Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  At daybreak, with lookouts on the masthead peering out over the wild coast for signs of the missing boat parties, Thorn sent searchers ashore. On the beach some natives who had been watching the Tonquin struggle into Baker’s Bay came out to the ship in canoes, and were questioned with sign language about the missing sailors, but they seemed to have no information. Thorn himself led one of the search parties and a short distance along the beach he found Stephen Weekes, the armorer who had been with Aiken’s whaleboat. He told a harrowing tale of the boat being swamped, of Coles, the sailmaker, and Aiken disappearing in the boiling surf. Weekes and the two Sandwich Islanders had managed to turn the boat on its keel and retrieve its oars. One of the Hawaiians died, presumably of exposure in the numbing cold before the boat beached itself; the other was found by Tonquin crewmen later on the morning of March 25, half dead from cold and fatigue.

  The armorer and the Hawaiian were the only survivors of the ten men sent into the channel, an event, Irving wrote, “that cast a gloom over the spirits of the whole party, and was regarded by some of the superstitious as an omen that boded no good to the enterprise.”

  * * *

  The natives of the lower Columbia, principally Chinook and Clatsop people, had dealt with white traders for many years and knew what they sought, and thus swarmed to the Tonquin’s anchorage from its first day in Baker’s Bay, their canoes carrying sea otter skins and other furs. These fisherfolk were waterway artisans, and the voyageurs especially admired their craft, some of which were fifty feet in length, hewn from a single fir or white cedar and capable of carrying thirty men. The thwarts were thick and the gunwales flared outward, features that enabled them to stay upright in the most treacherous of waters; the bows and sterns of the boats were intricately carved into grotesque figures of men and animals, some of the prow-pieces as tall and stately as any Viking ship. The canoers sat on their haunches to paddle; one man in the stern with a paddle serving as rudder. Women were not excluded from canoe-work and were as expert as any paddler and often took the important tiller position aft. Irving, who gathered descriptions from those who saw the natives at work, wrote, “It is surprising to see with what fearless unconcern these savages venture in their light barks upon the roughest and most tempestuous seas. They seem to ride upon the waves like sea-fowl.” He compared the Columbia River people with the horseback Indians of the Great Plains and said that while the buffalo-hunting tribes were “generally tall, sinewy, meagre but well-formed, and of bold and fierce deportment,” the Oregon coastal tribes, “lounging about the river banks, or squatting and curved up in their canoes, are generally low in stature, ill-shaped, with crooked legs, thick ankles, and broad flat feet. They are inferior also in muscular power and activity … to their hard-riding brethren of the prairies.”

  While the natives came to the Tonquin camp ashore and out to the ship in their canoes, some bringing otter skins to trade, many just to gawk, and some to pilfer, Captain Thorn and a number of the Astor partners explored the Columbia estuary searching for a suitable site for the trading post. As ever, Thorn was angry. He had lost eight men in his haphazard attempt to find an entrance to the Columbia estuary, and he was anxious to be rid of his insubordinate Canadian passengers and their sinister Gaelic babble. He was particularly infuriated at Duncan McDougall, the vain and splenetic little man who made so much of being Mr. Astor’s proxy. It had not escaped Thorn’s notice that McDougall seemed to have a covetous eye toward the wives and daughters of the Chinook chief Comcomly, a tendency the captain found as disgusting as the women themselves. Irving admitted that McDougall “seems to have had a heart susceptible to the influence of the gentler sex,” and of the Chinook women reported that they “painted their bodies with red clay, and anointed themselves with fish oil, to give additional lustre to their charms.” According to H. H. Bancroft, McDougall later “took to wife a dreamy daughter of the Chinook chief.”

  Thorn was particularly incensed that McDougall had invited Comcomly aboard the Tonquin with his many wives and large retinue without so much as a by-your-leave, an event that, one of the partners later wrote, “stirred the spleen of the captain, who had a sovereign contempt for the one-eyed chieftain and all his crew.”

  Above all, Thorn was impatient to move on, to leave the lubberly managers and fort builders on the beach and take the ship upcoast to fulfill what he considered the most important of Mr. Astor’s assignments, the investigation of the fur-trade potential of the entire Oregon coast. He ordered the building of a shed on the shore of Baker’s Bay to receive the supplies, tools, and equipment needed for building the trading post, and the dismantled schooner and its rigging. He intended to relieve the Tonquin of this cargo and the supernumerary civilians as well and take his leave of the entire land enterprise.

