Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival (22 page)

The North West Company already had a well-defined and very rapid canoe route, lying well to the north of the Missouri River route, from Lake Superior nearly to the Rockies. They had established trading houses near the foot of the Rockies. A few years earlier, David Thompson had crossed the Rockies and started to explore the fur terrain on the far northern tributaries of the Columbia, and the North West Company had established a few posts on the uppermost reaches. But neither Thompson nor any of the other Nor’westers, as the company men were sometimes called, had descended the river very far.

In the summer of 1810, as the Astorians had made their way westward by ship and overland, Thompson had been heading in the opposite direction—back to Montreal on that chain of rivers and lakes, to take a break from the life of a trader and wilderness explorer. Partway back, he’d received a message from the wintering partners sent from their contentious meeting at Fort William on Lake Superior, where they had debated whether to join forces with Astor. The message from the wintering partners told Thompson to turn around and head to the mouth of the Columbia.

Wrote Thompson to a friend back east: “I intended to have paid you a visit at Montreal . . . but the critical situation of our affairs in the Columbia obliged me to return.”

Approaching the Rockies in late fall, he pushed over the deep snows of a pass across the Continental Divide and wintered on a far northern branch of the Columbia. Even professional explorer Thompson was daunted by the power of the forest beyond the divide on the moist Pacific slope of the Rockies. He called humans “pigmies” by comparison to the trees towering more than two hundred feet above.

“[I]n such forests what could we do with Axes of two pounds weight?”

Some of his men deserted. Nevertheless, Thompson and his remaining men managed to craft a canoe of split cedar planks sewn to a frame with spruce roots. By early spring, via canoe and horse, they headed downstream toward the Columbia’s mouth, with Thompson stopping to smoke pipes at Indian villages to establish good relations. This was new terrain for explorer Thompson, too. At one major river confluence along the Columbia, Thompson planted a British flag on a tall pole, tacked with a message for all to see, claiming both the confluence as a trading post and all territory to the north as British. When he arrived at Astoria, he pointed out to the Astor partners that he would have arrived a good deal earlier at the Columbia’s mouth—in other words, before
they
had—if several of his party hadn’t deserted while crossing the Rockies during the winter.

What did he want? The Astorians still weren’t sure, even after Thompson had stayed a week, supping at their table. Was he a spy? Had he hoped to raise the British flag and start a North West Company post at the Columbia’s mouth but failed to arrive before the Americans? It was a subtle dance, with tremendous stakes.

“Mr. Thompson kept a regular journal,” reported Franchère, “and traveled, I thought, more like a geographer than a fur-trader.”

A wooden case in his canoe cradled a sextant, chronometer, and barometer. During his week at Astoria, Thompson made astronomical observations and fixed its latitude and longitude. Was this somehow to guide the North West Company or British Royal Navy to the exact spot? Clerk Alexander Ross was convinced that Thompson was a spy of some sort, and that McDougall—a former North Westerner himself but now an Astor partner—was, whether knowingly or not, abetting him.

“M’Dougall received him like a brother,” wrote Ross with disdain; “nothing was too good for Mr. Thompson; he had access everywhere; saw and examined everything; and whatever he asked for he got, as if he had been one of ourselves.”

One explanation for his visit is that Thompson arrived under the North West Company’s carefully thought-out strategy equipped with both a Plan A and a Plan B. Plan A might have been to claim the mouth of the Columbia first and establish a fur post there. But if the Astor advance party was already there, Thompson should go to Plan B: offer to divide the vast territory of western North America between the two companies. Thompson showed the Astoria partners a letter from the North West wintering partners that offered the equivalent of Plan B. Wrote Franchère: “[T]he wintering partners had resolved to abandon all their trading posts west of the [Rocky] mountains, not to enter competition with us, provided our company would engage not to encroach upon their commerce on the east side. . . .”

This, if true, was a mammoth proposal, involving thousands of square miles of North America. But matters were left unresolved. With the wealth of much of the western half of the continent hanging in the balance, Astor partner David Stuart and his party embarked upon the Columbia River on July 23 to establish their fur trading posts. Amicably, although perhaps guardedly, David Thompson and his big canoe of voyageurs paddled beside Stuart’s canoes, supposedly for mutual security. McDougall had given Thompson food and other supplies to travel back across the Rockies. Ross speculated that McDougall may have extended such hospitality and generosity to potential rival Thompson in order to lure him into revealing what, in fact, he was up to for the North West Company.

