Pacific Destiny and Bear Flag Rising

by Dale L. Walker

  Stuart struck a bargain with Derouin. He provided a sound canoe in exchange for their venerable and much-loved packhorse and after a few days of convivial information exchange, the Astorians set out on April 16 for the penultimate fragment of their march.

  The Indian-constructed canoe, actually a canoe-shaped bull-boat, was a godsend: Twenty feet long, four wide, and eighteen inches deep, it was a sturdy vessel with a willow frame covered by sewn and stretched elk and buffalo hides, the seams caulked with “unctuous mud.” They paddled it effortlessly down the Platte thirty miles from the Oto camp to reach the swiftly flowing Missouri, then were borne along briskly another hundred miles where they beached at an old trappers’ camp. There they found a larger, wood-and-bark canoe, transferred their gear and provisions into it, and rode the river another fifty miles to a bend and a glorious scene on the south bank: the ramparts of Fort Osage. There Wilson Hunt and his eight companions had been cordially received before their return to their winter camp on the Nodaway River.

  Lieutenant John Brownson was still in charge of the post and was delighted to welcome the ragged Astorians and treat them to a meal including pork and bread, the first they had tasted since leaving the Columbia.

  They set out again on the twenty-seventh in good spirits and with “a sufficiency of Pork & flour,” compliments of Fort Osage. At just before sunset on April 30, Stuart wrote, “we reached the Town of St. Louis all in the most perfect health after a voyage of ten months from Astoria during which time we underwent many dangers, hardships, & fatigues, in short I may say, all the privations human nature is capable of.”

  He calculated that the journey covered 3,768 miles counting all the numerous detours and wanderings, and estimated that he and his men had encountered thirty Indian tribes, bands, and hunting parties, including Cathlamet, Chinook, Walla Walla, Clatsop, Absaroka, Arapaho, Pawnee, Ponca, Oto, and Shoshoni.

  * * *

  Stuart spent three weeks in Saint Louis before embarking for New York for an audience with Mr. Astor, but except for the details of his overland adventure he had no news not already known to his employer. The war with England had begun on June 19, 1812, ten days before he and his party embarked on their mission, and by journey’s end Fort Astoria was an isolated American enclave in the midst of the enemy—the North West Company—and was destined to fall as a casualty of the war. Many months were to pass before either man learned of it, but as Stuart reached Saint Louis that spring of 1813, a convoy of Nor’wester canoes was already headed downriver to begin the takeover of Astor’s Pacific Fur emporium.

  The New Yorker had a high regard for the Perthshireman and had employment for him. Beginning soon after his marriage in New York to Elizabeth Emma Sullivan in July 1813, Stuart became Astor’s fur-trade representative in Montreal. In 1817 he joined his overland partner Ramsey Crooks as a co-agent at the Michilimackinac post, the center of Astor’s Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi operations, where he supervised 200 clerks and 2,000 voyageurs. (One of his employees said he was “one of those Scotchmen who gave his orders abruptly and expected them obeyed to the letter, yet a man of a deal of humor and fond of fun.”) He held this post until 1834, when Astor sold his northern fur enterprise to Crooks and other investors.

  The other five members of the Stuart expedition scattered once they reached Saint Louis.

  Robert McClellan, the irascible old Indian fighter, was imprisoned briefly for debt, opened a store in Saint Louis, and died there after a brief illness on November 22, 1815, at the age of forty-five. He was buried on the farm of his friend William Clark.

  Benjamin Jones bought land on the Mississippi after he returned from Astoria but became restless and went to Santa Fé in 1825 and remained in the Southwest four years. When he returned to Missouri he settled on a tract of land on Gravois Creek near Wilson Hunt’s homestead. Jones died of cholera in 1835, leaving a wife, five children, fourteen slaves, fifty-four books, and considerable property.

  There is no record of the lives of former army lieutenant Joseph Miller of Baltimore, and the two engagés, François LeClairc and André Vallé, after they reached Saint Louis.