  Meantime, McDougall and David Stuart set out in a boat to find a site for the fort and in the first week of April selected a densely wooded point of land on the south shore of the bay. Point George, as they named it, lay opposite the site of Lewis and Clark’s Fort Clatsop, twelve miles from the Columbia entrance channel and above a good harbor where trade vessels of average size could anchor within fifty yards of shore.

  Work began on the fort on April 12 with axmen on scaffolds topping the biggest trees and cutting down the firs and alders. In heavy rains, laborers chopped underbrush, moved rocks, blew up stumps with gunpowder, and landed goods and livestock. Others worked to erect a twenty-by-sixty-two-foot warehouse, a powder magazine, and a “residence” of barked logs surrounded by gardens, the plots hoed and sewn with vegetable seeds brought on the ship. As this work proceeded, two shipwrights Astor had employed began laying the keel of the trade schooner brought crated on the Tonquin.

  At last Captain Thorn was free to take his ship to sea and search for furs along the northern coast. Aboard were twenty-nine men, including the only civilians, Alexander McKay, listed as “supercargo,” with one James Lewis serving as his clerk. A Chehalem Indian named Lamanse, who had picked up some English and served vessels as interpreter to tribes along the northwest coast, was taken aboard at Gray’s Harbor, after which the Tonquin sailed north to Vancouver Island.

  Of Captain Thorn’s freedom from the Astor men, Bancroft asks rhetorically if “our most sturdy captain” might not now “shake from his feet the dust of Scotch fur-traders and filthy French voyageurs and on the Tonquin’s cleanly scrubbed deck, laugh at the discordant past, laugh as with his own crew only on board she flew before the breeze, and swept gayly into the coves and estuaries of the admiring savages?” His answer: “Alas! no; with his evil temper, evil times forever attended him. Doomed to destruction, the gods had long since made him mad.”

  2

  Jonathan Thorn, relieved of his burden of Gaelic-gabbling civilians and the detested cargo for building and provisioning of Fort Astoria, proceeded northward to Vancouver Island on June 5, 1811. He had a specific mission to fulfill: Mr. Astor wanted him to trade for furs among the coastal tribes and, having gathered a sufficient number of sea otter and other skins, to return to Astoria, check on the needs of the fort builders, and then proceed to China to sell the furs and sail back to New York. According to Astor’s plan, the Tonquin would become one of several trade ships making a periodic run to the Oregon coast, thence to Canton and back, with Astoria as the epicenter of the Astor-Pacific emporium.

  For his anchorage Thorn selected an inlet—called Neweetie by Irving, Clayoquot or Kyuquot by the natives—opposite a large Indian village thirty-odd miles above Nootka Sound. Lamanse, the Indian interpreter on board, warned the captain that the people of the village were “of a perfidious character,” but Thorn ignored the warning.

  Late in the first day of the anchorage, a group of natives came out to the ship bringing bundles of sea otter hides in their canoes and were welcomed on deck. Among the visitors were emissaries of the village chief, one Wicananish, who invited the white leaders to his lodge. Thorn declined the offer, but Alexander McKay went ashore with the interpreter and was rece
ived hospitably by Wicananish and spent the night in the chief’s home, sleeping in a warm bed of otter skins. As assurance of his amity toward the traders, the chief left six of his men—Irving called them “hostages”—aboard the Tonquin.

  The next morning (the date is unknown but is believed to be about June 15), Thorn, without waiting for McKay’s return to the ship, had his crewmen spread the trade goods on deck: blankets, cloths, knives, beads, fishhooks, odd pieces of iron. The captain expected a prompt and profitable sale, but as the natives boarded the ship with their packets of furs, Irving says, Thorn quickly learned that they “were not so eager and simple as he had supposed, having learned the art of bargaining and the value of merchandise from the casual traders along the coast.”

  The negotiations were guided by an old subchief named Nookamis, a wily bargainer with a long history of haggling with the Bostons and King George’s agents and “who had grown gray in traffic … and prided himself upon his acuteness.” Thorn, in contrast, Irving said, “was a plain, straightforward sailor, who never had two minds, nor two prices in his dealings, was deficient in patience and pliancy, and totally wanting in the chicanery of traffic.”

