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

by Peter Stark

A short ways upriver from St. Louis, Hunt’s riverboat with the new recruits had stroked past a hamlet, La Charette, where an old man stood on the riverbank. Some of the party recognized him. It was eighty-four-year-old Daniel Boone, who had retired here from the too-crowded Kentucky wilderness that he’d originally opened to settlement; he still trapped for beaver pelts farther up the Missouri. Here in the flesh stood what would become a central irony in the exploration of the West—those trailblazers who marked the path for “civilization” to follow still felt an emotional tug to keep it wild and pure, knowing that this wildness, like the native peoples and animals, was diminishing with every passing year.

The buoyant French-Canadian voyageurs called them as they saw them, the Trois Tetons—“the three breasts.” It’s the voyageurs’ name that has stuck for these grand mountains that tower above today’s Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Wandering starving in these uncharted lands, Stuart came to understand that enormous wealth, such as Astor’s, meant nothing here. Lofty political ideals about liberty and equality, such as Jefferson’s, took on an entirely different meaning in a barren wilderness. Here one is humbled by freedom—either find sustenance, or die.

Let him but visit these regions of want and misery; his riches will prove an eye sore, and he will be taught the pleasure and advantage of prayer—If the advocates for the rights of man come here, they can enjoy them, for this is the land of liberty and equality, where a man sees and feels that he is a man merely, and that he can no longer exist, than while he can himself procure the means of support.