“This is more than probable,” writes Ross, “for in point of acuteness, duplicity, and diplomatic craft, they were perhaps well matched.”

Now, in this last week of July 1811, the ranks at Astoria had thinned dramatically. The
Tonquin
had sailed up the Northwest Coast and David Stuart’s and Thompson’s expeditions were paddling up the Columbia, while Hunt’s party, unbeknownst to those at Astoria, had just left the Missouri to trek overland. It wasn’t expected in any case to arrive at the mouth of the Columbia until late summer or fall. The Indians that had crowded around the Astoria settlement also mysteriously vanished. What had teemed with busy workers, curious Indians, and parcels of goods unloading from the ship now fell strangely silent. The weight of the dark forest pushed in on the little clearing. They numbered approximately two dozen men, along with a few uncompleted and unfortified buildings. It struck them profoundly just how isolated they were—and how vulnerable.

It was the lack of activity that was most disconcerting. Nothing stirred in the forest. Nothing moved on the river except the great sliding sheet of downstream current and the ebb and flow of the estuary’s tide pushing in from the ocean. The swells from the Pacific pounded endlessly against the bar in the distance. Astoria constituted a tiny dot of “civilization” on this farthest, wild rim of the continent. The ports of China lay 12,000 miles across the Pacific. The ports of the United States lay 21,000 miles around Cape Horn—five times farther than Jamestown or Plymouth had lain from their supply ports in England. The Astorians’ presence was not a quick visit to load furs aboard a well-armed ship, or an expedition holed up for a few months in winter’s rain like those of the whites who had come before to this coast. 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. It felt like the ends of the earth. Also woven between sea and forest was an elaborate and unseen network of Indian tribes, each with its own loyalties and pacts, friendships and animosities, linked by a hidden communication network. It was another great unknown. The Astorians could only guess: What were these native peoples thinking?

Should the Astorians need to flee, they had no one to run to, and nowhere to hide. The remoteness and exposure were profound. The nearest reliable help lay at least a year’s journey away.

Paranoia set in—for McDougall in particular.

It was as if, in his need for self-importance, he had drawn a giant target on his back. McDougall had set himself up as the king of the Northwest, telling every Indian chief who would listen while visiting his “tent of state” of his importance and the glory and power of his empire-to-be. Now, however, with the
Tonquin
and its protective cannon and complement of men gone, as well as Stuart’s party traveling upriver, and with the Indians vanished and forest and river strangely quiet, McDougall realized he was a king who possessed neither castle nor army. Perhaps he also assessed the surrounding Indian tribes through the prism of his own thinking. He hoped to grow wealthy and powerful from this West Coast enterprise, surely knowing that it would come at least in part at the expense of the native inhabitants. Why, given the chance, wouldn’t they wish to grow wealthy and powerful at
his
expense? He sat atop a trove of trade goods—axes, knives, pots, as well as guns and gunpowder—that the tribes coveted. After the
Tonquin
had left, and Stuart’s party departed upriver, the Indians could plainly see that the treasure lay unguarded.

The paranoia intensified. The younger Stuart, Robert, still at Astoria while his uncle David led the upriver expedition, heard a rumor from an Indian friend: Since the post was undermanned, the tribes were mulling an attack to kill its occupants and steal its goods.

“We hastened, therefore,” wrote Franchère, “to put ourselves in the best possible state of defense.”

In a frenzied six days of work, lasting deep into the nights, they finished raising the log walls of the living quarters and workshops, which sat across an open space from the warehouse. Others hustled into the forest to chop small trees for pickets to erect a wooden palisade, with the warehouse serving as one wall and living quarters and shops the other, and the palisade joining them into a enclosed square about 90 feet by 120 feet. At the corners of the palisade they raised platforms on which they mounted four small four-pounder cannon, then set a guard watch night and day.

“The whole . . . had a sufficiently formidable aspect to prevent the Indians from attacking us,” wrote Franchère.

July turned to August. They started to feel more secure in their palisade. They practiced drills with their weapons. The
Tonquin
had now been away two months. They looked downriver, toward the Columbia Bar and the open Pacific, expecting her arrival soon.

Meanwhile, a large group of Indians from different tribes who lived northward up the coast had gathered at the Columbia’s mouth, just inside the bar in Baker’s Bay, to fish for sturgeon. The men at Astoria began to hear strange rumors emanating from this fishing encampment.

