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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Peter Stark
The snows lay too deep in January to traverse them. She found a hidden ravine, safe from attack. She killed the two horses. Over a fire, she smoked the horse meat to preserve it for the weeks ahead, and using the horsehides built shelter for herself and her children. Hidden in this makeshift shelter in a ravine with her two boys, Marie Dorion had spent the winter.
“My plan was right,” Astor allegedly said, according to another, “but my men were weak. Time will vindicate my reasoning.”
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.
That he had a talent for strategizing—or scheming, depending on how one might look at it—is obvious from his plans for the smallpox-in-a-bottle, from his marriage to Comcomly’s daughter, from his taking control so thoroughly of Astoria at the colony’s outset and ultimately selling the place out. Even Franchère, one of the most generous of the Astoria chroniclers and a fellow Canadian besides, finally takes to calling the Scotsman “the crafty M’Dougall” and declares that the “charge of treason will always be attached” to Astoria’s leadership.
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.
The Astorians served as that first push of American settlers across the continent, finding the route, placing an American presence on the Pacific Coast, and bringing the idea of settlement into consciousness.
Astor possessed the resilience and confidence to fail, along with the focus and drive to keep going despite failure.
John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson, living in comfort on the eastern seaboard. 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.
