Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival (3 page)

This journey and his contact with these traders was pivotal in Astor’s life—and the continent’s destiny. Here, at the edge of the great western wilderness, he heard stories directly from the mouths of the
coureurs de bois
—the French-Canadian “runners of the forest”—and from knowledgeable Indian chiefs of the continent’s vastness and its incredible abundance of furs farther to the west. He gained an understanding of its unmapped western geography—the run of its rivers, the lay of its mountains, and, so very far away, the glimmering Pacific Ocean, which marked the continent’s edge. Only one white man, Alexander Mackenzie, a Scottish trader with the North West Company, and his little party had paddled the northern forests and portaged the mountain spines to see it, arriving at the Pacific in the summer of 1793. At just about the same time, the first British and American trading vessels had begun to explore the fur-trading potential of the continent’s Northwest Coast.

Astor never forgot the vision of continental geography that he glimpsed from the wild western shore of Lake Superior and the stories of the traders who frequented it. He married this vision with the stories he’d begun to hear about the first British and American fur-trading ships landing on the Northwest Coast. These first ships had landed just a few years earlier, starting in 1788, bartered with Coastal Indians for sea otter and other pelts, and taken them across the Pacific to sell in Chinese ports for unheard-of sums. Astor’s genius turned in part on his ability to look far beyond the obvious horizons of time and place and meld fragments of information on geography, politics, and trade potential into a much greater vision. He quickly came to the realization that, one day, a wealthy trading empire would exist on the West Coast of North America. The Pacific Rim would emerge as a new world stage—a much larger version of what the North Atlantic was during his own era, a vast, globally important region ringed by powerful countries and fueled by a busy transoceanic trade.

The question was, whose West Coast empire would it be?

Alexander Mackenzie posed exactly that same question to his British readership in his account of his Canadian overland journey to the Pacific. Writing in his
Travels,
published in 1801, Mackenzie highlighted the enormous stakes that would go to whichever nation first established settlements on the Pacific Coast and the Columbia River and connected these via an inland water route to the East Coast and the Atlantic. That nation, Mackenzie wrote, would possess “the entire command of the fur trade of North America . . . from latitude 48, North to the pole . . . the fishing of both seas, and the markets of the four quarters of the globe.”

T
HE MOMENT FOR
A
STOR TO ACT
on his vision arrived in early 1808. It had been twenty-three years since the immigrant baker’s boy had hawked his cakes on Lower Broadway and enviously eyed the big brick houses. Now a wealthy fur merchant, he lived comfortably in one of them, a double row house at 223 Broadway, just a few steps up the street from St. Paul’s Church. He also worked the profitable tea trade from China with several of his own ships and was a substantial Manhattan landowner. One day that winter of 1808, Astor, still a relatively young man in his mid-forties, sat at his writing desk, dipped his pen, and began a letter of introduction to be dispatched to the Federal City in Washington.

Five years earlier, in 1803, President Jefferson had acquired the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon at bargain prices, and, with Congress’s eventual approval, added to U.S. territory nearly a million square miles up to the Rockies’ spine. Enormous as it was, the Louisiana Purchase still stopped far short of the Pacific Coast. The Northwest remained a mostly unknown and largely unclaimed (by Western powers) region of North America, a piece of real estate roughly the size of Western Europe available by squatters’ rights.

President Jefferson dispatched Lewis and Clark on their 1804–1806 expedition to discover a river route through the new lands and push beyond the Louisiana Purchase border, over the Rockies, and down the mountains’ far slope to the Pacific. He had read Alexander Mackenzie’s 1801 warnings to his British countrymen about the urgent necessity of controlling the Columbia’s mouth and Pacific Coast. With Britain distracted by the Napoleonic Wars, President Jefferson felt compelled to get there first—before his long-hated British, with their “bastard liberty,” and who, as he contemptuously put it, “would not lose the sale of a bale of fur for the freedom of the whole world.”

On his triumphant return to Washington, D.C., Meriwether Lewis strongly urged President Jefferson, as Mackenzie had urged the British, to create a seaport on the Pacific Rim as an outlet to China for furs from the western sector of North America, despite the lack of an easy water route through the Rockies. But President Jefferson felt that the U.S. government by itself had neither the will nor the funds to extend itself far west enough to settle the far edges of the continent. However much he wished to see it, he thought a Pacific Rim seaport was best left to private enterprise.