“It was bruited among these Indians that the
Tonquin
had been destroyed,” reported Franchère. “We did not give credence to this rumor.”

More native contingents showed up from the north, including the Tschikeylis (known today as Chehalis) and some from nearly as far away as Vancouver Island, almost two hundred miles north up the coast. They, too, were supposedly fishing for sturgeon. Or were they setting up for an attack? Some of these northern tribes were more warlike in appearance than the neighboring Chinook, reported Franchère, which put the men on their guard.

They, too, repeated the strange rumor about the
Tonquin
.

“[W]ithout wholly convincing us,” wrote Franchère, “it did not fail to make a painful impression on our minds. . . .”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A
STOR’S LEADERS WERE, IN MANY WAYS, HIS SURROGATES
. Astor had chosen Captain Thorn to sail the
Tonquin
because he was decisive, because he would fight, because he was sure to defend with steely courage Astor’s fledgling empire. Jonathan Thorn would make the perfect commander in a blazing cannon-to-cannon naval battle against a British or Spanish warship that might threaten to attack the West Coast emporium. But it was a very different adversary, as it turned out, that Captain Thorn would face on his first trading voyage up the West Coast.

Impatient as ever to be on his way, Captain Thorn, after unloading his ship at Astoria and crossing the Columbia Bar out to the open ocean on June 5, had sailed north up the Pacific Coast to trade for sea otter furs in the Coastal Indian villages along today’s Vancouver Island. He then was to return to Astoria and load more furs for the cross-Pacific voyage to China, furs that had been collected from the beginnings of a vast web of Astor posts reaching into the interior. Instead of officers, Captain Thorn carried on his ship the most experienced Scottish trader, Alexander McKay, and clerk James Lewis. While en route up the coast, the
Tonquin
put in at an Indian village near today’s Gray’s Harbor, Washington, and took aboard one more passenger when Thorn and MacKay hired an Indian interpreter, Joseachal, who spoke the Coastal dialects of Vancouver Island.

The
Tonquin
sailed for a village known as Newetee on Vancouver Island, about two hundred miles north of Astoria. As they made their way north, Joseachal warned Captain Thorn that the Indians of Newetee could be treacherous and held a grudge against an earlier American trading vessel whose crew had mistreated them. Ignoring the native’s warnings, Thorn dropped anchor in Newetee’s cove around that second week of June 1811. (The cove has since been identified as Templar Channel of Clayoquot Sound, British Columbia.) Trader McKay and interpreter Joseachal went ashore to open trade negotiations. The village chiefs received them with warm hospitality, and the two spent the night in a chief’s Clayoquot longhouse on the traditional cedar benches draped with thick sea otter furs.

Out in the cove on board the
Tonquin,
negotiations unfolded less smoothly. The Indians’ big cedar canoes, with their long snoutlike prows, pulled alongside the ship’s hull. Their paddlers, the Clayoquot, wore woven cedar-bark clothing and weatherproof conical hats. The paddlers held up rolls of sea otter furs to trade. Captain Thorn, the naval hero with no experience in the Indian trade, and his chief trader onshore at the villages, ordered a tempting array spread out on his deck of blankets, knives, blue beads, pots, and other trade goods. An elderly Indian chief named Nookamis climbed aboard to establish the prices in trade goods for furs. Captain Thorn made an offer—two blankets and a few smaller items such as fishhooks and beads in exchange for one sea otter fur.

Known to be a shrewd bargainer among the Coastal Indians, Nookamis contemptuously rejected Captain Thorn’s offer as far too low. It was a clash of two cultures on the purest of economic terms. Accounts vary as to exact details of this interaction between Thorn and Nookamis but follow the same general pattern, as do accounts of the
Tonquin
incident as a whole:

Nookamis wanted five blankets instead of the two Thorn had offered for a sea otter fur. Thorn didn’t budge.

“He had a vast deal of stern, but honest pride in his nature,” wrote Irving, who knew Thorn personally, “and, moreover, held the whole savage race in sovereign contempt.”

The two were at a stalemate. Jonathan Thorn was not a bargainer. He was a Yankee and a navy man with little experience outside those cultures. He believed he had given a fair price. But he had entered a Northwest Coastal Indian trading culture where bargaining was a centuries-old way of life. These people were not the “ignorant savages” Thorn believed they were.

