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

by Stark, Peter

  DONALD MACKENZIE—Pursued a long and varied career as a fur trader with the Northwest Company and Hudson Bay Company, in the Northwest and in the Red River region, fathering many children first with his “country wife” and then with his children’s young Swiss nanny, whom he married. He retired to an estate overlooking Lake Chautauqua, New York, and died in 1851 after being thrown by his horse.

  ALFRED SETON—After leaving Astoria in April of 1814 with Wilson Price Hunt aboard the Pedlar, the young clerk Seton underwent another long and inadvertent series of adventures—drinking bouts with Count Baranoff in Alaska, romances with Spanish girls in California, serious bouts of malaria in Panama. Still trying to make his way back to New York, he was stranded in Cartagena, Colombia, when, as a “gentleman,” he managed to talk his way into a passage with a British Royal Navy vessel to Jamaica, whence he returned to New York, “as poor as a Starved Rat”—this despite having dropped out of Columbia University to make his fortune and reverse his family’s tough financial times by joining Astor’s great venture. After some years as a fur merchant, he and several other partners founded the Sun Mutual Insurance Company, offering ship’s insurance, and became very wealthy, moving to a country home in Westchester County, New York, where he died in 1859. Seton’s lost journal was discovered in 1947 in a cupboard in Washington Irving’s home, “Sunnyside,” in Tarrytown, New York, when the home was undergoing historic restoration.

  JOSEPH MILLER—The former army officer and Astor partner from a “respectable family” in Baltimore, suffering a bodily malady that pained him to ride on horseback, gave up his shares and quit Hunt’s Overland Party just past the Tetons in October 1811. He and a string of trappers that included the three Kentuckians—Robinson, Hoback, and Reznor—were trapped for the winter toward the south, probably in what is today northern Colorado. Twice robbed of goods and horses by Indians, they made their way back north, and were found in August 1812 fishing beside a stream, horseless and nearly starved, by the Return Overland Party. While the three Kentuckians remained to trap in the Snake River country (and later were massacred with John Reed), Miller accompanied the Return Overland Party to St. Louis. He there disappears from the historical record.

  ROBERT MCCLELLAN—After struggling overland from Hell’s Canyon to Astoria, McClellan of the hair-trigger temper “threw in his shares” and quit. He then turned around and struggled back to the United States with the Stuart and Crooks Return Overland Party. Within a month of their arrival in St. Louis, McClellan was thrown into prison for unpaid debts. He declared bankruptcy and was freed, then briefly ran a store in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. He gave it up due to poor health, but seems to have purchased two racehorses nevertheless. He died at St. Louis only two and a half years after his arrival from Astoria, nearly impoverished.

  ALEXANDER ROSS—Leaving Astor’s concern, he worked for the North West Company and then for the Hudson Bay Company in the Northwest after the two outfits merged. He became an administrator in the Red River colony in today’s Manitoba, fathered thirteen children with his native wife, and later in life wrote three books on his experiences in the Northwest and West.

  ROSS COX—Worked briefly for the North West Company in the Northwest, returned to the East, and tried unsuccessfully to get a posting with the Hudson Bay Company. Returning to his native Ireland, he worked as a clerk in the Dublin police headquarters and as a correspondent for the London Morning Herald, publishing his book, Adventures on the Columbia River, in 1831.

  GABRIEL FRANCHÈRE—Returned to Montreal when Astoria was sold and married his sweetheart, whom he had left behind. He remained employed in the fur trade, eventually becoming John Jacob Astor’s chief agent in Montreal for Astor’s American Fur Company, then moved to New York City. After Astor sold his American Fur Company and it eventually went bankrupt, Franchère, said a friend, acted “in an extremely honorable manner, [and] sacrificed his own personal fortune to assist in meeting its liabilities.”

  BAPTISTE DORION, son of Marie and Pierre Dorion—Baptiste Dorion served as guide and interpreter to early settlers in the West and for the naturalist John Kirk Townsend.

