Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  (Irving speaks of a “plot” by Rose “to rob and abandon his countrymen when in the heart of the wilderness, and to throw himself into the hands of the savages.” The author described Rose as “one of those desperadoes of the frontier, outlawed by their crimes, who combine the vices of civilized and savage life, and are ten times more barbarous than the Indians with whom they consort.”)

  In August Hunt’s party skirted the Black Hills and struck westward along the arid divide to the Big Horns and crossed Crow lands, during which time Rose stayed behind with Indian friends. Proceeding to the Wind River, Hunt and his men crossed the Continental Divide to the Green (called then the Spanish) River. In camp on the Green, a band of Snake—Shoshoni—Indians sold Hunt a large supply of buffalo jerky and through sign language and dirt-drawn maps provided help for the next leg of the journey.

  The party crossed the Big Horn River and the lower Wind River Range in September and reached the headwaters of the westward-flowing Snake, which the trappers accurately called the Mad River. Known from Lewis and Clark reports to be a tributary of the mighty Columbia but unknown to Hunt and his party, the Snake was a writhing, death-dealing 1,038-mile waterway filled with narrow, rock-walled canyons and deep, timber-choked gorges with miles of churning rapids between. It was a mad river in every respect, and Hunt intended to negotiate it to the Columbia and Fort Astoria. The partners voted unanimously to attempt the river route and in early October turned most of their horses over to their Shoshoni guides, presumably in exchange for labor in constructing the fifteen canoes and pirogues required to carry downriver the party, their supplies, and the furs they had gathered. The necessary trees, big cottonwoods, were found at Henry’s Fort in Idaho, a deserted trappers’ stockade where a deceptively tranquil bend of the Snake widened to 150 yards.

  Joseph Miller, the Marylander, could not go on, due to what Irving mysteriously called a “bodily malady,” and stayed behind at the fort with a group of trappers detached from the party. These men, provided with some of the remaining horses, were to occupy the fort, continue to trap beaver that fall and winter, and bring their furs on to Fort Astoria in the spring.

  Hunt and the fifty-four members of his expedition remaining pushed off the banks of the Snake on October 19 and spent the rest of the month and the first week of November attacking the river and losing the battle. One voyageur drowned; several canoe-loads of provisions and furs were lost in the seething, bitter-cold water; and progress was agonizingly slow, every yard of advance gained in peril and exhaustion. At night, hunkered at their campfires, they made plans for the dawning: Detachments were sent out under various partners and by the clerk John Reed to hunt game, explore ahead, find possible new routes along the Snake’s banks, find Indians who might serve as guides, and barter for horses.

  At one point near what became Twin Falls in south-central Idaho, the river was abandoned and the expedition split into two parties. Hunt led the main force of thirty men and Dorion’s wife and children; Ramsey Crooks took charge of the others. Furs and other impediments to fast travel were cached, and the detachments set out on opposite sides of the Snake on November 9, still 700 miles from Fort Astoria, hoping to find Shoshoni camps, horses, and food. Both parties suffered as they trudged northwestward along the general course of the Snake in blizzard weather. Game was scarce, and all were reduced to eating roots and berries. One of Crooks’ party said that during one nine-day period the men subsisted on “one beaver, one dog, a few wild cherries and some old mockason soles.” Another of Crooks’ contingent, a voyageur named Jean Baptiste Prevost, went insane from starvation and drowned in the river. In Hunt’s camp, Marguerite Dorion gave birth and although her baby died after a few days, she managed to keep up with the line of march.

  On December 15, Hunt and his people stumbled on a Shoshoni village of a dozen lodges near the merging of the Snake and Boisé Rivers, where the Hudson’s Bay Company would subsequently erect a trading post. By the end of December, with three Shoshoni guides and with segments of the parties now rejoined, the expedition proceeded northwesterly, crossed the Grande Ronde valley and the Blue Mountains, and on January 6, 1812, struck the Umatilla River and located a large Indian camp. The party rested there six days before proceeding to the banks of the Columbia and following the river on purchased horses to The Dalles rapids, where they obtained canoes for the last miles of the journey. They arrived at Fort Astoria on February 15 with the stragglers coming in over a period of several weeks, each with a harrowing tale to tell. Crooks and John Day, wandering west from the banks of the Snake, would not be found and rescued until April.

