First of three parts.
Let's hear it for the first U.S. settlement in Oregon, likewise the first permanent U.S. settlement west of the Rockies. It's a place whose history "is full of romantic interest," said Charles H. Carey in his "General History of Oregon."
The official celebration doesn't begin until May, but March is when it all began. Considering the coast's tempestuous tendencies this time of year, May is a better bet for a party.
"One of the driving factors was the tall ships," said McAndrew Burns, executive director of the
, the umbrella organization for the celebration.
Scheduled to attend Astoria's fete are the
, a replica of the vessel Capt. Robert Gray commanded before taking over the larger Columbia Rediviva and discovering the Columbia River in 1792, and the Hawaiian Chieftain, patterned after a trading vessel at the turn of the 19th century.
"They won't cross the bar in March," Burns said.
Capt. Jonathan Thorn would have been wise to heed that precaution when John Jacob Astor's sea-borne contingent arrived off the Columbia bar on March 22, 1811. At least eight lives would have been spared.
Astor, a New York-based fur magnate, envisioned the river's mouth as an ideal headquarters for his Pacific Fur Co., even though he hadn't seen it in person and never would. A fur-trading center there, he reasoned, would anchor a string of posts throughout the region, knocking the wind out of the sails of the North West Co., his Montreal-based competitor.
Before launching his West Coast enterprise, Astor approached the Nor'Westers, as they were known, to seek a partnership. That plan fell through, so Astor struck out on his own.
"One of the aspects I always play up is what a real race it was for the whole region," Burns says. "Astor beat the Canadians ... and were it not for him, we'd be standing in part of Canada."
Astor in 1810 dispatched two parties to carry out his plan: one by land, the other by sea.
The sea-borne party sailed aboard the 290-ton, 10-gun Tonquin. Thorn, a rigor-ridden naval officer granted leave to work for Astor, was "by every report ... a martinet," Dorothy O. Johansen wrote in "Empire of the Columbia."
In charge of the trappers and voyageurs on board was Duncan McDougal, who as a Pacific Fur partner, considered himself Thorn's superior. Further riling Thorn, McDougal's men, a happy-go-lucky lot of French and Scottish extraction, were prone to treat the trip as a pleasure cruise.
Thorn and McDougal were at loggerheads throughout the long months it took to sail around Cape Horn to the Columbia bar. Despite the bar's huge breakers, Thorn ordered out five men in a whaleboat to sound a path for the ship to enter. The boat promptly swamped, and all five perished.
The next morning Thorn ordered another small boat with five men to the same task. It also ran afoul of the breakers. Three men died; two managed to reach the beach.
The Tonquin by then was so embroiled in the bar that Thorn had no choice but to ease it across to what historian Carey called "a rather unsafe anchorage within the estuary." A bit later he "managed to work into the shelter of Baker's Bay on the north shore."
The Tonquin sat idle there while McDougal and his men spent days poking around the river's mouth for a likely spot to erect a fort while Thorn fumed.
Finally, on April 12, McDougal chose a spot near what's now known as Point George. Thorn hastily offloaded supplies, axes and hammers rang out, and Fort Astoria was a-building. Thorn hurried off to trade with natives further up the coast and a fate not even his enemies would have wished on him.
Astor's crew members were so occupied with building the fort that they didn't get around to naming it until May 18, according to the journal of Alexander Ross, a fur company clerk. That, says Burns, is another reason for delaying off the celebration until May.
The tribulations of cross-country travel and the Tonquin's gruesome demise.
, Special to The Oregonian