  JOHN DAY—Irving says Day’s health was broken after his ordeals with the Overland Party and he died within a year, but that appears to be mistaken. Apparently Day went to work as a hunter for the North West Company, and in 1819 or 1820, being “infirm of body,” died in the Snake River country in a place traders called “Day’s Defile” (today’s Little Lost River, Idaho). He is memorialized in both the town of John Day, Oregon, and the John Day River.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book started with a happenstance encounter. One day in May 2008, during research for my previous book, The Last Empty Places, I was driving through the largely uninhabited regions of eastern Oregon. As dusk fell, I found myself cruising down a long, empty highway that tumbled through high prairies, over forested ranges, along twisting river-valleys. It seemed I hadn’t seen another car for hours. I began to wonder where I would spend the night. Past dark, by now around 10:00 P.M., I came to a small town—more a village, really—tucked among forested hills. I found a motel. I slept.

  The next morning, I discovered where I was: John Day, Oregon. What a curious name for a town, I thought. Who was John Day? A person?

  A quick bit of online research in my motel room revealed that he was a member of the Wilson Price Hunt expedition sent by John Jacob Astor across the continent in 1810–1811. I’d never heard of it. Or so I thought. I read that John Day had been left behind. He’d been captured by Indians, stripped naked, and sent into the wild. Rescued but faced with having to retrace the same route, he had tried to kill himself. This story piqued my curiosity even more.

  The deeper I delved into the story of John Day and the other Astorians, the wilder it became: canoes trapped in canyons, overbearing sea captains, longboats caught in surf, an exploding ship. And behind it all stood a poor immigrant who had become a wealthy New York fur baron and alongside him, cheerleading this first effort to plant an American settlement on the largely unclaimed West Coast, a U.S. president—Thomas Jefferson.

  Why hadn’t I heard of it? I’d lived for three decades in the heart of Lewis and Clark country, steeped in the stories of their heroics, but I hadn’t heard a word about the Astorians, a much larger expedition that had followed right afterward. I wanted to know more. I learned that Washington Irving had written a story about it. The story had become a bestseller in 1836 but was now largely forgotten. I started to dig into the story of the Astorians more deeply, and the more I dug, the more compelling the story became.

  As I researched, I realized I had caught glimpses of this story years before. On a long-ago family ski trip to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, my father, William F. Stark, veered the rental van onto a side road in a mountain valley.

  “The Astorians came through here,” he had said, or something to that effect. “These were men sent by John Jacob Astor from New York.”

  I hadn’t paid much attention at the time, not understanding the significance of the story. My father was a Wisconsin businessman, with a passion for history and for writing, and the author of several regional and local histories. For many years, he was also on the board of directors of the Wisconsin State Historical Society, a longtime leading resource in the history of the fur trade. He knew a great deal about the fur trade, especially in the upper Midwest. When I was a grade-schooler, we took canoe trips as father, son, and grandfather down the Wisconsin River, and my father told stories about the voyageurs who had paddled this same key route (which included Wilson Hunt Price and his Overland Party) for two centuries. For a time, hanging above our mantelpiece in my childhood home in Wisconsin, was a reproduction of a Frances Anne Hopkins painting of the voyageurs.

  So it’s to my father that I owe my first debt of gratitude for this book. In what has otherwise been a pleasure to research and write, it has been a deep regret that my father, who died in 2003, has not been alive as I’ve worked on Astoria. He would have so loved
to be involved in the research. I’m sure I would be receiving daily phone calls from Wisconsin and almost daily packages in the mail with new information about Astor, Ramsay Crooks, fur posts, Michilimackinac Island, and countless other historical matters relating to this story that he would have devoted himself to uncovering. I think he would have been very proud, on my behalf, of the result.

  As I dug into the story of the Astorians, I realized I’d been hearing about it for years, obliquely, from another family source. The family of my wife, Amy Ragsdale, has for decades had a summer cabin on Hartstene Island in Puget Sound next door to the summer cabin of the Murray and Rosa Morgan family of Tacoma, Washington. The families have remained the closest of friends. Until his death in 2000, at age 84, Murray was one of the Northwest’s best known popular historians, and the author, among many other books, of Skid Road, one of the most widely read and beloved histories of Seattle.

  From the time I first met him, in the 1980s, Murray was working on and off on what he called “the work by which I want to be remembered.” This was a history of the first European explorers who came to the Northwest Coast, and in particular the first ships that arrived to exploit the precious sea otter furs. It was through Murray, a wonderful storyteller—and no doubt over a long lunch or dinner sipping wine on the Morgans’ or Ragsdales’ rickety porch and looking out across Puget Sound at the shimmering glaciers of Mount Rainier—that I first learned of the significance of the sea otter that led to the trans-Pacific trade and European settlement of the Northwest Coast. Murray’s story was a huge one, covering many decades and expeditions, his research assisted, as usual, by Rosa. It was still in progress when he died. Murray and Rosa’s daughter, Lane Morgan, also a writer and editor, has since taken up the manuscript and is currently preparing it for publication.

