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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Peter Stark
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January 12 - February 16, 2018
It was Astor’s vision to capture its wealth. It was Jefferson’s vision to make it a democracy.
Jefferson was so passionately engaged in the possibilities of the western continent that he was known to crawl around on hands and knees in the president’s office studying maps spread out on the floor. It’s clear that Astor and Jefferson fueled each other with their mutual enthusiasm and vision of the West Coast’s limitless possibilities.
in 1809, Astor would dispatch his first ship, the Enterprise, to test the profitability of his transglobal trading scheme with a quick stop at the Northwest Coast. The following year, in 1810, he would send two advance parties—one around Cape Horn by sea on the Tonquin and one across America by land. The Overland Party would begin to lay out a vast network of fur posts reaching up the Missouri River, over the Rockies, and to the Pacific Ocean, and open a “line of communication” across the continent along which both messages and furs could travel.
they would construct the first American colony on the West Coast.
Then the Astor ships would transport the heavy fur packets—sea otter, beaver, lynx, bear—across the Pacific. His captains would sell them at a tremendous markup in Canton, where a powerful demand existed from wealthy Chinese. Then, in China, Astor’s ships would load porcelain, silk, tea, and yellow nankeen cloth and sail these cargos around the other half of the globe (or return via the same route, depending on conditions) to the markets of London and New York, completing the circumnavigation and reaping another astronomical profit from fashionable and eager European and American consumers of
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was, as the early accounts described it, “the largest commercial enterprise the world has ever known.”
On this happy, bright Sunday in August 1810, however, neither John Jacob Astor nor Thomas Jefferson, nor anyone who had signed on as a participant, possessed the least inkling of the toll the “grand venture” would exact. It
The best in the business, by far, were the Scottish traders and French-Canadian voyageurs in the Canadian trade. Many of these traders were employees of the Montreal-based North West Company, whose sprawling operations stretched over thousands of square miles of wilderness from the Great Lakes nearly to the Rockies, while the Hudson’s Bay Company operated farther to the north.
Nor was it possible to predict the powerful distorting effect that this degree of exposure would have on the personalities and leadership abilities of the men Astor had chosen to head his West Coast empire. Under extreme stress, each leader succumbed to his own best and worst traits.
This cultural clash aboard the Tonquin had its origins in the earliest European settlement of North America. The ship in many ways was a microcosm of the continent itself at that moment in 1810—national boundaries still undefined, and different peoples, even Northern European ones, largely unblended in what would eventually become known as the melting pot.
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. From then on, Scottish Highlanders, immigrating from Britain, took over management of what had been the French-Canadian fur trade. With their main headquarters at Montreal,
Captain Thorn would have been well served to learn from Captain Cook’s temperamental treatment of the native peoples, but the captain had apparently remained aboard ship.
Thorn was steeped in a rigid system of order, discipline, and deprivation designed for the sole purpose of combat at sea.
the Columbia’s mouth. Still today one of the world’s most dangerous navigational hazards, here the power of the largest river of the western continent, discharging an average of 265,000 cubic feet of water per second, collides head-on with the power of the world’s largest ocean. The Pacific tides and swells entering the river’s mouth fight against the outgoing river’s discharge.
To the amazement of Cook’s officers and crew, when they reached China after his death they discovered that the spectacularly lustrous sea otter furs purchased for one dollar’s worth of trinkets from Northwest Coastal Indians sold for the equivalent of a hundred dollars cash in Macao and Canton.
British naval officer George Vancouver, on a four-year mission to chart the entire Northwest Coast, arrived at the river’s mouth. Sending small boats one hundred miles up it, Vancouver officially claimed the river and its enormous unexplored interior basin for Britain,
John Jacob Astor didn’t originate the idea of trading goods for furs on the Northwest Coast and selling them across the Pacific in China. What Astor did was to conceive it on a scale far larger, more global, more intricate, more elegant, and more profitable than anyone had before. 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.
One extends hospitality to wayfarers in need with the unspoken knowledge that one day it will be returned.
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.
They didn’t realize that the mouth of the Columbia still lay hundreds and hundreds of miles away and nearly five thousand feet below them. Even a sextant, however, couldn’t have told them of the horrors that lay between here and there.
it marked only the second time in recorded history that a party of Americans had crossed the North American continent. Hunt
every person involved, starting with Astor himself, grossly underestimated the psychological toll both journey and settlement would take on men and leaders alike.
They would pull up stakes and abandon Astor’s West Coast enterprise. Another tough question arose: How? It was now June. There was no way to pack up their goods and cross the Rockies before winter.
“It was [Astor’s] great misfortune that his agents were not imbued with his own spirit,” wrote Irving. Yet neither Irving nor Astor acknowledges a central fact: John Jacob Astor wasn’t there.
While Astor wanted the bravest man he could find, Thorn illustrated that there lies a point when bravery shades into arrogance, and arrogance shades into idiocy.
Almost immediately Hunt left Astoria aboard the Beaver. Arriving at the Russian fortress on the Alaskan coast, he let himself be manipulated by Count Baranoff. He wouldn’t stand up to Captain Sowle. When the captain swung the Beaver from Alaska toward the Sandwich Islands—Hawaii—for repairs, Hunt either would not or could not demand firmly enough that the ship first return to Astoria to drop him off. His penchant for avoiding confrontation in
Whichever it was, Hunt’s decision left him absent from the mouth of the Columbia at a crucial time and left the door open for McDougall to sell out. If McDougall acted with stealth and subterfuge, and Thorn by direct confrontation, it seems that Hunt often made choices by default. The result was that Astoria lacked a strong leadership loyal to John Jacob Astor. Instead it had a “crafty” leadership loyal to its own interests. Foreshadowing certain American business practices two centuries in the future, McDougall, in the absence of anyone present to tell him no, fashioned himself and Mackenzie
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Stuart and Crooks had discovered a place where a loaded wagon could cross the Rocky Mountains and Continental Divide. That crucial discovery, along with the channel Hunt had found cut through the mountain ranges by the Yellowstone hot spot, would become the Oregon Trail.
Manifest Destiny—that Americans were destined, for any number of reasons, to sweep westward across the continent to the Pacific—Benton asserted in a speech to the Senate in February 1823 that Astoria had “consummated” the U.S. title to the region. He also invoked fears of a British empire on the Pacific.
