Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival (24 page)

Four men slipped into the longboat during the night and stealthily rowed out of the cove. As day broke, they weren’t to be seen. Clayoquot canoes from the village set off from shore to make their way to the
Tonquin,
approaching slowly, cautiously. They wished to seize the ship and its precious cargo of trade goods, and tow it to shore.

Nothing stirred at first aboard the
Tonquin
. Then a single figure, either Lewis or Weeks, slowly appeared on deck.

“The wounded man showed himself over the railing, made signs that he was alone, and wanted their assistance,” stated one account.

He then disappeared below. Slowly, cautiously, the Clayoquot canoes nestled around the
Tonquin’
s hull. The first Clayoquot climbed over the rail and onto the deck. They realized that no one manned the ship but the wounded man who had disappeared below. Seeing the ship was now theirs, the Clayoquot excitedly pried opened hatches and doorways, scrambled over the decks and through passageways below, to loot its vast treasure of trade goods.

Dozens and dozens of Clayoquot Indians now scrambled aboard the
Tonquin
as she rode in the cove, with many more clustered alongside her copper-sheathed hull in their big cedar canoes. Joseachal, the interpreter, watching from the shore, estimated there were four or five hundred Indians in total.

Suddenly, reported Joseachal, who watched from the shore, the ship disappeared in a blinding flash and a billowing explosion of smoke. A thunderous roar rolled across the water, echoing for miles along the wooded coast. Torsos, limbs, heads, and pieces of flesh arced over the cove. Shattered bits of wood from the
Tonquin’
s thick hull and the cedar canoes rained down on the sea.

Lewis—or Weeks—had taken revenge for Captain Thorn and all aboard the
Tonquin
. He’d apparently waited for the Indians to gather aboard to loot the ship. Then he lit off the ship’s powder magazine, all nine thousand pounds of it packed in the hold like a bomb, blowing himself and everyone nearby into the sky.

Somewhere around two hundred Clayoquot perished. Joseachal reported that body parts washed up on the beach for days afterward. He also reported the fate of the four crew members who escaped in the longboat. They eventually were blown by a gale to shore. Discovered by Indians, they were brought back to the Clayoquot village. Joseachal apparently heard from them the story of their attempted escape. Then the Clayoquot slowly tortured the four survivors to death.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I
N
A
STORIA, THE PLEASANT WEATHER OF LATE SUMMER
and early autumn in 1811 abruptly ended when the late October rains swept in. The mood darkened further. The
Tonquin’
s voyage should have lasted just a few weeks. It had now been more than four months since she’d left. The only news came from the continued rumors of her destruction delivered from the tribes to the north. Likewise, they expected Hunt’s Overland Party to arrive any day. But they sighted no voyageurs canoes emerging from behind Tongue Point and stroking hard down the broad Columbia, paddle blades flashing and songs rolling across the water.

With the chill autumn storms blowing in from the Pacific, their little clearing in the forest turned to mud. The fortifications they had erected so hastily at Astoria did little to repel the choking sense of vulnerability or leaven the dark anxiety of the unknown on this sodden, storm-battered coast, three thousand miles from home. Possessing neither numbers, nor ships, nor large cannon, McDougall thought hard about how to regain advantage over the unseen Indians who he feared lurked in the forests around him, ready to overrun the palisaded settlement under his command. Clever with ruses and behind-the-scene strategies to safeguard his interests, McDougall finally hit on an inspiration.

Of the new diseases that the first Europeans brought to the Americas, one of the leading killers was smallpox. The virus, transmitted through close contact and expelled mucus or bedding, could race quickly through whole villages, covering its inhabitants with lesions, followed by death. About twenty years earlier, the Northwest Coastal Indians had suffered a severe smallpox epidemic brought by the first coastal trading ships. They lived in mortal fear of the disease.

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.

“I have but to draw the cork, and let loose the pestilence, to sweep man, woman, and child from the face of the earth.”

They backed away. The ruse gave him some leverage—for a while.

Work continued, even with no sign of the
Tonquin
or the Overland Party. The
Tonquin
had gone missing, a major loss, but they knew that other Astor ships were due to supply the emporium in the coming spring, and that Hunt’s Overland Party should eventually arrive with more men to reinforce their thinned ranks.

Still, they had yet to spend a winter at the new colony on the West Coast. They began to prepare. Hunters, both Indian and Astoria’s own, brought back deer and elk to supply the men with nutritious fresh meat. Other natives paddled up to the settlement in canoes laden with dozens of fresh and dried salmon to exchange for goods. The Astorians worried they wouldn’t have enough food for winter. There were many reasons to be anxious. Two centuries earlier, the first winter and starvation had decimated the Jamestown colony on the East Coast. Winter’s cold and scurvy had nearly wiped out some of the first French settlements in New France, and likewise killed 52 of the 102 original Plymouth colonists during their first winter of 1620–21.

