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

of buying and selling furs in the 1780s and 1790s, his own travels took him farther from the docks of America’s Atlantic seaports and deeper into the interior. With Sarah’s blessing, the stocky, energetic, young family man John Jacob left their lively household full of young children and boarded sailing sloops on long journeys up the Hudson River to visit the Indian tribes of upstate New York. He walked the forest paths with a backpack of trinkets, or drove a wagon that bogged down on the muddy tracks. He slept in front of the big kitchen fireplaces in settlers’ wilderness homes. He learned how to barter with Indians, who had been trading goods between tribes for untold centuries and were highly astute bargainers. The conscientious young trader picked up enough of their languages and techniques to close his deals in Seneca, Mohawk, or Oneida.
    “Many times,” reminisced an old resident of Schenectady, New York, “I have seen John Jacob Astor with his coat off, unpacking in a vacant yard near my residence a lot of furs he had bought dog-cheap off the Indians. . . .”
    Soon Astor’s fur-buying trips took him to Montreal—then the continent’s center of the fur trade, and the portal to the great interior wildernesses where the Canadian companies captured their furs. In Montreal, Astor was wined and dined by the partners of Canada’s North West Company, the more southerly counterpart to the Hudson’s Bay Company, at their luxurious Beaver House. One summer in the mid-1790s the company’s Scottish fur traders invited their valued New York customer, who bought pelts in volume, to accompany them as their guest in a huge voyageur canoe all the way to the key North West Company post at Grand Portage, on the western shore of Lake Superior. This served as the jumping-off point to the waterways of the western interior. Astor thus became one of the few white men in the late 1700s, except for the traders themselves, to travel so deeply into North America’s wild heart.
    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,