  In 1856, three years before his death in New York at age seventy-two, Ramsey Crooks took exception to certain newspaper stories lauding the western explorations of John Charles Frémont, then the Republican Party presidential candidate. Crooks was particularly disturbed by claims (which Frémont himself did not make) that the explorer-politician had “discovered” South Pass. In a letter to a friend that was subsequently published in the Detroit Free Press, Crooks wrote that “even if the Colonel had discovered the ‘South Pass,’ it does not show any more fitness for the exalted station he covets than the numerous beaver hunters and traders who passed and repassed through the noted place full twenty years before Col. Frémont had attained a legal right to vote.” These men, he said, “were fully his equals in enterprise, energy, and indomitable perseverance, with this somewhat important difference, that he was backed by the United States Treasury, while other explorers had to rely on their own resources.” He stated, as if to make a formal record of it, that he was among the seven men “who left Astoria toward the end of June, 1812, crossed the main chain of the Rocky Mountains, and through the celebrated ‘South Pass’ … reaching St. Louis the following April.”

  In a splendid stew of metaphors, the Free Press editor preceded Crooks’ letter with his own comments, saying that the letter “quite dissipates the halo of glory sought to be woven around Col. Frémont’s brow as the alleged discoverer of the ‘South Pass,’ and plucks the stolen plume with which his supporters have adorned him.”

  Robert Stuart lived to witness the Great Migration to Oregon and California along the trail he helped blaze and over South Pass, which he and his little expedition stumbled upon on October 21, 1812. After retiring from Astor’s service he purchased land in Detroit and built a home, became an elder in the Presbyterian Church, a bank director, state treasurer of Michigan, and the United States superintendent of Indian affairs for Michigan.

  He died in Detroit on October 29, 1848, leaving an estate valued at over $78,000, and upon his death, his widow, Elizabeth Sullivan Stuart, wrote in his Bible, “He leaveth the incense of a good name.”

  4

  When the news reached him in New York of the fate of his beloved fort on the Columbia, Astor said, “Had our place and our property been fairly captured, I should have preferred it; I should not feel as if I were disgraced.… The very idea is like a dagger in my heart.”

  His dream of empire ended with a financial loss estimated at $150,0001 and while at first he blamed the war for the failure of Pacific Fur, he later adopted the idea that he had been betrayed by certain of his partners, chief among them Duncan McDougall, who had, Washington Irving said, received the Nor’westers “with uncalled for hospitality, as though they were friends and allies,” and supplied them with stores from the fort. In Astor’s view, were it not for McDougall’s largesse, Donald McTavish and his North West Company minions would have been starved off for want of provisions, or driven off by the Chinooks “who only wanted a signal from the factory to treat them as intruders and enemies.”

  In 1823, at the request of John Quincy Adams, then secretary of state in the James Monroe administration, Astor gave an account of his lamented enterprise and of the sale of Fort Astoria. Of McDougall he wrote, “From the price obtained for the goods, etc., and he himself having become interested in the purchase, and made a partner in the North West Company, some idea may be formed of this man’s correctness of dealings.” Another view was held by Alexander Ross, one of the Scotch partners who had sailed to Oregon on the Tonquin. He maintained that “M’Dougall had been with the nabobs of the North West before, and did not leave them without tasting of the bitter cup of disappointment; he could, therefore, have had no predilection in their favour.” On the other hand, Ross also had transferred his allegiance back to the Nor’westers after the sale of Astoria.

  The loss of his investme
nt meant less to Astor than the loss of his dream, and he drew little comfort in viewing the establishment of Astoria as strengthening American claims to the Oregon Country. He wrote to Wilson Hunt that his spirit had been “aroused” by the conduct of the North West Company. “After their treatment of me,” he said, “I have no idea of remaining quiet and idle.” In fact, he said, he was determined to resume his Pacific enterprise upon the end of the war with Britain.

