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

In the early nineteenth century, the vast Pacific Coast between Spanish missions near San Francisco and Russian fur posts in Alaska remained unclaimed by any Western power. Peter Stark recounts how German-born immigrant John Jacob Astor, by then one of America's wealthiest fur merchants, conceived a plan to capture this territory's wealth by founding the first American colony on the West Coast. With the enthusiastic backing of President Thomas Jefferson, who envisioned a sister democracy on the Pacific, Astor in 1810 launched two expeditions, one by sea and one overland, to meet at the mouth of the Columbia River and build a trading post called Astoria. The settlement would serve as the hub of a global triangle trade linking New York, the Northwest Coast, and Canton, China: Ships would carry manufactured goods to exchange with Native Americans for furs, transport those furs to China for enormous profit, then return with Chinese luxuries for sale in New York.

Astor chose three very different leaders. Wilson Price Hunt, a young New Jersey businessman with no wilderness experience, would lead the Overland Party and head West Coast operations. Duncan McDougall, a proud Scottish fur trader, would serve as second in command. Captain Jonathan Thorn, a rigid U.S. naval hero, would captain the ship Tonquin. Astor also recruited Scottish partners formerly of Canada's North West Company (NWC), a powerful rival fur-trading consortium, offering them shares in his new Pacific Fur Company.

The Tonquin departed New York in September 1810, and cultural conflict erupted immediately. Thorn imposed strict naval discipline on the Scottish traders and French-Canadian voyageurs, skilled paddlers organized in a rigid hierarchy from novice mangeurs de lard to seasoned winterers, who were accustomed to wilderness autonomy. At the Falkland Islands, Thorn sailed the ship out of the harbor while nine passengers were ashore, apparently intending to abandon them. Young Robert Stuart, nephew of partner David Stuart, forced Thorn at gunpoint to turn back. After rounding Cape Horn and stopping in Hawaii, the Tonquin arrived at the Columbia River's mouth on March 22, 1811, where a four-mile-long sandbar created one of the world's most dangerous navigational hazards. Despite pleas to wait for calmer weather, Thorn ordered boats into the violent surf to find a channel. Over three harrowing days, eight men perished simply trying to enter the Columbia.

Once inside the river, the Seagoing Party chose a south-bank site and began building the settlement they named Astoria. In June, Thorn sailed the Tonquin north to trade for sea otter furs. At Clayoquot Sound, a harbor on Vancouver Island, he insulted an elderly chief named Nookamis by rubbing a fur in his face during negotiations. The next morning, local Indigenous warriors boarded the ship under the pretense of trading, then attacked with war clubs and knives, killing Thorn, partner Alexander McKay, and most of the crew. Four sailors escaped in a longboat during the night, but a single wounded man remained aboard. When hundreds of warriors returned to loot the ship, he detonated the powder magazine, killing himself and approximately 200 others. The four who had escaped were later captured and killed.

Meanwhile, Hunt's Overland Party had departed St. Louis in October 1810 with dozens of voyageurs, American hunters, and the Dorion family: interpreter Pierre Dorion, his Iowa Indian wife Marie, and their two toddlers. The river froze in November, forcing a winter camp nearly a thousand miles short of their goal. When the party resumed in spring 1811, they heard terrifying accounts of attacks by the Blackfeet, the powerful tribe controlling the upper Missouri region, from scalped survivors of earlier expeditions. Hunt decided to leave the Missouri and the known Lewis and Clark route, heading overland through unknown terrain. At the villages of the Arikara, an Indigenous nation on the Missouri, he spent five weeks negotiating for horses before leading the party onto the high plains in mid-July.

After crossing the Bighorn Mountains with Crow Indian guides, the party built 15 cottonwood canoes on what they believed was a Columbia tributary. The river, known today as the Snake, soon turned violent. Veteran steersman Antoine Clappine drowned when his canoe split on a boulder. At a thundering waterfall named Caldron Linn, Hunt found miles of impassable gorge downstream. The party was trapped: unable to proceed by water, their horses abandoned hundreds of miles behind, with only five days' food as winter closed in.

Hunt split the group to forage independently. For weeks they struggled along the Snake River through Hells Canyon, the deepest gorge in North America. Starvation set in. Hunt faced an agonizing choice between staying with his collapsing friend Ramsay Crooks, one of the most capable partners, and pushing ahead to find food. He chose to go ahead, leaving Crooks with two companions. Voyageur Jean Baptiste Prevost drowned in a frenzy of hunger. Marie Dorion gave birth on December 30; the baby died a week later during a mountain crossing through waist-deep snow. Hunt's group finally emerged from the mountains in early January 1812, reaching a prosperous Indian camp near the Columbia. They arrived at Astoria on February 15, emaciated and in rags. Scottish partner Donald Mackenzie and reconnaissance leader McClellan had arrived with their splinter groups a month earlier in similarly desperate condition.

Hunt took command and dispatched expeditions to establish fur posts throughout the Columbia Basin. In May 1812, Astor's supply ship the Beaver arrived with fresh men and goods, and interior posts reported rich fur harvests. But the War of 1812 soon intervened. The NWC's efficient message system delivered news of the conflict far faster than Astor could reach his own men. An NWC agent announced that an armed British ship was sailing to capture Astoria. Astor petitioned the Madison administration for naval protection, but the government never responded. He dispatched the fast ship Lark with urgent instructions, but a storm off Hawaii dismasted and wrecked the vessel.

Hunt, who should have been commanding at Astoria, had left aboard the Beaver for a trading mission to Russian Alaska, followed by a detour to Hawaii, where he was stranded for months unaware of the war. In his absence, McDougall and Mackenzie voted to abandon the enterprise. When David Stuart and upriver post leader John Clarke argued against abandonment, Mackenzie delivered a systematic indictment of Astor's management, persuading the partners to sell. Hunt returned in August 1813, furious, but the partners refused to reverse course. On October 23, 1813, McDougall sold Astoria and all its goods to the NWC for roughly 30 cents on the dollar. In December, a British warship formally claimed the settlement for the Crown.

Marie Dorion's husband Pierre was killed by Indians in the Snake River country that winter, apparently in retribution for Clarke's execution of an Indian thief at an upriver portage. Marie gathered her two surviving children, killed her horses for food and shelter, and spent the winter hidden in a mountain ravine before crossing the Blue Mountains on foot to reach safety.

Stark argues that despite its collapse, Astoria's most important legacy was geographic. The Overland Party's route through the Rockies, combined with the discovery of South Pass by Robert Stuart's eastbound expedition carrying messages to Astor, together formed the path that became the Oregon Trail. South Pass offered a gentle crossing of the Continental Divide passable by wagons. In the 1840s, thousands of settlers followed this route to the Willamette Valley, where an elderly Marie Dorion was living with her third husband. The Oregon boundary was settled with Britain in 1846 at the 49th parallel. Stark contends that without Astoria's establishment of an American presence on the Pacific, the entire West Coast might have remained under British control. Astor died in 1848 as the richest man in the United States, and Stark reflects on the enduring tension between Astor's commercial ambitions and Jefferson's democratic ideals, a question about whether America is primarily a beacon of democracy or a commercial empire that still resonates today.