It was Astor’s idea to beat the Northwest Fur Company to the mouth of the Columbia, and hence command what was supposed to be the rich fur trade of that new and unknown region. He intended to send ships laden with trading supplies to the mouth of the Columbia River, there to take on the cargoes of furs caught by his own men or secured in trade with the Indians. These ships, laden with furs, were to go thence across the Pacific to China, and were to return from China to New York, laden with the products of the Orient, which our old-time historian, Henry Howe, thought must some time come across the American continent by rail. Here, then, was a commercial undertaking of no small dimensions.
Mr. Astor attached two strings to his bow. He fitted out one expedition by sea, and one by land, the objective point of each being the mouth of the Columbia River. He relied largely upon men he had known in the fur trade of the Great Lakes for the leadership of his land party, but he made the great mistake of placing three men in practically equal command. Unfortunately, he made another mistake in establishing the leadership of his sea expedition. There was but one leader there, the captain of the ship Tonquin, Thorne by name, a man by no means fitted to command any company of adventurers. The Tonquin left New York September sixth, 1810. It reached the mouth of the Columbia River March twenty-second, 1811. A party was soon thereafter detached for the erection of the proposed post to be known as Astoria. The Tonquin then proceeded northward up the coast. Its commander, domineering, overbearing, not fitted to trade with the Indians, succeeded in exciting the wrath of the Coast Indians. The latter attacked his ship and practically destroyed his crew, one of whom, an unknown fighting man, whose name is lost by reason of events, blew up the ship, killing many savages and destroying all vestige of the encounter. This was about June thirteenth, 1811.
As to the land party under its three leaders, we may say that the winter was spent near St. Joseph, Missouri, but on April twenty-first, 1811, about a month after the ship Tonquin had reached the mouth of the Columbia, this land party started out on its long and arduous western journey. By June twelfth they had traveled thirteen hundred and twenty-five miles up the Missouri River, being then in the neighborhood of the Arickaree villages. There they bought horses and started boldly westward, leaving the waterway of the Missouri, the first of the great companies of transcontinental travelers to proceed along the cord of the great bow of the Missouri.
There were sixty-four of these Astorians, and they had with them eighty-two horses. They must have passed to the north of the Black Hills. They crossed the Big Horns and on September twenty-ninth were on the Wind River, a stream later to be so well known by trappers and traders. They ascended the Wind River about eighty miles, seeking for a place to cross the Rocky Mountains. They had Crow Indians as guides through the Big Horns, and west of the Big Horns the Shoshones had guided them. These Indians detected signs of other Indians on ahead, and hence did not present to these travelers the natural and easy way, through the South Pass,—an ascent so gentle that one can scarcely tell when he has reached the actual summit. The Astorians crossed the mountains probably at what is now known as the Union Pass, a little to the north of the South Pass.
On September twenty-fourth they started from the Green River to the Snake River, and on October eighth, 1811, reached Fort Henry, which, at the time the Astorians reached it, was an abandoned post. It seems that even these early travelers found a West in which there had been some one before them! Thence, scattered and disorganized, on foot and by boat, this party undertook to go down the Snake River to the Columbia. By January first, 1812, they reached the valley known as the Grande Ronde. By January eighth some of them were on the Umatilla River, and some of them reached the Columbia by January twenty-first. Here they met Indians, who told them of the destruction of the Tonquin and the loss of a great number of their associates—an incident that shows well enough the strange fashion in which news travels in the wilderness.
Some parties under Mackenzie, McLellan and Reed separated, came down the Clearwater to the Lewis or Snake River, and thence voyaged on down-stream as best they could. Some of these reached Astoria January eighteenth, 1812, ahead of others of their scattered companions, who seem to have wandered aimlessly about the upper tributaries of the Columbia. The party under Hunt reached Astoria February fifteenth, 1812. Crooks and Day, others of the expedition, did not come in until May eleventh. A party of thirteen trappers, who had been left behind to pursue their calling, did not reach the post until January fifteenth, 1813. The trip, measuring by the time of the first arrivals at the mouth of the Columbia, had required three hundred and forty days. Thirty-five hundred miles of country had been covered. The Northwestern Company had been beaten in the race to the mouth of the Columbia by just three months. It was beaten by a gait of about ten miles a day! We build railroads almost as rapidly as that to-day.
Discovering that, ten years before Jedediah Smith made his journey northward across Oregon to Fort Vancouver, there were well established lines of travel and well established settlements on the Columbia and its tributaries, we may think that by this time we are close to the first of things in Western history. Of course we know that ahead of the Astoria party was the Lewis and Clark expedition. Before Lewis and Clark came the Louisiana Purchase, which offered us this territory for exploration; and the Lewis and Clark expedition will serve as the starting point of our scheme of the history of the trans-Missouri.
We may, perhaps, reinforce these salient points in memory if we go back once more well upon this side of our former starting point, and work to it again upon slightly different lines. For instance, we may ask, who built Fort Henry, the fort that the Astorians found abandoned, west of the Rocky Mountains? The answer is, Major Andrew Henry, some time partner of that energetic early merchant, General Ashley. Henry was at the Three Forks of the Missouri in 1810. He crossed southward through the mountains and built Fort Henry in the fall of that year. This was the first post built west of the Continental Divide. It was erected on what is now known as the Henry Fork of the Snake River.
But was Major Henry himself the first man to penetrate into the Rockies? He was not. Who, then, was ahead of Henry? The answer is, Manuel Liza, that strange character of Spanish, French and American blood, who was perhaps the first of the Western merchants to catch the full significance of the Lewis and Clark expedition. We have heard of one William Morrison, of Kaskaskia, Illinois, who sent a representative to far-off Santa Fé. This same William Morrison was the partner of our strange genius, Manuel Liza, in the first fur trading venture up the Missouri. They fitted out one keel-boat for the Northwest trade in the spring of 1807.
Did Liza and his hardy crew of keel boatmen find an untracked and uninhabited wilderness? Not altogether such; for, as they were ascending the ancient waterway, they met coming down one John Colter, that hardy soul who had left the Lewis and Clark expedition to return to the Yellowstone River for the purpose of doing a little beaver trapping on his own account. Colter, it may be remembered, is thought to have been the first discoverer of the region now included in the Yellowstone National Park. This country was discovered and forgotten, to be later officially “discovered” on the same basis that Frémont discovered other portions of the Rockies. Colter is the last link in this chain. He brings us back again to Lewis and Clark, the first of the up-stream adventurers to penetrate the region of the trans-Missouri.