Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival (29 page)

“Two days were spent in mutual recriminations,” wrote Ross.

McDougall was incensed that these upriver parties had not purchased horses from the Indians, as he had instructed, so they could all abandon Astoria in July, a month from now, and head back overland to the East. He would now have to spend an entire
year
more at this godforsaken outpost. Stuart and Clarke were enraged that McDougall had single-handedly, with Mackenzie’s urging and consent, decided to shut down the West Coast enterprise.

The bitter argument raged in the partners’ quarters over whether or not to abandon Astor’s West Coast emporium. Hanging like a vulture over the proceedings was McTavish of the North West Company. He, too, had recently arrived at Astoria from far upriver with his own party. He had set up camp a short ways down the shore, awaiting what he was sure would be the imminent arrival of the armed company ship,
Isaac Todd,
to claim the whole place.

McDougall and David Stuart, the two Scotsmen and Astor partners, went head-to-head. The American partner, Clarke, sided with Stuart to stay the course. Their territories on the northern tributaries were rich with furs. The empire would succeed, they claimed. McDougall demanded immediate abandonment. War had been declared. British warships were on their way. Sell out now to the North West Company while the selling was good.

Where, however, were the threatened warships? McTavish had originally claimed that the
Isaac Todd
and an armed British convoy would arrive at the Columbia’s mouth in March. Now it was June. They were still nowhere to be seen. Was this all a bluff on the part of the North West Company? But if the British Royal Navy convoy did appear it could simply take Astoria as a prize of war, along with its valuables and furs.

And Astor’s supply ship? Where was that? Had the British blockaded the U.S. ports and prevented it from leaving New York Harbor? And Wilson Price Hunt and the
Beaver
? Had they utterly disappeared?

Mackenzie stood off to the side while the cedar roofing of the partners’ quarters reverberated with angry words and accusations. The recriminations reached a standoff. Mackenzie spoke up. He’d prepared his argument as carefully as a barrister, in Alexander Ross’s detailed recounting of the moment.

“ ‘Gentlemen,’ said he, ‘why do you hesitate so long between two opinions? Your eyes ought to have been opened before now to your own interests. In the present critical conjuncture, there is no time to be lost. . . . We have been long enough the dupes of a vacillating policy. . . .”

Mackenzie then enumerated the ways that the Americans John Jacob Astor and Wilson Price Hunt had wronged the British citizens who were supposedly equal partners in the West Coast enterprise:

First, at Montreal, Hunt had refused to hire enough Canadian men because they were not Americans.

Second, Astor’s “private missive” to Hunt at Nodaway winter camp had given the American Hunt exclusive leadership of the Overland Party and had given offense—“umbrage”—to all the other (in other words, British) partners.

Third, Mr. Astor had sent orders to Hunt aboard the
Beaver
regarding Astor’s American nephew, clerk George Ehninger, also traveling on the ship, that he be placed in charge of all the other clerks. “Could there be anything more impolitic and more unjust . . . more at variance with the spirit of the articles of agreement?” asked Mackenzie to his fellow Britons.

Fourth, Mr. Astor’s orders to his American ship captains, such as Thorn of the
Tonquin
and Sowle of the
Beaver,
served to “annihilate the power and authority of the partners.”

And fifth, the two Astor supply ships,
Tonquin
and
Beaver,
had sailed off from Astoria carrying all the most valuable trade goods still aboard, leaving only the poorest articles for the British partners remaining at Astoria to use to buy furs. Additionally, this year, “there is no ship at all!”

“Has it not been obvious from the beginning that under Astor’s policy we can never prosper?”

Mackenzie admitted that certain circumstances lay beyond Astor’s control, such as the U.S. declaration of war. Likewise, it was not a question of prosperity of the country, he argued. The country was rich with furs. “[B]ut Astor’s policy, and a chain of misfortunes, have ruined all.”

Mackenzie pointed out that the original agreement between the partners and Astor allowed the partners, within five years of signing, to abandon the West Coast enterprise if it wasn’t profitable or practicable. Now he was arguing that it was neither, and that Astor, “with all his sagacity, either does not or will not understand the business.”

