Astoria

John Jacob Astor had a vision of the fur trade as a worldwide business. With furs gathered in the northern reaches of North America’s streams and mountains, ships would carry the harvest around the world. In 1800 China was an especially lucrative market. Astor’s first step was the organization of the American Fur Company in 1808, but he needed a separate company to open the trade to the Pacific. To this end, in 1810 he organized the Pacific Fur Company. At a time when the fur trade also represented national interests, Astor’s companies represented the United States, and they were arrayed against powerful rivals: the Canadian-based North West Company and the British-owned Hudson’s Bay Company. Thus as relations with England became tenser in the decade after the Louisiana Purchase (leading to the War of 1812), Astor and his fur-trading companies might be seen as representing American strategic interests. Nowhere was this confrontation more evident than in the Pacific Northwest. It was there that Astor hoped to build a post, thwart the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company, and establish trade with China.

The foundation of Astor’s plan was information derived from the expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (1804-06). Lewis and Clark had traveled across some of the richest fur-bearing lands on the continent. Their experiences demonstrated that furs could be gathered and transported to the Pacific Coast and from there shipped to China. This could be done with less expense than shipping from the East Coast, as his rivals and he were currently doing. Astor gained additional knowledge from some Canadian friends in the North West Company who were also in competition with the Hudson’s Bay Company.

To establish his post and put it into operation, Astor organized two separate parties, the first to travel to Oregon overland and the second by sea. To staff the companies, he hired the very best fur traders and explorers, most of them from the North West Company. The most important of these was Alexander McKay, who had been a member of Alexander Mackenzie’s expedition to the Pacific Coast in 1793. Astor offered shares in his enterprise to McKay and other recruits from the North West Company and also signed on several veteran French-Canadian and American independent trappers. In 1810 the seagoing expedition left with 33 men on the brig Tonquin from New York City to sail around Cape Horn to the Oregon coast. These Astorians suffered from a tyrannical captain, who had little experience or sympathy for his cargo of fur trappers. After the vessel reached the mouth of the Columbia River in March 1811, the company immediately laid out the site of the future post and began construction. Within a few weeks, Captain Jonathan Thorn provoked the surrounding Indian peoples into an attack that destroyed the Tonquin and its crew.

The “overland Astorians” were slower but, in the end, more successful. Wilson Price Hunt’s party of 64 left St. Louis in April 1811 to cross the continent. It was a hard passage, with desertions, hostile Indians, and missed trails. The party eventually splintered into smaller groups, Hunt and his group reached the site of Astoria in February 1812, and they soon constructed the fort. Astor’s dream seemed on the verge of success; at this point, his investment was more than $200,000.

Astor’s expensive gamble seemed to have succeeded, but then fate intervened in the form of war between the United States and Great Britain. Most of Astor’s employees were Canadian, and they did not support the United States in the conflict. In October 1813 Astor’s representative, Duncan McDougall, sold Astoria to the North West Company for $58,000, a price that represented only a fraction of Astor’s investment in the enterprise. Within a month a British warship appeared at the mouth of the Columbia, and on December 12, 1813, its captain took possession of the fort and renamed it Fort George, in honor of the British monarch.

In October 1814 the Treaty Of Ghent ended the war between the United States and Great Britain. The terms of the treaty specified that property should be restored to a condition that had existed before the declaration of war. The trading post of Astoria had been sold, not seized, but Astor sued to recover the post on the grounds that the sale had been forced and made for only a fraction of his original investment. The international tribunal agreed.

Astor again had his post on the Pacific, but the fur trade was changing. Twenty-five years of war had impoverished much of Europe, especially the rich merchants and nobility who were the buyers for American furs. Astoria as the center of the fur trade in the Pacific Northwest had already been replaced by Fort Vancouver, the headquarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company operations. In 1821 Astoria was absorbed into the Hudson’s Bay Company.

In its brief history, Astoria was an important strategic location for the fur trade and a symbol of the American presence in the region. At a time when the young American nation could mount only a single expedition of exploration, an American entrepreneur, John Jacob Astor, built a trading post that flew the American flag and proclaimed America’s presence. The significance was the greater because Astoria was located at the mouth of the Columbia River, already seen as the great inland waterway of the West Coast.

Further reading: John Denis Haeger, John Jacob Astor, Business and Finance in the Early Republic (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991).

Atkinson, Henry (1782-1842) U. S. Army officer Henry Atkinson was a professional soldier who spent much of his career on the frontier of the trans-Mississippi West. Born in North Carolina in 1782, he entered the army as a captain of the Third Infantry Regiment in 1808 and was promoted to colonel of the Sixth Infantry Regiment in May 1815. With the close of the War of 1812, the American government determined to make its influence felt among the Indian nations of the trans-Mississippi West, some of whom were heretofore allied with the British. To this end, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun organized an expedition to the mouth of the Yellowstone River. Calhoun named Atkinson to command the expedition, which would include an army of 1,000 men. The main force never traveled past Council Bluffs, but in summer 1820 Atkinson dispatched parties of exploration under Major Stephen H. Long and Captain Matthew M. Magee to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains (Pike’s Peak) and to the mouth of the Minnesota River. That same summer, Atkinson was promoted to brigadier general and transferred to St. Louis, where he assumed command of the western department.

In 1824 Atkinson was given command of a second expedition to the Yellowstone River, and with 476 soldiers he left Council Bluffs on the voyage north on May 16, 1825. The group successfully reached its objective, and Atkinson opened negotiations with several Indian groups along the way. These treaties inaugurated relations between the U. S. government and several of the most important tribal groups in the interior of the continent. While on the headwaters of the Missouri River, Atkinson met William Henry Ashley returning to St. Louis with furs and escorted him downriver. In autumn 1825 Atkinson returned to St. Louis and chose the site of Jefferson Barracks nearby. Two years later, he authorized the expedition of Colonel Henry Leavenworth that established fort leavenworth in what would become eastern Kansas.

When the Black Hawk War broke out in 1832, Atkinson was in command of the U. S. force. He supervised the pursuit of the Black Hawk and his band, culminating in the Battle at Bad Axe in August 1832, when the Sauk peoples were virtually destroyed. In 1840 Atkinson directed the removal of the Winnebago people from Wisconsin to Iowa. Fort Atkinson, established that year, was a tribute to his long service on the frontier.

Atkinson died June 14, 1842, at Jefferson Barracks with the rank of brigadier general.

Further reading: Roger L. Nichols, General Henry Atkinson: A Western Military Career (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965).