  * * *

  Upriver from the fort, Hunt had received sketchy information from Chinook informants on the Tonquin disaster, now eight months past, and in conference with the other Astorians learned the chilling details. As dismayed as he was at the news and while still recovering from the privations of the sixteen-month trek from Saint Louis, Hunt undertook his duties as factor-in-chief at Fort Astoria. He sought to follow Astor’s instructions on negotiating with the Russians and cementing friendly relations with the British fur traders on the coast, dispatched trappers upriver, assigned duties at the post, and took the resignations of partners Ramsey Crooks and Robert McClellan, who joined Robert Stuart in the summer for an overland journey back to Saint Louis.

  The opportunity to begin Astor’s diplomatic work came in May with the arrival in Baker’s Bay of the Beaver, a 490-ton brigantine commanded by Captain Cornelius Sowle of Rhode Island and carrying reinforcements and tons of foodstuffs, supplies, and trade merchandise, some of which was transferred to the fort’s warehouses. In the fall, Hunt boarded the ship and sailed with Sowle to Sitka, the flourishing capital of Russian America, 600 miles north of Vancouver Island. Sitka, and the island on which it lay, was ruled by the fierce, erratic, vodka-loving Count Alexandr Andreevich Baranov, and at Hunt’s advent in his miniature kingdom the nobleman had spent forty of his sixty-five years in the fur trade in Siberia and Alaskan waters. He was as tough a customer as any Astor man was likely to encounter, but the New York financier’s confidence in Hunt, and Hunt’s tenacity, paid dividends as the Astorian traded to Baranov all the Beaver’s cargo of food, arms, powder, and trade merchandise, except for the portion that had been necessary to provision Astoria, in exchange for 75,000 seal skins. In Canton, by Hunt’s calculations, the furs were worth four or five times the value of the cargo exchanged for them.

  Baranov’s furs were stored in a fishery in the Pribilof Islands, and Hunt remained aboard the Beaver as it sailed to the Bering Sea for the six-week detour required to get there, load the skins, and return to Astoria to pick up the baled furs awaiting the China trade. Hunt decided to omit the Astoria stopover and instructed Captain Sowle to drop him off at Oahu, then to sail on to China with the Baranov furs. It was now early in 1813, and the chief factor hoped to make passage back to the Oregon coast in the spring on the Lark, the resupply ship Astor had dispatched to the Pacific.

  News of the American war with Britain reached the Sandwich Islands shortly after Hunt’s arrival there, and all his plans—and those of his employer—went awry. The Lark arrived in the islands on schedule, but she was wrecked in a gale off Maui in March, at a cost of seven men drowned. The surviving crew members and their captain were rescued after a harrowing twelve days in the splintered and dismasted hulk of the vessel, living on a small ration of salt pork and wine that had been saved. Hunt was forced to purchase a Boston brig, the Pedlar, to return him to Astoria. He arrived there on August 20, just in time to witness the sale and abandonment of the fort.

  3

  Astor’s proprietors had witnessed signs of deteriorating relations between the United States and England even before the Tonquin sailed in September 1810. The ship had been escorted from Long Island into the open sea by the Constitution to prevent its being boarded by British press gangs ostensibly searching for deserters from their navy—but, lost to the world in their tiny enclave on the Oregon coast, the Astorian
s knew virtually nothing of the war’s cause and progress. What little news seeped into the fort told nothing of Britain’s seizure of American merchant ships in European waters; President James Madison’s trade embargo against England; the fall of Forts Michilimackinac, Detroit, and Dearborn to the Americans; the battle at Queenston in the Niagara campaign; the capture of York, capital of Upper Canada; or Perry’s defeat of the British fleet at Lake Erie.