“We owe it to Astor—we owe it to ourselves . . . to deliver the whole back into the hands from which we received it—and the sooner the better.”

Mackenzie said, in short, that Astor favored the Americans over the British partners, that Astor’s policies were doomed from the start, and that the outbreak of war would end it all anyway. Stuart and Clarke thought it over and eventually agreed with Mackenzie and McDougall. They would pull up stakes and abandon Astor’s West Coast enterprise.

Another tough question arose: How?

It was now June. There was no way to pack up their goods and cross the Rockies before winter. They would have to spend another winter at Astoria. 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 and the possibility of a bloodbath for control of the West Coast, Columbia Basin, and Pacific Rim trade. There was also, thanks to Clarke’s decision to execute the thief upriver, the possibility of Indian attack.

McDougall made a proposal for the upcoming year. It’s impossible to know if behind this proposal simmered some backroom deal struck between McTavish of the North West Company and McDougall of Astor’s company. Likewise, when McTavish had first showed up at Astor’s Spokane post with the proclamation of war, it’s impossible to know if McTavish had pulled Astor partner Mackenzie aside to deliver some tempting and whispered offer to sell out Astor and to join his firm, the North West Company, bringing Astor’s assets with him.

Whatever the case, McDougall and McTavish now came to an official agreement to cover the upcoming year until the Astorians abandoned the settlement. McDougall would sell some of Astoria’s trade goods to McTavish to resupply the North West Company. The two companies would further agree to split up the fur posts already established in the Columbia Basin—striking, as historian Robert F. Jones has put it, a “market-sharing agreement.”

It was a temporary reprieve both for the stretched McTavish and, although McDougall didn’t necessarily intend it that way, the grand plan of John Jacob Astor. With this agreement in place until the next spring, when the Astorians would abandon the settlement, the various parties dispersed back up the Columbia to their respective winter posts.

Astoria emptied out again. McDougall led the small contingent that remained. A palpable sense of uncertainty and anxiety hung over Astoria during that summer of 1813. British attack? Indian attack? The Indians at the Walla Walla continued to promise revenge and those at Astoria heard stories from posts upriver of the way Indians tortured their enemies.

Ross Cox, working as a clerk on the upper tributaries, described in his memoir how a captured Blackfeet Indian was tortured by the Flatheads, the two tribes mortal enemies. While Cox’s story may have been exaggerated or even apocryphal, it illustrates whites’ fear of Indian torture. The Blackfeet warrior, tied to a tree, unceasingly taunted his torturers as they pressed a red-hot rifle barrel to his body, cut out his fingernails, and severed his fingers joint by joint. 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. . . .”

Then turning to a one-eyed Flathead warrior.

“It was by my arrow
you
lost
your
eye.”

Whereupon the Flathead warrior “darted” at the bound Blackfeet and scooped out an eye with his knife. And so it continued—“I killed
your
brother, and scalped your old fool of a father”—the taunting and retribution, the stoic display under excruciating pain, until the Blackfeet warrior was scalped, and finally shot through the heart by the enraged Flathead captors. Meanwhile, writes Cox, the Flathead women directed the torture of the female Blackfeet captives in a manner too gruesome to describe.

McDougall’s paranoia seemed to rise in inverse proportion to the number of men with him at Astoria. With only a small contingent remaining at Astoria, McDougall, himself a schemer who constantly saw schemes forming against him, cast about for self-protection. Previously, he had concocted the smallpox-in-the-bottle threat. He now conjured up another insurance policy against Indian attack. He paid a visit to Chief Comcomly of the Chinook in the villages across the river. As was customary in these situations, McDougall laid down offerings of presents to the chief. Then emissaries who accompanied McDougall asked in his name for the hand of Comcomly’s daughter in marriage. Comcomly consulted his daughter and opened negotiations with McDougall over the gifts that would be exchanged.

