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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Peter Stark
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July 16 - September 13, 2025
Eventually they bought a parcel of largely rural land known—as it still is today—as Greenwich Village, and another property called Eden Farm, which would one day be the site of Times Square and much of Midtown.
British warships cruising in the Atlantic recently had boarded American commercial vessels to search for British subjects aboard as crew or passengers—of which there were often many, as in the case of the Tonquin. The British ships dragooned these errant subjects of the Crown into the ongoing war against Napoleon, where Britain needed all available men.
The earliest French colonists in North America were aristocratic adventurers and entrepreneurs who established a settlement in today’s Nova Scotia shortly before Sir Walter Raleigh’s British colonists founded Jamestown in Virginia in 1607.
Europe’s own wild, fur-bearing animals had been largely depleted by about 1600.
The cultural mix of the French fur trade changed fundamentally after 1763—a change that was reflected in the cultural mix aboard the Tonquin—when Britain won Canada from France in the Seven Years’ War.
Highland Scots eventually ran long strings of wilderness trading posts out of a great baronial hall on the shores of Lake Superior known as Fort William.
The fur trade embodied the economic differences between these groups that coexisted on the North American continent. The trade in Canada came under regulation by the British Crown,
In the United States and its territories, despite the efforts of merchants to acquire government-backed monopolies, the trade was unregulated by charter and fell to individual operators.
Canadian fur trade. On its lowest rung stood the mangeurs de lard, or “pork-eaters,” so named because, subsisting on preserved or salted pork, they were mostly a waterborne porter service where newcomers started.
the higher-status hivernant, or “winterer,” lived off wild game while managing the remote wilderness fur posts of the interior throughout the winter, where he traded goods directly with the Indian hunters and trappers for furs.
At the top of the hierarchy stood the bourgeois—or “proprietor” or “partner”—who actually owned part of the enterprise.
On July 22, 1810, about three weeks after leaving Montreal, Hunt and Mackenzie’s birch-bark freight canoe surged into the cove and toward the crescent of beach at Michilmackinac Island.
Established as an outpost nearly a century and a half earlier, in the 1670s, by Jesuit missionaries, Mackinac for a century had served as a major collection point of the Canadian fur trade in the upper Great Lakes.
Americans, paddled into Mackinac with pelts to sell, eager for company and with a yen to cut loose—drinking, dancing, singing, whoring, fighting, buying knickknacks and finery
“Perhaps Satan never reigned with less control in any place than he has here,” wrote one missionary’s wife in 1803 of the Mackinac Island beach scene.
geographic barrier that is almost unrecognized today but that determined the route of much pre-industrial travel (and even cultural patterns) in North America. This subtle rise of land known to geographers as the Mid-Continental Divide
“Crews with clique structures,” according to a summary of these studies, “report significantly more depression, anxiety, anger, fatigue and confusion than crews with core-periphery structures.”
After pushing their empire across Siberia to the Far East, the Russians, with the Bering Expedition in 1741, sailed across the North Pacific to the Aleutian Islands and Alaskan coast, and quietly began to develop a fur trade with natives there.
Starting in 1769, Franciscan Father Junípero Serra planted a string of missions up the Pacific Coast as far north as today’s San Francisco Bay.
On May 12, 1792, Captain Gray, during his second visit to the Northwest Coast, thus became the official Euro-American discoverer of the long-rumored Great River of the West. Sailing thirteen miles up it, he named it after his ship—the Columbia.
His innovation was to link the interior North American fur trade over the Rockies with the Pacific coastal fur trade and link that to the Russian Alaskan fur trade, and link that to China, to London, to Paris, to New York. Astor’s thinking revolved on entire continents and oceans.
Colter pointed to Meriwether Lewis as being at least partly responsible for the Blackfeet’s vehemence toward whites.
In the altercation, one of Lewis’s men stabbed to death one of the Blackfeet, and Lewis shot and probably fatally wounded another. In his anger about the cheeky raid, Lewis had left a Jefferson peace medal around the neck of the dead man, to show to all who had killed him.
The incredible wealth of marine life supported a Northwest Coastal Indian standard of living that was in many ways superior to late-eighteenth-century living conditions for much of the population of London, Boston, or New York.
So great was the wealth of the Northwest Coast that the ceremonial life of these societies centered on the potlatch. These were elaborate ceremonies in which a family gained social status by giving away—and even destroying—its own wealth.
What all this wealth of the Coastal Indians meant for John Jacob Astor and his proposed West Coast empire was that, should these tribes find it in their interests, they possessed a great deal of motivation to resist outsiders.
When the combined Overland Party, with Archibald Pelton among them, arrived at Astoria in the winter of 1812, it marked only the second time in recorded history that a party of Americans had crossed the North American continent.
This trading and toll-taking presumably had gone on from time immemorial—by some archaeological estimates the villages at the Narrows are among the oldest continuously inhabited human settlements in North America,
The partners would send out expeditions in virtually all directions to establish a vast network of posts. These tendrils of John Jacob Astor’s empire on the Pacific would spread out like a giant web from the epicenter at Astoria
expeditions traversing hostile Indian territory, where, for months on end, explorers were in an almost continuous state of profound threat and often witnessed traumatic events—all of which are associated with PTSD.*
Astor had sent a total of about 140 men to the mouth of the Columbia, between the Tonquin, the Beaver, the Lark, and Hunt’s Overland Party. Of these, at least sixty-one, or over 41 percent, died in a gruesome spectrum of violent deaths.
Was this a bold display of perseverance on John Jacob Astor’s part, to send expedition after expedition to a dangerous and remote coast? Or was it simple callousness to human life?
Manifest Destiny—that Americans were destined, for any number of reasons, to sweep westward across the continent to the Pacific—
in 1840 a few bold American settlers in wagons kept on going, dragging their heavy loads over the Blue Mountains to the Columbia. Under the “joint occupation” agreement they were free to do so even though the British held the fur posts on the river.
In 1843 the first large group of wagons, known as the “Great Migration,” made for the Willamette from Independence, Missouri, along the route pioneered by the Astorians.
