additional thousands of stockpiled furs and deliver them across the Pacific to the wealthy markets of Canton. Astor’s enterprise would take a commission on the sale of the additional Russian furs in the Chinese market.
Whether by design or happenstance, the Count managed to delay the amiable Wilson Price Hunt for six weeks at New Archangel with his drinking bouts and endless show of parading men. Autumn storms began to roil the North Pacific. Hunt knew he had to leave to return to Astoria, and quickly. Hunt’s haste to depart no doubt gave the Count, as the Count may have calculated, the best possible deal in terms of what he had to pay in furs for Hunt’s trade goods.
The bargain finally sealed, Captain Sowle, Hunt, and the Beaver sailed still another three weeks out into the Bering Sea to St. Paul Island to load Baranoff’s huge stockpile of eighty thousand seal furs stored there. It took days simply to bale the furs into bundles. A storm blew the Beaver out to sea. She was recovered with a damaged rudder. Captain Sowle, cautious as the late Captain Thorn was arrogantly confident, told Hunt that, with winter storms coming in and their huge Pacific swells, he wouldn’t risk sailing his damaged ship in the rough waters off Astoria. Instead he would sail the Beaver straight for those flower-scented islands of Hawaii to repair the storm-damaged ship.
Hunt protested, though one wonders how hard. Hunt’s journal for this portion of the Astoria undertaking is missing, and one can only guess his thinking. The cautious Captain Sowle was pushing for Hawaii for the safety of his ship. Hunt still knew nothing about the outbreak of war, but he knew Mr. Astor wanted him at Astoria to take command and to ensure the West Coast emporium’s smooth and loyal business operations. To follow Astor’s wishes meant he would return to that difficult and highly insecure post at the Columbia’s mouth just as the long, cold winter rains set in and its occupants, as clerk Franchère phrased it, were subject to “insufferable ennui . . . in the midst of deep mud.”
The Beaver, according to Captain Sowle, was in danger of being permanently damaged or lost if they returned to Astoria in winter. That would represent a significant loss to Astor, if Captain Sowle was being truthful about the risks. Here was another crucial decision point for Wilson Price Hunt. What was more important? Avoiding risk to the Beaver and its valuable cargo of furs, or ensuring that a loyal American was in command of Astor’s West Coast emporium? Or, given Hunt’s nice-guy, consensus-seeking personality, was Captain Sowle simply able to overwhelm him?
However Hunt might have rationalized it, or whatever the personality dynamics, a winter in Hawaii surely looked more attractive than winter in a ragged forest clearing of cold mud. Hunt acquiesced to Captain Sowle and together they sailed off to Hawaii on the Beaver.
The normally mild, polite Wilson Price Hunt now grew livid in the soft August night as McDougall told him that the partners had signed an agreement to abandon Astoria and return to the East.
“[H]e blamed us severely for having acted with so much precipitation,” reported the clerk Franchère, “pointing out the success of the late coasting voyage. . . . [I]t was a thousand pities to sacrifice, and lose the fruits of the hardships he had endured and the dangers he had braved, at one fell swoop, by this rash measure.”
His rage changed nothing. The partners wouldn’t budge in their decision. A week after he arrived, Hunt sailed off again on the Albatross, as he had chartered the ship only to take him to the West Coast and it had other cargo duties to fulfill in the South Pacific. He said he would return soon with another ship to get Mr. Astor’s furs. It was now the end of August. The threatened British warships still hadn’t arrived. There was still time, should someone be so determined, to save John Jacob Astor’s West Coast empire.
Certainly Astor had no intention of giving it up.
AS HUNT WAS MAKING HIS BRIEF STOP at Astoria in mid-August 1813, Astor’s ship, the fast-sailing Lark, was bearing down hard toward the West Coast emporium in order to protect it from the British. Somewhere behind the Lark was Astor’s stealth ship, the Forester, secretly purchased in England. And as far as Astor knew, his large ship, the Beaver, armed with its own considerable complement of cannon, was headed toward Astoria, too. In effect, Astor had dispatched his own private navy to the Pacific to defend his West Coast colony against possible Royal Navy attack.