They finished the dwelling house on September 26, and the small schooner, named
Dolly,
after Astor’s effervescent teenage daughter, on October 2. David Stuart, one of the Scottish partners and a kind of unofficial elder, had left in early summer by canoe to explore and establish an interior fur post high on a Columbia tributary known to the Indians as the Okanagan, taking with him clerk Alexander Ross and a few voyageurs. Now his nephew Robert Stuart took the
Dolly
to explore the Columbia’s lower reaches and establish a fur trade with the natives there. The unpopular McDougall remained in charge at Astoria.

On November 10, the Astorians discovered that three men had deserted. Leaving under the pretense of a hunting expedition, the trio “absconded,” as Franchère put it, with a canoe and fowling guns and other men’s clothing. The threesome evidently believed they could reach the Spanish settlements that lay nearly a thousand miles south down the Pacific Coast. They meant to escape the dark, sodden Northwest and the heavy labor of clearing the forest. McDougall dispatched a search party led by Franchère, which got lost in a maze of islands a short way up the Columbia and spent several very unpleasant nights beating through thick forest in blustery rain. With the help of Indians who identified the fugitives’ footsteps on a sandy river beach, the searchers eventually located the three escapees, held captive by an Indian chief on a nearby southern tributary of the Columbia. The river was called the “Willamet” or “Wolamat,” as some wrote it. Known to the natives as the
Cathlanaminim,
the Willamette Valley was then unknown and unexplored by whites. It would figure prominently in the future of both the Astorians and the entire West. Grudgingly, the chief ransomed the trio of escapees back to Franchère for eight blankets, a brass kettle, a tomahawk, and a broken pistol.

Hauled back to Astoria, the three were put in irons and on half rations for eleven days, then freed to return to the work of sawing logs into planks and other tasks for the budding settlement. That they had been willing to walk to the Spanish settlements so far through unknown terrain gives one a sense of the level of discontent at Astoria that fall. But then things got worse. The days grew short and dark. Winter rains charged in from the open sea, blasting into the river’s mouth, moaning through the swaying forest of giant trees, occasionally toppling one with an earthshaking crash into rain-soaked underbrush. The Astorians felt exposed.

“It rained in torrents and was dark as pitch,” Franchère wrote of nights in the forest during the search for the fugitives, when rain doused their campfire and a gale blew away the woven mats they used for tents.

By early December, they’d given up on the
Tonquin
for the season. Had she sailed directly for China? Or were the Indian rumors true? With the winter storms’ huge North Pacific swells crashing onto the Columbia Bar, she clearly wasn’t returning anytime soon. They were so sure of this that McDougall auctioned off the personal articles that clerk James Lewis had left behind when he sailed off aboard the
Tonquin
for Vancouver Island. The downpour leaked into the fort’s cellars and powder magazine. Work parties bailed out the cellar, elevated the floors, and tightened the cedar shingle roofs. With the late autumn gales, the local Indians migrated from their exposed villages along the wide Columbia’s banks to smaller, sheltered tributaries inland, no longer providing the Astorians with a regular supply of fresh game meat.

Yet not all events were discouraging that fall. A small expedition arrived at Astoria that October by canoe from upriver, sent from David Stuart’s new post high on the Okanagan. It carried promising reports—friendly Indians and bountiful furs. The Astorians also heard reports from the natives that the valley of the river Willamette, where the deserters had been held, was particularly rich in beaver. Young Robert Stuart set out on December 5 to explore the Willamette as a possible fur post. It was encouraging to learn that, as at the Okanagan, and surely on many other unknown rivers, lay rich new territory for Mr. Astor’s fur empire on the Pacific. Here in abundance lay the resources to feed his transglobal trade.

The Astorians dug up the last of the root crops that they had planted upon their arrival in May, spading on November 26 sixty potatoes, sixty turnips, and a few carrots. Another twenty-five bushels of turnips were unearthed on December 20, one of them, noted McDougall, measuring thirty-three inches around. It was a victory of sorts. They had physically shoved back the overpowering wildness on this ragged, stormy juncture between continent’s edge and ocean’s breadth to create a haven where they nurtured domestic crops. Their pigs were another, messy triumph. Tended by the Hawaiians, they also had survived well, rooting contentedly in the mud and rain and the food slops tossed out to them.

The Astorians celebrated a rainy Christmas Day in 1811 happily enough. They remained unaware, of course, of Hunt’s struggles over the snowy mountains at the same time, but perhaps imagined Astor with his browned roasts and warm fires in New York. They drank an extra dose of grog. New Year’s Day—the traditional voyageur day of celebration—presented an even bigger occasion. Franchère noted that it had rained almost without interruption since early October. The new year of 1812 dawned beautifully at Astoria, with clear blue skies, sunshine, and a white frost on the ground that sparkled against the dark green forest.

