John Jacob Astor: Wealthy Merchant and Fur Trader

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A western entrance to the trading areas had long been desired, but to this point, none had been found. Canadians had already searched; a Scottish Canadian named Alexander MacKenzie had set out for the Pacific from the Athabasca country in 1780, but he did not reach it. Instead he found the Arctic by what he called the River of Disappointment–today’s MacKenzie River.

In 1793-94, he tried again, and this time he almost reached his goal. He wanted to find the Columbia River, and American and Canadian history might have been different had he done so. But he was a couple of hundred miles north of his aim when he crossed the Continental Divide, and instead of the easy Columbia, he found the turbulent and unnavigable Fraser River. The Canadians kept trying; an employee of the Northwest Company, David Thompson, was deep in the Rockies, surveying, exploring, and preparing a final drive to the Columbia River.

Montreal was itself almost in the heart of the continent, and to the Canadians it was logical to find a western terminal as an extension of their already existing trade network. To Astor, it was less sensible to trek all the way across the continent than to sail south around South America and land at the back door. He would do it the easy way.

It took more than a year to formulate his plans. This was not to be a one-shot stab in the dark; it was to be a large enterprise, and Astor foresaw the depot he hoped to establish on the Columbia River as the focus of the whole western trade. Even Astor did not have the money for the venture alone, and he approached the Northwest Company with his project, offering the organization a one-third interest in his proposed Pacific Fur Company.

Officially the Northwest Company was uninterested; it was feeling its way to the coast, and was confident that in any struggle it could control the area. However, three former members of the company agreed to join Astor. Internal dissension was a part of the history of the Northwest Company, and there were always Montreal men around who, for one reason or another, had been squeezed out. The articles of incorporation of the Pacific Fur Company were signed in June of 1810, and the venture was ready to be launched.

In the spring of 1811 the ship Tonquin arrived on the Pacific coast, and a fort was built at the mouth of the Columbia River. The traders named it after their employer, and thus Astoria was born. Six weeks after the American flag had been hoisted over the little stockade, a party of white men came down the river from the interior–David Thompson and his fellows of the Northwest Company. He had lost time in surveying one river too many, and so the Oregon coast became American instead of Canadian.

Astor’s plan for his fur empire was really world-wide. He proposed to send out one or two ships a year from New York around Cape Horn to Oregon. These ships would carry American manufactured goods for trading with the Indians. The furs obtained in this exchange would not return to New York, however, other ships would carry them to the best market for fur, the Orient. At Canton they would be traded for Oriental goods. These in turn would be carried through the Indian Ocean to Europe. There they would be traded–always at a profit–for European goods that would then be brought across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. The scheme had a great deal to recommend it and deserved to succeed.

Unfortunately for Astor, however, it was a failure. One of the ships was lost to an explosion, with all hands. There were difficulties with the Indians, and the outbreak of the War of 1812 and the disruption of normal trading patterns were altogether too much for the enterprise. In 1813 an expedition of the Northwest Company, commissioned by the British government in Canada, arrived and demanded the cession of the fort. Astor’s agent sold it to them for $58,000, succumbing to a combination of military and business pressure.

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