Astor’s timing was perfect. Not long after Lewis reported in to Jefferson about the need for a port on the Pacific, a letter posted from New York and dated “27 Feb 1808” in a flowing, deeply forward-slanted hand, arrived at the president’s house in Washington.

Sir,

It was my intention to have presented myself before you & to have stated to you my wish of engaging in an extensive trade with the Indians . . . [that] may in time embrace the greater part of the fur trade on this continent the most of which passes now through Canada. . . .

President Jefferson vetted Astor through his New York contacts. He learned that Astor was “a man of large property & fair character, and well acquainted with the fur & peltry business.”

The president replied enthusiastically to Mr. Astor:

The field is immense, & would occupy a vast amount of capital. . . .

You may be assured that in order to get the whole of this business passed into the hands of our own citizens . . . every reasonable patronage & facility in the power of the Executive will be afforded.

Thus introduced to each other via letter, President Jefferson and John Jacob Astor then arranged a meeting at the president’s house in Washington, D.C., in the spring or early summer of 1808.

T
WO YEARS LATER,
on a warm summer Sunday in 1810, a strange craft came winging from the north down the Hudson River, bearing the first recruits of the great undertaking. Hundreds of spectators—out of the city’s ninety-six thousand people—crowded to the docks that were clustered at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. The huge birch bark canoe, nearly forty feet long, surged through the water far faster than any Yankee rowboat. This was a vessel of the North, the racehorse of the fur trade, propelled by nine French-Canadian voyageurs who had paddled from the great fur-trading center of Montreal. The canoe jumped forward as they planted each stroke of their blades. Feathers and ribbons fixed to their hats streamed jauntily behind them on the breeze. The lyrics to their French boat songs, chanted in unison to the rhythm of their paddles, punctuated by the lilting solos of the steersman, echoed across the water and rolled along the Hudson’s wooded shores. The Sunday strollers had never seen anything like it.

Dans mon chemin j’ai rencontré

Trois cabalières bien montées
*

The canoe glided alongside the lower Manhattan docks, now so packed with spectators—sailors, strolling couples, vagrants, wharf rats, curious young men, mothers and children, stout businessmen—that the voyageurs could barely find a spot to land. They hopped out. With graceful Gallic manners and dipping flourishes of their feathery hats, they cordially greeted the crowd. They were short men—few over five feet six, the better to fold their legs into cargo-jammed canoes. They wore gaudy sashes tied around their waists, from which hung beaded tobacco pouches, easily accessible for their regular pipe breaks while paddling for long days through wilderness lakes and rivers. Deerskin moccasins and leather leggings covered their spindly legs. Their upper bodies, however—arms, shoulders, and torsos—bulged with outsized strength.

Two of the voyageurs now reached down, one at the bow and one at the stern of the canoe that was thinly sheathed with birch bark, its seams stitched with spruce roots and caulked with spruce gum. The two men seized it by the thwarts, plucked it out of the water, and easily slung the giant, dripping hull on their shoulders.

The crowd gasped with astonishment at their strength.

Astor now stepped forward from the crowd. In his mid-forties, he was prosperously stout and dressed simply but emanated a lively energy, intensified by his long shocks of straw-colored hair and bright, curious eyes. In his thick German accent, he greeted this exotic feather-bunted flock. Reaching into his pocket, he approached the two voyageurs hefting the big, featherweight craft.

“[D]elighted with the vivacity and dexterity of the two men,” a witness reported, “he gave them an eagle to drink his health.”

The ten-dollar coin, a half ounce of solid gold, represented a small fortune. John Jacob had come a long way from his start as a baker’s boy. He turned to a group of gentleman acquaintances.

“Six Americans,” he told them, “couldn’t do what these two brawny fellows just did.”

Proud Yankee wharf rats jeered. His prosperous New York acquaintances took issue. But the voyageurs’ leader, the Scottish fur trader McKay, spoke up to challenge the crowd: They would race any boat in New York Harbor over a three-mile course at ten-to-one odds.