  To John Jacob Astor, the war meant potential ruin for his Pacific enterprise, and he begged the Madison administration for protection. He sent urgent letters asking for a minimal force of forty soldiers to be dispatched to Astoria to protect his interests, which he felt were American interests, but his entreaties to Secretary of State James Monroe were ignored. In March 1813 he sent the supply ship Lark to the Columbia, but it was lost at sea. And, fearing that a blockade of New York Harbor would prevent departure of a second supply vessel that autumn, he managed to get a dispatch to Captain Sowle of the Beaver, then at Canton selling the Baranov furs, to return to Astoria with his ship’s hold filled with supplies.

  While these measures were being taken, the partners at Astoria were measuring their anomalous situation: They had learned of the war in January 1813, probably via North West Company trappers who came visiting, and now they were British subjects trading under the flag of the United States, unable to bear arms against their own country. They were isolated on a wild coast with a warehouse full of furs, cut off from Astor supply vessels, faced with dwindling food reserves and the imminent possibility of takeover by any armed British ship arriving on the coast or any British land force traveling down the Columbia.

  The threats were real. While the Astor agents were nervously conferring on their plight, their great rival, the North West Company, “clearly perceiving this to be their time to strike, and plant thorns beneath Astor’s pillows,” Bancroft says, dispatched the twenty-gun man-of-war Isaac Todd to the Columbia to “plant a fort and dominate the region.” Many months would pass before this ship reached the Oregon coast, but the North West Company paid a visit in the meantime, and the Astorians saw no recourse but to make terms with them.

  Wilson Hunt was still at Oahu on April 11, 1813, when his fort was confronted by a convoy of canoes and pirogues led by a Nor’wester named John George McTavish. This man was welcomed, somewhat too warmly, some thought, by Duncan McDougall, senior partner at Astoria and now both Astor’s and Hunt’s “proxy.” McTavish notified McDougall, Donald Mackenzie, and the others that the war now presented certain “difficulties” for the Americans. He told of the expected advent of the Isaac Todd and notified the Astorians that since the Oregon coast was now in British hands he was authorized to take control of the fort and purchase its stores, buildings, and furs. At some point in the discussions McTavish appears to have made certain other representations and incentives to those Astorians who were former North West Company men.

  In August, Hunt returned at last to Astoria on the Pedlar. He argued against selling or quitting the fort but was voted down by the other partners.

  After the negotiations that summer, the Astorians agreed to sell the fort’s goods “at cost” and the furs housed there at the current London market price. The sale was completed on October 12, 1813, with McTavish presenting bills of exchange in the name of the North West Company. The selling price was $58,191.01, a fraction of Astor’s investment and of the value of the property and goods.

  There was a tense moment during the negotiations, reported by Alexander Ross, one of Jonathan Thorn’s hated “scribbling clerks” who kept a journal on the voyage to the Columbia. A twenty-eight-year-old Nairnshire, Scotland, native, Ross had been fortunate in staying with the fort-building party while the man who had hired him, Alexander McKay, sailed north to his death on the Tonquin. Ross witnessed the sale of Astoria to the North West Company agents and wrote that near the conclusion of the negotiations, McTavish seemed to be buying time: He had learned that the Isaac Todd and perhaps other British warships were due to arrive on the coast at any moment, whereupon the American fort and property would “be seized as a prize,” costing his company nothing. McDougall and Mackenzie, Ross said, “saw through this piece of artifice” and insisted that the bills of exchange be signed immediately. While McTavish stalled, “full of commercial wiles,” the partners summoned all seventy-two of the Astorians and ordered the fort manned, the cannons shotted and pointed—presumably at McTavish’s camp, which was situated a short distance from the fort—and slow matches lit. “In an instant,” Ross said, “every man was at his post, and the gates shut. At eight o’clock a message was sent to McTavish, giving him two hours, and no more, either to sign the bills or break off the negotiation altogether and remove to some other quarters.” This offensive move seems to have convinced McTavish not to wait for his warships: He signed the bills and the fort was delivered up.