  The day’s trade did not begin well, but then it got worse. Thorn pointed to the furs Nookamis’ people had brought on board, pointed to the goods he would trade for them, and the old chief laughed and shook his head merrily and made a counteroffer. The captain, sorely offended from the start, sullenly paced the deck, hands thrust in his pockets, followed by Nookamis holding out a sea otter skin and pestering him to make an offer. After a few minutes of Nookamis’ hectoring chatter, Thorn, “never remarkable for relishing a joke, especially when at his own expense,” exploded. He snatched the pelt and rubbed Nookamis’ face with it, then strode about the deck swearing, kicking the furs about, his face an ugly mask. He grabbed Nookamis by his hair and shoved the old man to the rail, grabbed another—named Shewish, one of Wicananish’s sons—and booted him toward the sallyport, and shouted to the others to leave the ship instantly. The Indians ran to the rail, “as one might recoil from a pestilence,” Bancroft said, and jumped into the sea or down the boarding ladder to their canoes, Nookamis and Shewish shouting imprecations at Thorn as their men scurried to the paddles.

  When McKay returned to the ship later in the morning and learned of the incident, he and Lamanse warned of the danger and urged Thorn to make sail, as there would surely be reprisals. The captain scoffed at the panicky agent and interpreter and pointed to the Tonquin’s cannon and small arms locker, saying, “Do you think I would run before a lot of naked redskins so long as I had a knife or handspike?” Bancroft observed that the captain “loved to triumph, not less over those about him, than over the barbarians ashore.… After all, it would not sound well in polite circles to have it said that a lieutenant in the navy sailed a peddling-ship all the way round Cape Horn, and then thrashed the savages with his own hand because they were more skillful traders than he.”

  Accounts vary on the events that followed Thorn’s tirade, but it appears that a day or two elapsed in an odd calm, as if the eye of a storm were passing over the Tonquin as it swung at anchor in Clayoquot Sound. During this lull the natives returned to the ship with their furs, a canoe at a time, and, as before, were invited aboard. Thorn appears to have kept to his cabin in these days, perhaps letting McKay conduct the negotiations.

  The eye passed over just after dawn one morning when a large pirogue-sized canoe carrying twenty native traders and their bundles of furs came alongside the Tonquin. The canoe was commanded by Shewish, the chief’s son Thorn had banished from the ship. He and the others held up their otter skins and the officer of the watch, determining the visitors to be unarmed, permitted them to board while Thorn and McKay slept in their quarters below the main deck. Soon other canoes appeared from shore, and more of Wicananish’s villagers climbed the ladder and scattered around the deck displaying their bundled goods. The watch officer eventually sent a man below to wake the captain and the Astor partner, and by the time these sleepy gentlemen appeared on deck the Tonquin was swarming with Indians. McKay, with one quick glance around, told Thorn he must abandon the harbor in all haste and the captain, standing on the quarterdeck, saw the number of canoes surrounding the ship and others shoving off from shore and barked orders to his officers to weigh anchor and send men aloft to make sail, and ordered others to clear the Indians from the deck.

  As hands manned the capstan and crewmen began unreefing sails, one of the natives—perhaps Shewish—gave a yelled signal and in an instant knives, hatchets, and war clubs hidden in the fur bundles were produced and the Tonquin’s deck turned into a killing ground. James Lewis, McKay’s clerk, was standing by a bale of trade blankets, arms folded across his chest, when he was stabbed in the back; McKay himself, seated at the taffrail, was knocked overboard, where he was clubbed to death by the Indian women in the canoes; Thorn, armed only with a clasp-knife, slashed at his attackers, is said to have killed Shewish with it, and, according to Irving’s unlikely account, dealt crippling blows left and right, “strewing the quarter deck with the slain and wounded” before being hemmed in, smashed down, and stabbed to death and his body heaved overboard. James Thorn, the captain’s sixteen-year-old brother, a “ship’s boy,” was also slain.

  Of the seven sailors sent aloft to work the sails, three were killed as they descended from the rigging, the four remaining, including armorer Stephen Weekes, who was mortally wounded, fighting with knives and handspikes down the steerage hatchway to a cabin where they barricaded the door. They smashed open the arms locker, loaded muskets, and came up to the main deck firing volleys at the clots of natives looting the dead and managing to force the Indians to flee over the rails to their canoes below. The four crewmen loaded the light shipboard cannon and fired grapeshot, “which did great execution among the canoes, and drove all the savages to shore,” Irving claimed.