Nookamis dismissed Thorn’s low price. Thorn stalked off angrily along the deck. Nookamis followed him, holding up a bundle of sea otter furs. He began to ridicule Thorn’s offer, harassing and “pestering” him to trade. Captain Thorn suddenly spun about, his temper exploding. He grabbed a sea otter fur and rubbed it in Nookamis’s face.

“Damn your eyes!” he shouted at the chief, angrily kicking away the bundles of furs and trade goods laid out on the deck.

Then he threw Nookamis off the
Tonquin
.

The other Indians immediately left in their canoes. McKay and Joseachal returned to the ship later that day and, when they heard what had happened, urged Captain Thorn to weigh anchor immediately. The Indians would look for revenge for such a deep insult, they warned. Thorn contemptuously laughed them off.

“You pretend to know a great deal about the Indian character,” he said to McKay, according to Alexander Ross’s account, which captured the spirit of this tense encounter, whether or not its exact wording, too. “You know nothing at all. . . . They’ll not be so saucy now.”

I
T IS ANOTHER
of Astoria’s historical ironies that John Jacob Astor, for all his own wealth, came up against two of the wealthiest Indian groups in North America. These were the Blackfeet with their buffalo herds, a tribe that Hunt carefully avoided, and the Coastal Indians with their annual salmon runs. Captain Thorn was willing to confront the latter tribes head-on. 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—and leaping up waterfalls where they could easily be netted or speared.

This abundance of salmon on the Northwest Coast—plus clams, mussels, oysters, geoducks, seals, whales, halibut, and much more—thrived where cold, nutrient-rich North Pacific seawaters met countless freshwater rivers and estuaries pouring off the rain-drenched continent, then stirred by powerful tides into a giant, blooming, marine-life stew. Here lay the West Coast equivalent of the cod-rich Grand Banks off Newfoundland. They would prove as significant a draw in bringing the first Europeans around Cape Horn to the Northwest Coast as the Grand Banks had first been in bringing the first Europeans across the Atlantic to the East Coast.

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. The Coastal Indians lived several families together in huge longhouses, up to one hundred feet long, or more, housing up to eighty people, tightly built of post-and-beam construction and cedar planking split from giant coastal rain forest trees. Fire pits ran down the center of these longhouses, one fire per family. Drying racks for damp clothing or fish hung from the ceiling, and cedar sleeping benches rimmed the walls, plushly upholstered with sea otter furs. Carved and painted totemic objects guarded the entrances, and one entered some longhouses through the giant mouths of these mythical creatures.
*
Unlike the more nomadic and egalitarian societies of the interior, Northwest Coastal Indians were divided into social classes. A chiefly rank topped the social hierarchy, followed by commoners, and at the bottom labored a slave class—many of them war captives—who performed the menial tasks.

So great was the wealth of the Northwest Coast that the ceremonial life of these societies centered on the potlatch. These were elaborate ceremonies in which a family gained social status by giving away—and even destroying—its own wealth. What all this wealth of the Coastal Indians meant for John Jacob Astor and his proposed West Coast empire was that, should these tribes find it in their interests, they possessed a great deal of motivation to resist outsiders. Fortunately for Astor, the Coastal tribe in the immediate vicinity of Astoria’s headquarters at the Columbia’s mouth, the Chinook, and their Chief Comcomly welcomed the fur traders and valued their trade goods. Farther up the coast, however, the relationship between white traders and the tribes—along today’s Vancouver Island and beyond toward Alaska—was more complex and strained.

Powerful, tightly knit, and more warlike societies, these were cultures of the “voyaging” or “war” canoe, massive craft up to sixty-five feet long and eight feet wide that could carry up to sixty paddlers, their bows fiercely carved with a bald eagle or a human face or other figures, painted in the characteristic red, black, or white. Some, like the Clayoquot, were whaling societies, which demanded feats of tremendous seamanship and bravery as the canoes put out into the open sea with a harpooner in the bow who had undergone weeks or months of ritualized purification. A great deal of intertribal trade occurred up and down this rich, two-thousand-mile coast. Tribes that crafted especially finely woven rain hats of the inner bark of a cedar tree might trade them to tribes rich in salmon or whale, or villages that hewed the best voyaging canoes might trade the vessels for strings of detalium—mollusk shells that looked like miniature tusks and served as Northwest Coastal currency.