No one stepped forward.

Satisfied that he had hired the best in the business, taking pride in their skill and strength as a harbinger for the success of his bold, continent-changing undertaking, Astor directed his French-Canadian voyageurs across New York Harbor to his Brooklyn staging area. Here more of his recruits would assemble to board his ship,
Tonquin,
bound in a month for the Pacific Coast, to lay the first foundations of the great empire.

No exact record exists of that meeting between President Jefferson and John Jacob Astor two years earlier at the president’s house. Jefferson was so passionately engaged in the possibilities of the western continent that he was known to crawl around on hands and knees in the president’s office studying maps spread out on the floor. It’s clear that Astor and Jefferson fueled each other with their mutual enthusiasm and vision of the West Coast’s limitless possibilities. Jefferson was a philosophical idealist (but practical statesman) possessed of a continent-wide vision and deeply committed to the concept of nations living free from royal rule. Astor was an extremely focused and yet far-seeing businessman whose deepest loyalties, besides to his family and closest acquaintances, were to his business empire: extending it as far as possible, preferably in the form of a monopoly, while maximizing his bottom line. For these two energized individuals meeting in Washington, the Pacific Coast hovered over the western horizon like a giant blank slate—a tabula rasa for statecraft on a hemispherical scale and trade on a global one.

“A powerful company is at length forming for taking up the Indian commerce on a large scale,” Jefferson wrote to Meriwether Lewis after his meeting with Astor. Lewis was governor of the Louisiana Territory and based in St. Louis at the time. “It will be under the direction of a most excellent man, a Mr. Astor, merch’t of New, long engaged in the business, & perfectly master of it.”

After their meeting, Astor had framed his global commercial vision into an overarching strategy and meticulous business plan that dovetailed with Jefferson’s geopolitical thinking. As soon as possible, in 1809, Astor would dispatch his first ship, the
Enterprise,
to test the profitability of his transglobal trading scheme with a quick stop at the Northwest Coast. The following year, in 1810, he would send two advance parties—one around Cape Horn by sea on the
Tonquin
and one across America by land. The Overland Party would begin to lay out a vast network of fur posts reaching up the Missouri River, over the Rockies, and to the Pacific Ocean, and open a “line of communication” across the continent along which both messages and furs could travel.

The two advance parties, Seagoing and Overland, would meet at the mouth of the Columbia River. Here, overlooking the Pacific, they would construct the first American colony on the West Coast. This great trading “emporium” would gather furs from the western half of the North American continent. It would form the apex of an elegant and fantastically profitable triangle trade between three continents that employed a fleet of Astor’s ships continuously circling the globe. From manufactories in London and New York the ships would carry inexpensive trade goods valued by the Indians—knives, blankets, pots, beads—around Cape Horn to the Northwest Coast. Here, along two thousand miles of the forested, indented Pacific coastline, Astor’s agents would exchange the trade goods with Coastal Indians for valuable furs such as sea otter. They would also load the ships with furs funneled to the emporium from Astor’s interior network of trading posts, which covered tens of thousands of square miles, as well as gather furs from Russian posts on the Alaskan coast.

Then the Astor ships would transport the heavy fur packets—sea otter, beaver, lynx, bear—across the Pacific. His captains would sell them at a tremendous markup in Canton, where a powerful demand existed from wealthy Chinese. Then, in China, Astor’s ships would load porcelain, silk, tea, and yellow nankeen cloth and sail these cargos around the other half of the globe (or return via the same route, depending on conditions) to the markets of London and New York, completing the circumnavigation and reaping another astronomical profit from fashionable and eager European and American consumers of Chinese luxury goods.

The scale of the plan was staggering. As of this date, 1810, the entire tradable wealth of largely unexplored western North America lay in its furs. There was no gold. There were no commercial fisheries. There was no wheat grown or timber harvested. Astor, this still-young and very ambitious immigrant, had conceived a plan that funneled the entire tradable wealth of the westernmost sector of the North American continent north of Mexico through his own hands. It was, as the early accounts described it, “the largest commercial enterprise the world has ever known.”