  The melee had lasted only a few minutes, but the attack caught the crew unarmed and outnumbered, and Thorn, McKay, and twenty-four crewmen, half of them Hawaiians, were killed. Most of their corpses were thrown overboard, where they floated about the ship’s keel.

  That night, three of the four surviving sailors lowered a longboat and rowed away from the ship, intending to make their way south along the Oregon coast to Fort Astoria. They were unable to manhandle their boat beyond the wall of surf of Clayoquot Sound, however, and were forced to beach the craft in a small cove. During the night, they were captured and tortured to death.

  Weekes, dying from loss of blood, stayed aboard the Tonquin and survived the night. At first light the Indians returned to the ship and circled it. With them was Lamanse, the Gray’s Harbor interpreter whose life had been spared and who had been taken prisoner. He recognized Weekes, who stood at the rail waving at the canoes, but the armorer quickly disappeared and was forgotten as the Indians boarded and roamed the deck, looting the blankets and trade goods. By mid-morning at least thirty canoes had reached the ship, the Indians swarming over the rails in search of plunder.

  Before the first of them boarded, Weekes found the strength to get below decks to the powder magazine and there he waited, listening to the whoops and shouts and the thud of running feet above him. He poured a train of gunpowder to the magazine and, before he lost the last of his strength, lit it. The explosion blew the Tonquin into scraps of oak and human flesh. Lamanse, in the main-chains, was thrown from the deck into the bay and survived. He later said that “arms, legs, and heads were flying in all directions,” and for days afterward the limbs and torsos of the dead were washing up on the beach.

  Irving described the scene: “The ship had disappeared, but the bay was covered with fragments of the wreck, with shattered canoes, and Indians swimming for their lives, or struggling in the agonies of death; while those who had escaped the danger remained aghast and stupefied, or made with frantic panic for the shore.”

  (Astor’s author asserted that James Lewis, the clerk who was among the first
men attacked on the Tonquin, lit the fuse, and that on the voyage out Lewis had “expressed a presentiment that he would die by his own hands; thinking it highly probable that he should be engaged in some contest with the natives, and being resolved, in case of extremity, to commit suicide rather than be made a prisoner.” Gabriel Franchére, one of the Astor agents on the Tonquin who stayed at Fort Astoria when the ship departed north, stated that the magazine was blown up by Stephen Weekes. It seems likely that a ship’s armorer, in charge of all the small arms on the vessel, would know more about the powder magazine and how to detonate it than a civilian clerk.)

  As to Captain Thorn, Irving—who appears to have known him personally—wrote of him as “a frank, manly, sound-hearted sailor … loyal, single-minded, straightforward, and fearless” and said, “With all his faults and foibles, we cannot but speak of him with esteem, and deplore his untimely fate; for we remember him well in early life, as a companion in pleasant scenes and joyous hours.”

  Many months later John Jacob Astor learned of the fate of the Tonquin in New York and took the news stoically, although, as Irving said, he “felt it with all its force, and was aware that it must cripple, if not entirely defeat, the great scheme of his ambition.” While attending a play not long after receiving the terrible news, a friend asked the financier how he could remain so calm while in possession of such dreadful information. “What would you have me do?” Astor wondered. “Would you have me stay at home and weep for what I cannot help?”

  3

  Six weeks passed before the first rumors of the Tonquin massacre reached Duncan McDougall, David and Robert Stuart, and the other Astorians preoccupied in the building of their factory and fort on the Columbia. But news of another sort reached them in July from upriver that a party of thirty white men had appeared out of nowhere and were hastily erecting buildings on the riverbank. David Stuart and eight men prepared to set out to investigate the report but were held back when, on July 15, a canoe came sliding down the river, a Union Jack fluttering at its stern and bearing a party of voyageurs and a distinguished passenger, David Thompson, astronomer, explorer, cartographer, and a partner of the North West Company. He was a formidable wilderness man, only thirty-one years old but already with seventeen years’ experience in the Canadian back country, where he had opened trade with several Indian tribes and explored and mapped routes between far-flung Canadian forts and factories. He had crossed the Rockies in 1807, blazing a trail south of that of Alexander Mackenzie, and built a fort at Windermere Lake, the first on the Upper Columbia.