In short, the Northwest Coastal Indians were extremely sophisticated traders and bargainers, to the surprise and sometimes the distress of the first Europeans to arrive, including Captain Thorn. The first few European trading ships to Vancouver Island found they could purchase the sea otter furs cheaply. The Northwest Coast Indians used the plush furs to cover their sleeping benches and for other purposes, but didn’t hunt it with any more verve than they did other sea mammals. The Russian fur traders who had begun to work the Alaskan coast had come to call the sea otter furs “soft gold” for the incredible prices they brought on the Chinese market, a discovery also made by Captain Cook’s men. An enormous demand grew from China’s wealthy and educated mandarin class, who used furs to line their vests and trim their robes.

Sea otter pelts mesmerized the luxury-loving beholder. With nearly one million fine hairs per square inch, the sea otter possesses the densest fur of any mammal known. The fineness and denseness of the hairs give it a soft, luxurious touch. It’s this coat that allowed the sea otter to thrive in frigid coastal waters all along the northern Pacific Rim—from California, to Alaska and the Aleutians, to Kamchatka, to the northern islands of Japan. Unlike other cold-water marine mammals such as the seal, it has no insulating blubber layer and relies on this double coat of fur for warmth. Outer guard hairs protect the soft, dense inner hairs, which trap air bubbles and serve as an insulating layer that keeps the otter’s actual skin dry.

Even then, since the sea otter needs to maintain a very high metabolism to keep its inner furnaces hot, it eats up to 25 percent of its body weight daily—diving for bottom-dwelling mollusks such as clams, mussels, abalone, and creatures like sea urchins and octopus. It pries these off the rocks, stuffs them into an armpit pouch of skin along where it also carries a rock, swims to the surface, and lies floating on its back, where it can eat in repose, pounding open the hard shells with its rock, using its belly as a kind of table. Sea otters gather in large groups of one hundred or more called “rafts,” where they float together amid kelp beds and ocean swells and groom and fluff their fur meticulously to maintain its insulating properties. A mother sea otter nurses her baby pups while they rest on her belly, and when she dives for food, she wraps them in strands of kelp so they don’t drift away in her absence.

The native hunters of the Northwest Coast learned how to exploit the sea otter’s habits, and did so especially efficiently after fur traders arrived from Russia and then other nations coveting the furs. The Aleuts, in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, paddled
baidarkas
—seagoing kayaks—in the predawn darkness in large groups and stealthily surrounded the floating otters. Shooting in unison, they released arrows or spears at the animals. Each hunter’s arrow carried a distinctive marker so he would get credit for the kill with the Russian traders who accompanied them. Farther south, Coastal Indians used special canoes for sea otter hunting, paddling out in wide rows to scout a broad expanse of calm seas and kelp beds, and releasing on discovery special arrows tipped with bone points.

The first American and British ships traded for sea otter furs on the Northwest Coast in the late 1780s. The next wave discovered that the Indian bargainers—knowing demand when they saw it—had raised the price heftily. Angered at the price rise, some American and British trading ships took furs by force or threat of violence. This quickly escalated with retaliations and counter-retaliations. Thus, as mentioned earlier, John Boit’s complaint in his journal in 1792 that his commander ordered him to destroy the village called Opitsatah: “[I] am grieved to think Capt. Gray shou’d let his passions go so far. . . .”

As it happened, that very village, Opitsatah, and the nearby village of Clayoquot were Captain Thorn’s first trading stop in the
Tonquin
. Boit’s incident at Opitsatah had occurred almost two decades before, but only the previous year another unfortunate incident took place when an American fur-trading ship took aboard about a dozen Clayoquot Indians as hunters on a fur-trading voyage far down the West Coast, promising to return them home afterward. Their usefulness at an end, however, their Captain Ayres of Boston casually abandoned the Clayoquot hunters on some uninhabited islands off the California coast. Only a few had survived the long overland trek back home through hostile tribal territories.

That memory was still fresh for the Clayoquot, and so interpreter Joseachal had warned Captain Thorn against entering this particular inlet along Vancouver Island. Astor, likewise, had explicitly warned Captain Thorn in his instructions. Having spent his early business career trading directly with the Iroquois and related tribes of upstate New York, Astor had some grasp of Native American culture, the system of economics, the respect they demanded, and also, surely, the vengeance that could result when such respect was not given. Captain Thorn did not.