  So my second debt is to Murray Morgan, who opened my eyes to the significance of the sea otter trade on the Northwest Coast. Its historical significance resonated with me when I stumbled across the story of the Astorians. Thus I’ve dedicated Astoria to Murray and Rosa, and to Rags, the name by which my father-in-law, Wilmott Ragsdale, was universally known. A foreign correspondent and then–professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin, Rags (who was also my journalism professor in graduate school), taught me much about writing and gave me unflagging encouragement even in the darkest of times that almost inevitably intrude at points in a freelance writer’s career.

  Countless other individuals and institutions have helped me in the course of researching and writing Astoria, and I’d like to acknowledge them here, aware that I may nevertheless inadvertently overlook someone.

  Historical researcher John Robinson of Spokane, Washington, and Missoula, Montana, has done a superb and amazingly efficient job of helping me find obscure articles and dig out deeply buried facts, as well as collaborating in compiling and writing the endnotes, and many other research tasks. He is truly a “J-STOR Ninja”—a master of the massive online database of academic articles. He also happens to have been born in Astoria, Oregon; knows the terrain; and, for his doctoral thesis in history, is writing on the federal status (or lack thereof) of the Chinook tribe at the mouth of the Columbia who helped the Astorians. I’d also like to thank John’s thesis advisor, Dan Flores, A. B. Hammond Chair in Western History at the University of Montana and author of numerous books on the American West, for putting me in touch with John Robinson.

  Several individuals read the book’s proposal in the early stages and gave me valuable responses: Bryan Di Salvatore, David Cates, Fred Haefele, Connie Poten, Kate Stark Damsgaard, Ted Stark, and Bob Hayssen. I am also grateful to several editors who read the completed proposal and gave their editorial insight: Leslie Meredith, Marc Resnick, Roger Scholl, Gillian Blake, Nancy Miller, Anton Mueller, Susan Canavan, and Tom Mayer. Jack Macrae early in the process recognized Astoria as a largely unknown story of exploration that deserved a greater audience. Alex Philp, historical geographer, has been a great sounding board for my ideas over the years, as has Scott Elrod.

  As I began to research and write the book, I visited as many of the locales portrayed in the Astoria story as time and circumstance (and wilderness accessibility) allowed, in order to capture with vividness and immediacy what the Overland and Seagoing Parties experienced in these rugged landscapes and seascapes themselves. It is amazing to me how much of the Hunt route remains wilderness, or near-wilderness, or much as he saw it two centuries ago. With the exception of a few small pockets, this is not a part of North America that has been subdivided into housing developments or paved over into mall parking lots. Much remains sparsely populated rangeland, farmland, rugged near-wilderness, or—in the case of Hell’s Canyon, the Wind River Mountains, the Bighorn Mountains, and parts of the Blue Mountains—actual designated wilderness under the federal Wilderness Act of 1964.

  In September 2012, we took a four-day canoe trip down the South Fork of the Snake River, very near to the section of the Snake where Wilson Price Hunt and his Overland Party ran into such difficulty with rapids and canyons on their “Mad River.” I’d like to thank my paddling companions on that trip: Jim Ritter and his daughter, Kate, and my daughter, Molly Stark-Ragsdale, who also captured portions of the trip and the rugged terrain and canyon walls on videotape. Jim, both a journalist and a widely read history buff, is not only one of my oldest friends and paddling companions, but has been a tremendous resource throughout my research and writing of Astoria, both as a reader from the proposal stage onward and a sounding board for ideas.

  On the Snake River trip, Jeff Hawkes of Rexburg, Idaho, helped us with canoe rentals, happens to live very near where the Overland Party built their canoes on the Henry’s Fork, and has a deep interest in local history. For my hike into the Seven Devils area near Hell’s Canyon, where Hunt’s Overland Party encountered impassable mountains, I’d like to thank the Hell’s Canyon National Recreation Area office in Riggins, Idaho, for advice.