  One month later, the Nor‘westers formally took possession of Fort Astoria, raised the Union Jack over its factory building, and christened the place Fort George. Many of Astor’s Pacific Fur Company employees, including some of the voyageurs, who had come out to Oregon on the Tonquin, entered the service of the Nor’westers. McDougall, suspiciously, some of the Astor faithful thought, accepted a partnership with the British company. A few of the Astor overlanders decided to stay in Oregon, thus becoming among the first permanent settlers in the Willamette River valley.

  In April 1814 Wilson Price Hunt sailed out of Baker’s Bay in the Pedlar, which he had purchased for Astor in the Sandwich Islands, and spent two years in the Pacific coast trade trying to recoup some of his employer’s investment. He ended his tour with a voyage to Canton and sailed home with the Pedlar loaded with chinaware, silks, and tea. He reached New York in October 1816, after a seafaring adventure “that might have furnished a chapter in the wanderings of Sinbad,” Irving said.

  Hunt resumed his former life as a merchant in Saint Louis, prospered in his business ventures, married a widow with three children, and died peacefully on April 13, 1842, on the eve of a great migration to the Oregon Country.

  * * *

  On November 29, the British sloop-of-war Raccoon anchored in Baker’s Bay and its main passenger, another of the ubiquitous Macs of the Astoria saga, one John McDonald, a senior partner in the North West Company, assumed command of Fort George and the entire Columbia River fur enterprise. The skipper of the Raccoon took one look at the fort’s split-board “palisades,” pitiful bastions, and earthworks and said to McDonald, “This, then, was your enemy’s stronghold, requiring a navy to conquer? Damn me! With a single four-pounder I would have battered it down in two hours!”

  And, in April 1814, the long-awaited Isaac Todd crossed the Columbia bar and anchored before Fort George, thirteen months out of England, bringing with it another North West Company eminence, another Mac, another McTavish, another Donald, all in the person of Donald McTavish. Another noteworthy passenger on the warship was a certain Miss Jane Barnes, and H. H. Bancroft found it a pity “that the first European woman to stand upon the banks of the Columbia should have been of so questionable a character.”

  According to the historian, “One of the Macs [presumably Donald McTavish], doomed to the perils of western life yet loath all at once to relinquish every creature comfort, had brought with him some bottled porter, canned beef, cheese, and a blue-eyed, flaxen-haired female companion.” Miss Barnes was a “daughter of Albion,” who, “at the solicitations of this Mac had resigned her position as bar-maid in a Portsmouth hotel, and had come to this land of doubtful pleasures and profits, where at once she became an object of deepest interest to all.” The more carnal-minded on the wild coast, the historian said in an abundance of superfluous language, “were scandalized that this lecherous Mac should so far break the laws of God and of the Honorable Northwest Company, as to form an unholy alliance with a frail fair one whose father was no chief, when fur-trading interests demanded duskier relationships. Make as many unmarried wives as you please of native maiden
s, and the great interests of commerce shall guard your good name, but to bring hither a white mistress—what will the savages say?”

  Duncan McDougall’s Chinook wife was envious, Bancroft said, “for pretty Miss Barnes flaunted a new frock almost every day,” and McDougall’s father-in-law, Chief Comcomly, was “curious, and one of his sons who had now but four wives, was amorous, wishing immediately to marry her.” This young warrior, arrayed “in the richest robes, well painted, and redolent of grease, came and laid at her feet the offering of his heart. One hundred sea otter skins her owner should have, and she should never carry or dig. She should be queen of the Chinooks, and all his other wives should humble themselves before her. Elk, anchovies, and fat salmon should be heaped upon her lap, and all the livelong day she should sun herself and smoke.”

  But Miss Barnes declined these royal overtures and, indeed, found the society of the Columbia unsuited to her taste. She quickly determined to return to England and bartending by the ship that brought her out “but at Canton where the vessel touched, she fell in love with a wealthy English gentleman of the Honorable East India Company, and consented to grace a splendid establishment which he offered her.”

  Donald McTavish, however, had little time to enjoy the company of Miss Jane. His factorship at Fort George lasted barely a month. On May 22, as he crossed the river in a longboat, a sudden squall struck the channel and the boat filled and sank in a few minutes. McTavish and five other men from the Isaac Todd drowned.