  In the summer of 1814, that opportunity seemed in the offing with the news that Adams, Henry Clay, and other American commissioners were conferring with their British counterparts in the Flemish town of Ghent to reach a peace accord. Five months passed before the document emerged that ended the war, and not until February 11, 1815, did details of the agreement reach New York. Of principal interest to Astor was the provision of status quo ante bellum under which all pre-war territorial claims were restored. This meant that Fort Astoria and the adjacent Columbia River lands were once again American property. Moreover, in the winter of 1815, Congress passed a law prohibiting all traffic of British traders within the United States’ claims.

  But all this diplomatic and legal paper lay 3,000 miles from the Columbia, where the facts were quite different. The withdrawal of the Astorians had left the Pacific Northwest in the hands of the well-armed and belligerent agents of the North West Company who were already engaged in a trade war with the Hudson’s Bay Company, and to dispossess them would require more than a cadre of Scotch partners, clerks, and voyageurs. Astor above all was aware of this and made an “informal overture” to President James Madison, through his Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, offering to renew his Oregon enterprise and reestablish Fort Astoria providing it would be militarily protected by the American flag. He estimated that the force required for its protection “would not exceed a lieutenant’s command.”

  Gallatin approved the idea and recommended it to the president, but Madison chose not to respond to it. Said Irving, “Discouraged by this supineness on the part of the government, Mr. Astor did not think fit to renew his overtures in a more formal manner, and the favorable moment for the re-occupation of Astoria was suffered to pass unimproved.”

  The failure of Astor’s scheme, Irving said, was ascribable to a series of “cross purposes, disasterous to the establishment.” These included the loss of the Tonquin (“which clearly would not have happened had Mr. Astor’s earnest injunctions with regard to the natives been attended to”); Wilson Hunt’s long detainment in the Sandwich Islands, during which Astoria was sold to the Nor’westers; the loss of the supply ship Lark off the island of Maui; the War of 1812, which “multiplied the hazards and embarrassments of the enterprise”; and the failure of President Madison to support the idea of a military reoccupation and protection of Astoria.

  And so the financier turned his brilliant business mind to more profitable, settled, matters—his fur business in the Upper Mississippi and Great Lakes—and watched discontentedly while certain diplomatic efforts surfaced that affected his late Oregon dream. In 1818 President James Monroe’s secretaries of state, Richard Rush and John Quincy Adams, negotiated an agreement with Britain that established the Canadian-American border at the 49th parallel between Lake of the Woods, in the pine forests of northern Minnesota, southern Manitoba and Ontario, and the Rocky Mountains. Both nations claimed the lands west of the Rockies, the Oregon Country, and since no boundary could be agreed upon, a compromise was reached: That territory was declared “free and open” to both England and the United States, a quasi-solution called “joint occupation.” Meantime, Adams sought to pressure Spain to relinquish its claims on lands north of its province of Alta California, this part of the sweeping Adams-Onís Treaty signed in February 1819. In it Spain, weakened by its colonial problems in South America, ceded the Floridas to the United States and defined the western limits of the Louisiana Purchase. The 42nd parallel became the boundary separating northern California from the Oregon Country, to which Spain relinquished its claims.

  Two years later Russia gave way. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Russian traders had moved south of Alaska and established outposts as far down the Pacific Rim as San Francisco. In 1821 Czar Alexander I rattled a saber by issuing a proclamation prohibiting the ships of foreign nations from coming within 100 miles of the 51st parallel of the North Pacific coast of America. Since this latitude encompassed lands claimed by Britain that were still a subject of dispute with the United States, both nations pressured the czar. As a result, in 1825 Russia disclaimed all territories below the latitude of 54 degrees 40 minutes, a pairing of numbers that would reverberate in years to come.

  John Quincy Adams, one of many political figures who viewed the United States and North America as synonymous, saw these developments as leading to a time when “the remainder of the continent should ultimately be ours” and, citing the Monroe Doctrine, considered the entire hemisphere “closed to any new European colonial establishments.”

  Thus by the mid-1820s, only the old establishments—England and the United States—remained to contest the territory between 42 degrees north and 54 degrees 40 minutes. Britain’s claims rested on the Nootka Sound Convention of 1790 and various explorations from the time of Captain James Cook and the establishment of fur-trading posts by its Hudson’s Bay Company. The United States had its own declarations: explorations by Robert Gray, discoverer of the Columbia River, and by Lewis and Clark; the acquisition of Spanish claims in the Adams-Onís Treaty; and the fact that Oregon was contiguous to American lands gained in the Louisiana Purchase.

