More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Peter Stark
It was Astor’s vision to capture its wealth. It was Jefferson’s vision to make it a democracy.
As the Lark began to capsize, turning her bottom up toward the raging wind and monstrous seas, dragging her rigging and yardarms in the heaving ocean like a giant net, Captain Northrup issued the fateful command: Dismast her.
[Y]our name will be handed down with that of Columbus & Raleigh, as the father of the establishment and the founder of such an empire. —THOMAS JEFFERSON TO JOHN JACOB ASTOR
it was said that when your luck ran well in the card game, the time was right to make life’s important decisions. When it ran poorly at Patience, you should avoid them.
Astor definitely believed in runs of luck. He also believed in meticulous planning, bold vision, huge risk, and relentless focus on his bottom line. As
The teenage Astor started planning his escape from Walldorf long before he made the break.
Along with his fellow passengers, Astor walked to shore toting a sack of seven finely crafted flutes and a few other imported goods—his initial capital to start life in, as the Germans called it, the New Land.
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.
JOHN JACOB AND SARAH ASTOR both viscerally understood that, in those early days, the great riches of interior North America were in furs. Furs and land.
Astor, this still-young and very ambitious immigrant, had conceived a plan that funneled the entire tradable wealth of the westernmost sector of the North American continent north of Mexico through his own hands. It was, as the early accounts described it, “the largest commercial enterprise the world has ever known.”
Paddling twelve to fifteen hours per day, with short breaks while afloat for a pipe of tobacco (they measured distances in terms of “pipes”) or a stop ashore for a mug of tea, they could cover fifty to ninety miles per day, unless they faced strong headwinds or waves that forced them to the shelter of shore, a state called degradé.
During that single day each voyageur would make more than thirty thousand paddle strokes. On the upper Great Lakes, the canoes traversed hundreds of miles of empty, forested shorelines and vast stretches of clear water without ports or settlements or sails, except for the scattered Indian encampment.
“I could carry, paddle, walk and sing with any man I ever saw,” claimed one seventy-year-plus voyageur, as quoted by historian Grace Lee Nute, writing in the early 1900s. “I have been twenty-four years a canoe man, and forty-one years in service; no portage was ever too long for me. Fifty songs could I sing. I have saved the lives of ten voyageurs. Have had twelve wives and six running dogs. I spent all my money in pleasure. Were I young again, I should spend my life the same way over. There is no life so happy as a voyageur’s life!”
“Every nook and corner in the whole island swarmed, at all hours of the day and night, with motley groups of uproarious tipplers and whisky-hunters,” wrote one contemptuous Scots-Canadian observer. “[It] resembled a great bedlam, the frantic inmates running to and fro in wild forgetfulness.”
Astor’s behalf was a tremendous commitment, even by the standards of today; it would mean handing five years of one’s life to a start-up venture bound for the unknown.
Above the waist, the voyageurs wore a loose-fitting and colorful plaid shirt, perhaps a blue or red, and over it, depending on the weather, a long, hooded, capelike coat called a capote. In cold winds they cinched this closed with a waist sash—the gaudier the better, often red. From the striking sash dangled a beaded pouch that contained their fire-making materials and tobacco for their “inevitable pipe.”
The true “Man of the North” wore a brightly colored feather in his cap to distinguish himself from the rabble, fixing it in place before landing at a fur
“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.”
And off John Ledyard went—twenty years before the Lewis and Clark expedition—having planted in the future president’s mind a glimpse of the potential economic and political significance of the Northwest Coast and Pacific Rim. As the
Thus 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.
John Jacob Astor usually dealt with rival enterprises in one of three ways. First he tried to buy them out. If that didn’t work, he tried to form a partnership with them. If he failed to join them, he tried, through relentless competition, to crush them.
Behind our house there is a pond, Fal lal de ra, There came three ducks to swim thereon. . . . One can hear, in the cadence of these lines, the quick, swirling stroke of the oars in the water, the brief, dripping pause after the stroke, followed by the next hard pull and the sudden forward surge of the riverboat, repeated thousands and thousands of times each day.
“Smoking,” on the other hand, as Crooks explained to Bradbury, referred to a custom among tribes friendly to one another. If one tribe lacked in some item—food, horses, whatever—that tribe could send emissaries to the other tribe, smoke together, and ask the other tribe to help provide the missing item. Someday, both tribes knew, the favor would be returned.
On August 20, the night turned cold enough to lay a skim of ice “as thick as a dollar” on standing water.
earth. The sun blazed. Mackenzie’s dog died of heat.
