Much Ado about Astoria Astoria has the distinction as being Oregons oldest city, founded in March 1811 by the New York financier, John Jacob Astor and the Pacific Fur Company. Astor sent fur traders to establish a trading post which they would attempt to stake a claim to the fur trade in the region, in a race with the rival British North West Company The year was 1810, and the dreamer was the prosperous German American fur trader John Jacob Astor. Encouraged by ex-president Thomas Jefferson and acting on sparse information supplied by Lewis and Clark and a few other explorers, Astor made plans to buy and sell furs on a gargantuan scale. What the high-flying immigrant had in mind was nothing short of amazing: 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. To accomplish all this linkage, Astor had to get a lot of pieces on the board, and his first move was to send out an expedition. Astor bankrolled his agents and gave them instructions as to what he wanted done, but he did not himself brave the Rockies, or summon the diplomacy needed to win the confidence of Indians, or face starvation, or lose the way when maps proved useless, or contend with the profound cold of Western winters, or sail vast distances, or deal with mutinous crews. Astor was an urban-dwelling merchant with more than enough capital to hire others to carry out his scheme. The expedition proceeded on multiple fronts. There was a seagoing contingent on-board the Tonquin, which was to carry its cargo (most notably the hardware needed to build an outpost) around Cape Horn and up the west coasts of South and North America to the mouth of the Columbia River. There was also an overland party with a mandate to reach the interior West by river and then proceed as best they could to the coast — on horses when they had them, on foot when they did not — for a rendezvous with their nautical brethren. As you could imagine, the overland party had it rough. Game all but disappeared during the winter, and they soon faced starvation. Peril came from another source when the way forward became impassable in what is now known as Hell’s Canyon on the Snake River in Idaho and Oregon. Unable to punch through either raging rapids or harsh badlands, they backtracked and broke into small groups so that if one party found a way out, the others could benefit, too. Nearly half perished. Watching the unraveling of the Tonquin’s captain, a martinet named Jonathan Thorn would have been a sight. He acquitted himself well in the arduous task of getting the Tonquin to the mouth of the Columbia. But with no experience outside his own narrow culture, he was hopeless in dealing with “civilians”. He managed to alienate two disparate groups: first, the worldly, pleasure-loving Scots who sailed on the Tonquin as Astor’s co-investors and partners and took umbrage when Thorn had the gall to boss them around; and second, the Indians with whom Thorn parleyed for furs. His intransigence toward the Indians led to the killing of almost everyone onboard his ship, himself included. These and other mishaps spelled failure for the expedition. In addition to losing nearly half of his travelers to starvation, disease and violent death, Astor suffered the humiliation of having his Western assets liquidated. In 1813, a partner sold “John Jacob Astor’s West Coast enterprise and first American colony on the Pacific and all its goods for about thirty cents on the dollar to the hated Montreal-based North West Company. Pictured is a drawing of Fort Astoria circa 1811
Posted on: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 00:54:10 +0000
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