Early in the afternoon on July 20, according to Irving’s account, a canoe procession of Chinook paddled across the Columbia and landed at Astoria, bearing the anointed bride to McDougall, who received her at the fort. From then on, according to Irving, Comcomly paid a daily visit to his son-in-law’s fort. He kept Astoria’s blacksmith shop busy making various iron implements for him.

Another alliance had been sealed. Duncan McDougall rested more easily at night knowing his father-in-law would protect him and his fort. The fate of John Jacob’s Astor’s western empire, however, still hung in the balance.

A
MONTH AFTER
M
C
D
OUGALL’S MARRIAGE,
on the fresh, sunny morning of August 20, a canoe raced across the Columbia from the Chinook villages on the opposite bank. Comcomly’s son, Gassacop, announced excitedly that his people had spotted a sailing vessel cruising back and forth in the sea off the Columbia’s mouth. The Chinook had sent two canoes out through the crashing surf to discover its identity.

McDougall now jumped into his own dory. He ordered his men to row hard downstream toward the mouth. As they pulled at the oars, a big ship hove into sight at the river’s mouth. It sailed cleanly across the Columbia Bar on an incoming tide and westerly breeze, and flew upriver with full sails along the opposite bank. On the riverbank at Astoria, the tension built. Was she a British ship come to capture Astoria? Was she an American ship come to help? Was she Spanish? Was she Russian?

As McDougall’s dory rowed across the broad river, the ship dropped anchor on the far shore of the Columbia directly opposite John Jacob Astor’s emporium and lowered sails. Only the five miles of the river’s breadth now separated the unidentified ship and Astor’s fort. Glassing her, Franchère and others at the fort spotted an American flag flying. Franchère ordered her saluted with three guns booming from the fort. The ship saluted back with three guns. She was American. But they still didn’t know who she was or why she had come.

The long summer dusk settled over the Columbia’s broad estuary. McDougall’s dory reached the ship. It then turned back across the river toward Astoria bearing extra passengers. Darkness fell. Franchère and company waited nervously. In the darkness, they finally heard the splash of oars as the dory approached the wharf.

She came alongside. Out of the darkness stepped the passenger. To their amazement, it was the long-given-up-for-dead Wilson Price Hunt.

A
YEAR EARLIER,
Hunt had climbed aboard the
Beaver
with Captain Sowle for a coastal trading mission to the Russian fur posts in Alaska. Hunt soon had found himself in the heart of a fortress perched atop a rocky promontory on the Alaskan coast, sitting across the table from Russia’s Count Baranoff, futilely trying to match the Count cup of rum for cup of rum. The Count’s stronghold, called New Archangel, possessed one hundred cannon and guns, sixty Russians, and an untold number of Indian hunters paddling canoes and the seagoing kayaks called
baidarkas,
and commanded a vast network of trade in sea otter and other furs along the Alaskan and Aleutian Island coasts.

Pleased to have company in his lonely outpost, the Count offered full Russian hospitality to whoever happened by. He expected in return, however, that his guest eat, drink, and make merry as hard as he.

“He is continually giving entertainments by way of parade,” Hunt reported in his journal, “and if you do not drink raw rum, and boiling punch strong as sulfer, he will insult you as soon as he gets drunk, which is very shortly after sitting down to table.”

The Count was a cagey businessman as well as a heavy drinker. According to the careful plan worked out by Astor with the Russians, the
Beaver
was to deliver trade goods from New York to the Count and his fortress. Astor’s representatives aboard the
Beaver
would be paid for these trade goods in the Russian’s furs. Then the
Beaver
was also to load the Count’s additional thousands of stockpiled furs and deliver them across the Pacific to the wealthy markets of Canton. Astor’s enterprise would take a commission on the sale of the additional Russian furs in the Chinese market.

Whether by design or happenstance, the Count managed to delay the amiable Wilson Price Hunt for
six weeks
at New Archangel with his drinking bouts and endless show of parading men. Autumn storms began to roil the North Pacific. Hunt knew he had to leave to return to Astoria, and quickly. Hunt’s haste to depart no doubt gave the Count, as the Count may have calculated, the best possible deal in terms of what he had to pay in furs for Hunt’s trade goods.