The Crow chief received the leaders in his tipi with the same gracious hospitality they’d experienced with the Arikara and Cheyenne. A similar code of hospitality traditionally extends to wayfarers among many nomadic societies across the world—among Inuit hunters in the Arctic, Bedouin dwellers in the desert, Tibetan nomads on the high Asian plateaus.
returned. Here on the high plains, if the strangers violated that hospitality, infringed on it, or killed someone, their hosts could transform into enemies relentlessly bent on revenge.
Its lodge remained nearly impenetrable, but the beaver’s system of marking its territory made it vulnerable to trappers. While its eyesight is poor, its sense of smell is acute.
The trappers worked in pairs, or groups—the “leashes” that Hunt released from the main group. The first leash had split off on the other side of the Tetons. While the voyageurs hewed the cottonwood canoes, after
The Overland Party usually didn’t bother to hunt them—too much time and ammunition for too little meat. They wanted big animals. The hunters spotted a few old bison tracks on the arid sagebrush plain above the river, but no bison.
The blue eyes of Northern Europeans set in hairy faces—like the eyes of a wolf—disconcerted Native Americans.
His only concern was that I not take away his fish and meat and that I commend him to the care of the Great Spirit.”
The Indians, once again, had rescued Hunt. He and his party stayed in the Sciatoga camp for six days to recuperate, some men gorging on meat and roots until they sickened themselves.
These people had landed here to establish a permanent settlement—the first American colony on the West Coast. Their sense of exposure deepened. Like a two-pound axe up against a two-hundred-foot tree, their camp was nothing but a tiny clearing between the vast wilderness of western North America’s mountains, forests, and rivers and the vastness of the Pacific, with its crushing swells and storms.
The salmon runs reached staggering proportions during those pre-European times—somewhere around 300 million fish each year, or about 1.8 billion pounds of protein. And they ran in predictable routes up coastal inlets and river mouths—a veritable pipeline of fish—
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.
One could argue that Alexander McKay and Captain Thorn represented two competing approaches to the world’s remote coasts on the part of the first European visitors. Thorn performed well within a tightly structured and disciplined system, but was absolutely at a loss when outside clear-cut rules and boundaries, while McKay was a free-form improviser who seemed vastly adaptable to other societies. Neither approach, however, worked out well for them when the Tonquin met the Clayoquot, although it seems McKay almost escaped.
Knowing this history, McDougall invited the local chiefs to Mr. Astor’s new emporium on the Columbia. Once they’d gathered, according to an account Irving heard from one of the participants, McDougall held up a small glass vial. In this bottle, McDougall told them, hid the deadly smallpox. If the Indians didn’t treat the traders well, there would be consequences.
The reports from the inland tributaries such as the Okanagan and the Willamette indicated rich harvests of furs, the Okanagan post alone trading less than $200 worth of merchandise to the Indians for $10,000 worth of furs.
they would have died if two Shoshone Indians hadn’t strayed by their shelter, relit their fire, fed them, stayed with them for two days, and left them a two-pound piece of venison.
Finally they reached a small Indian encampment. The inhabitants gave them food and bits of clothing.
luxury goods and sell them in New York. It had worked. The Pacific Rim and transglobal triangle trade had made the kind of immensely profitable returns for which he’d hoped.
him whether the Beaver had arrived bearing fresh supplies. Likewise for his companion in naked exile, the Virginia hunter John Day.
Virtually every person involved, starting with Astor himself, grossly underestimated the psychological toll both journey and settlement would take on men and leaders alike.
Astor had put all his faith in the loyal, steady, consensus-seeking, conflict-avoiding Wilson Price Hunt to serve as the anchor of the West Coast emporium.
fact: Astoria now presented a fair target for British attack.
Furthermore, McTavish and the North West Company were encamped nearby, waiting for their armed ships to seize everything. But McTavish was anxious, too—growing desperately low of supplies and trade goods while waiting for the promised ships. Everything hung in stasis. What had been a jostling rivalry between the two companies, amid a certain professional collegiality, had become a high-stakes standoff that awaited the arrival of mutually hostile and heavily armed ships
Cox asked a translator what the Blackfeet was saying. “You can’t hurt me. . . . You are fools. . . . You do not know how to torture. . . . We torture your relations a great deal better, because we make them cry out loud, like little children. . . .”
Nonetheless, on October 23, 1813, Duncan McDougall sold out John Jacob Astor’s West Coast enterprise and first American colony on the Pacific and all its goods—including some thousands of furs—for about thirty cents on the dollar.
“It was thus,” lamented Franchère, “that after having passed the seas, and suffered all sort of fatigues and privations, I lost in a moment all my hopes of fortune.” He was not the only one.