“At sunrise,” wrote McDougall, who kept Astoria’s official log, “the Drum beat to arms and the colours were hoisted. Three rounds of small arms & three discharges from the great Guns were fired, after which all hands were treated with grog, bread, cheese & Butter.”

The dinner provided a wonderful break from what Franchère described as a meager diet for the last several months, consisting mainly of “sun-dried fish.” Then more grog was served out, and the French-Canadian voyageurs, the Hawaiians, and the Scottish traders danced together in front of the fire at Mr. Astor’s new settlement on the Pacific until 3:00
A.M.

I
N MID-
J
ANUARY
the men at Astoria were going about their usual daily work building the emporium to handle the expected influx of furs in the thousands—the cooper splitting staves for barrels, the blacksmith assembling dozens of axes for upriver trade goods, the carpenters framing a shed, voyageurs hauling timbers from the forest for boatbuilders to build barges for the river trade, Hawaiians clearing brush. The sick list showed six men. Scurvy had begun to set in after many weeks without fresh food. McDougall himself was ill. He often was, keeping to his quarters, not recording his illness in the official log. At 5:00
P.M.
on Saturday, January 18, 1812, the Astorians looked up from their appointed tasks to see two canoes paddling around Tongue Point, headed toward their settlement. The canoes appeared to contain white men.

They neared the beach. Wrote Franchère: “Mr. M’Dougal . . . being confined to his room by sickness, the duty of receiving the strangers devolved on me. My astonishment was not slight, when one of the party called me by name, as he extended his hand, and I recognized Mr. Donald M’Kenzie, the same who had quitted Montreal, with Mr. W. P. Hunt, in the month of July, 1810.”

It had been a year and a half since they’d seen each other. Since then, Astor partner Mackenzie had been traveling nearly nonstop across North America’s wilderness. Franchère was taken aback at his appearance.

“[They] arrived at the establishment, safe and sound, it is true,” he wrote, “but in a pitiable condition to see; their clothes being nothing but fluttering rags.”

Accompanying Mackenzie were partner McClellan, clerk John Reed, American hunter William Cannon, and seven voyageurs. Two small reconnaissance parties had gone ahead when the Overland Party had first split up at Caldron Linn in early November, one under Mackenzie and one under McClellan. Farther along the Mad River the two small parties had run into each other and rejoined in their trek toward the Columbia and the Pacific. They’d suffered extremely. Unable to descend to the Mad River to fetch water, they had been plagued by thirst so intense that it killed their dogs and forced the travelers to drink their own urine. Crossing mountains northward and struggling through the deep gorge for three weeks, they had gone without food for days on end, surviving on bits of roasted beaver skin and old moccasins. Finally they had reached a canoeable tributary of the Columbia, traded for two canoes from the Nez Percé Indians, and paddled downstream to the Columbia’s mouth.

For the first time, they saw the new settlement. It existed. But they also learned the disturbing news about the loss of the
Tonquin
.

Now the fear at Astoria was this: If Mackenzie’s group had suffered so deeply on the trek along the Mad River, what about Hunt and his much bigger party? With far less wilderness experience than Mackenzie, and moving more slowly, Hunt and his party surely would suffer worse. Rumors floated about that they had died of starvation, or been killed by Indians.

A month later, on February 15, a pod of six canoes emerged in the distance from behind Tongue Point and soon paddled up to the beach at Astoria. It was Wilson Price Hunt and his party of thirty-three, which included the Dorion family. These men, too, looked awful. Wrote Alexander Ross: “The emaciated, downcast looks and tattered garments of our friends, all bespoke their extreme sufferings during a long and severe winter.”

Yet there was joy also in reunion. The parties celebrated warmly at Astoria—voyageurs embracing voyageurs; clannish Scottish fur traders joined again, clasping hands, smoking their pipes and speaking their Gaelic. Inexplicable gaps, however, remained in the Overland Party’s unity, as well as strange additions. Still missing were partner Ramsay Crooks, Virginia hunter John Day, and the several struggling voyageurs who had stayed behind at the Shoshone villages. The weakened Carriere, riding a horse, had simply vanished. Two men had drowned in the Mad River—Clappine, swept away in the rapids after Crooks’s canoe smashed into a rock, and the starving Prevost, who tumbled out of a bullboat. Besides these losses, Mackenzie’s party had added to its numbers a white stranger picked up en route.

He was a young New England teenager by the name of Archibald Pelton. They’d found him wandering aimlessly deep in the wilderness. Pelton had run away from his family’s farm a few years earlier in Northampton, Massachusetts, and ended up in St. Louis. Here he had joined Andrew Henry’s ill-fated attempt in 1809 to establish a fur post on the Upper Missouri at Three Forks. Pelton had witnessed the massacre of his close companions by the Blackfeet but had managed to flee. He wandered in the unmapped wilds for nearly two years, eventually taken in by a friendly tribe (probably a group of Nez Percé), where Mackenzie and McClellan had found him as they struggled toward the Pacific.