  The joint occupancy accord between the vying nations was renewable as long as each signee agreed to renew it. Either signee had the right to renounce it, giving the other a one-year notice.

  Twenty years would pass before the “Oregon question” was finally settled.

  10

  Fort Vancouver

  “… THE OARS BRIGHT FLASHING LIKE TOLEDO BLADES.”

  1

  George Simpson preferred to travel in a big, white birch-bark canot du maître—master’s canoe—paddled by six or eight black-bearded voyageurs, and at a fur-trade outstation have a bagpiper in full tartan regalia announce his arrival. On such occasions he would wear a tall beaver hat to improve his 5½-foot height, a scarlet-lined black cloak over a buttoned-up, expensively cut frock coat with matching trousers and waistcoat, a boiled white shirt and black cravat. This outfit, severe against the filthy but brightly beaded deerskin shirts, leggings, and moccasins of his oarsmen, was purposeful: He would never be mistaken for a mere trader, factor, or petty bureaucrat but would be instantly recognized as possessor of the impressive and sonorous title of governor of the Northern Department and Columbia River District of the Honourable Hudson’s Bay Company.

  There were times when Simpson’s ostentation had the reverse effect, when onlookers greeting him on the beach at some far-flung Company factory gathered from his show and ceremony, and from his dark raiment and dour visage, that he was precisely what he looked like: a vainglorious politician, or a porer over ledgers, more at home among pallid boardroom colleagues or barricaded behind a tower of paperwork than in the wilderness amongst trappers and traders and bales of beaver furs.

  If the “Little Governor,” as he was called, gave these impressions when he stepped ashore at Fort George, formerly Fort Astoria, on November 8, 1824, they did not last long. He was a politician and ledger man, but in its history of a century and a half the Hudson’s Bay Company never had a high-ranking officer to match Simpson’s physical vitality. His stature belied a strength and endurance that matched that of any of his voyageurs, and he proved it in pushing these woods-wise roughnecks overland from the Company’s headquarters at the York Factory on Hudson’s Bay to the Pacific. In eighty-four days they crossed Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, the Rocky Mountains, and the Selkirk range and paddled down to the mouth of the Columbia. The linear distance was about 1,500 miles, but the actual miles traveled, on winding, wandering waterways
, in portaging, walking, and climbing, may have been a thousand miles more.

  Simpson did not yet have a piper to skirl notice of his coming—that fine touch would be added when he began his inspection tours—but the unheralded occasion of his arrival at Fort George on that crisp winter forenoon had great portent for the future of British-American relations in the Oregon Country. Simpson was only thirty-seven and had risen swiftly in the Company’s service since he ventured to Canada from his birthplace of Ross-shire, Scotland. He was a well-knit, broad-chested man with blazing blue eyes, an imposing mode of speech, and an affable manner. He possessed other qualities, including something called “redundant animal spirits,” that his superiors adored: He had an educated, orderly mind, a driving ambition, a work ethic that shamed the most tireless of his colleagues, and a penny-pinching profit philosophy. He had, a contemporary said, “the imagination of a Clive,” the reference, electrifying to Englishmen of the era, being to Robert Clive of Plassey, the soldier-founder of the British empire in India. Simpson was regarded as such a pragmatic visionary and was sent to the Pacific Northwest to take advantage of the fall of Astoria and Astor’s failure to persuade his government to provide military support for reopening his fort on the Columbia. The governor was to consolidate Fort George’s strength and wage a campaign to solidify the Company’s fur empire: send trapping brigades east into the Snake River and Rocky Mountain country, north into Canada, and south to Mexican California; prosecute the fur trade vigorously; monopolize it by fending off American trappers venturing across the Rockies; and make a profit for the directors and stockholders in London. He was also authorized to abandon Fort George and build a new trade center on the north bank of the Columbia.