  My understanding of the Seagoing Party’s dilemmas at the mouth of the Columbia, as well as en route on the open ocean, was informed in part through my visit to Astoria itself and Cape Disappointment at the Columbia’s mouth, as well as a four-day sailing experience with a group from Sussex School in Missoula, Montana, aboard the Adventuress, a one-hundred-foot, traditional wooden schooner that sails on Puget Sound. There, we not only learned—and performed—traditional sail-hauling and other techniques but also had the experience and knowledge of our captain, Daniel Evans, to draw on as well as the help of his crew.

  My understanding of square-rigged sailing ships such as the Tonquin was greatly enhanced by countless hours of conversation with my father, William Stark, who as a young man in 1949 served as an ordinary seaman aboard the last commercial windjammer to round Cape Horn, the Pamir. I helped my father write a memoir of this experience, The Last Time Around Cape Horn, and in the course of it heard in detail how square-rigged sailing ships perform in squalls and storms at sea, including a hurricane that the Pamir endured in the Atlantic while my father was aboard and, for part of the storm, aloft in the rigging.

  To learn more about Northwest Coast Native Americans and their large sea-going canoes, I was pleased to be able to attend two annual gatherings of nations from up and down the Northwest Coast. Every August, representatives from each nation paddle—in some cases for weeks—on open ocean or inland waterways to reach a designated gathering spot for a week of celebration, dancing, feasting, and honoring of ancient traditions. In August 2012, I attended the Paddle to Squaxin, hosted by the Squaxin Island tribe on Puget Sound near Olympia, Washington, a gathering of 102 large canoes, and in August 2013, I attended the Paddle to Quinault, hosted by the Quinault Indian Nation on the open Pacific Coast near Taholah, Washington. I am very grateful to these tribes and this event for opening themselves so willingly to the general public, and to the event’s founders and participants for keeping these ancient traditions and the Northwest Coast canoeing arts alive.

  I further learned about the ori
ginal peoples of the Northwest Coast (as well as the violent end of the Tonquin) during a visit to Clayoquot Sound, on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, and to the town of Tofino, British Columbia. It was there that I took a room for several days at the House of Himwitsa Lodge and Gallery in Tofino, overlooking Clayoquot Sound, and owned by the George family. I am very grateful to their hospitality and helpfulness. The title of Maquinna, hereditary chief of Ahousaht, has been handed down in their family for seventeen generations.

  During my stay at Clayoquot Sound, Brandon Hilbert, of Tofino Water Taxis, took me on a boat tour of the possible site of the Tonquin’s destruction and other points of interest in the sound.

  My research was made a great deal easier by the helpful staffs at Baker Library at Harvard Business School, and by Tim Mahoney, Special Collections Librarian; the New York Historical Society; the Manuscripts and Archives Division at the New York Public Library; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and Ingrid Lennon-Pressey; Clatsop County Historical Society and its Heritage Museum in Astoria, Oregon; Tacoma Public Library; Mansfield Library at the University of Montana; Grand Portage National Monument in Grand Portage, Minnesota, and Karl Koster; Fort William Historical Park in Thunder Bay, Ontario; Fort Michilimackinac State Park, Michigan; the Stuart House Museum, Mackinac Island, Michigan; Headwaters Heritage Museum at Three Forks, Montana; Nez Perce County Historical Society and Museum in Lewiston, Idaho; Spokane House Interpretive Center at Riverside State Park in Spokane, Washington; Museum of the Mountain Man in Pinedale, Wyoming; and Museum of the Fur Trade in Chadron, Nebraska.

  I am also extremely grateful to historians who came before and have researched the efforts of John Jacob Astor to establish his West Coast trade empire. These include Washington Irving himself, who with his nephew and researcher, Pierre, assembled a great deal of the Astoria story from documents, journals, and interviews. While some critics and historians of the 1800s disparaged Irving’s efforts as romantic, exaggerated, or embellished, I have found—as have others before me—that on close examination, much of what he wrote is based directly on the documented material. He also had the advantage of interviews with living participants and access to letters and other documents that have since been lost or destroyed. Other historians who laid the groundwork for the Astoria story are Hiram Chittenden and Kenneth Wiggins Porter, both writing in the early 1900s. For the modern reader who wishes to learn about the Astoria story in greater detail from a more academic perspective, I recommend the impeccably researched Astoria & Empire by Western historian James P. Ronda.