Astoria: Astor and Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Tale of Ambition and Survival on the Early American Frontier [9780062218308]

Overview

In the tradition of The Lost City of Z and Skeletons in the Zahara, Astoria is the thrilling, true-adventure tale of the 1810 Astor Expedition, an epic, now forgotten, three-year journey to forge an American fur-trading empire on the Pacific Coast. Peter Stark offers a harrowing saga of survival in which a band of explorers battled nature, starvation, and madness to establish the first American settlement in the Pacific Northwest and opened up what would become the Oregon trail, a pivotal moment in U.S. westward expansion that permanently altered the nation’s landscape and its global standing.

Six years after Lewis and Clark’s journey to the Pacific Northwest began, two of the Eastern establishment’s leading figures, John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson, turned their sights to founding a colony akin to Jamestown on the West Coast and transforming the nation into a Pacific trading power. Author and correspondent for Outside magazine Peter Stark recreates this pivotal moment in 19th-century American history for the first time for modern readers, drawing on original source material to tell the amazing true story of the Astor Expedition.

Unfolding over the course of three years, from 1810 to 1813, Astoria is a tale of high adventure and incredible hardship on the American frontier, both in the wilderness and at sea. Of the more than one hundred-forty members of the two advance parties that reached the West Coast—one crossing the Rockies, the other rounding Cape Horn—nearly half perished by violence. Others went mad. Within one year, the expedition successfully established Fort Astoria, a trading post on the Columbia River. Though the colony would be short-lived, it opened provincial American eyes to the potential of the Western coast and its founders helped blaze the Oregon Trail.

Drawing on firsthand accounts, this epic survival story uncovers the brutal reality of a venture that changed America forever:

• Two Epic Journeys: One party’s harrowing overland trek across the Rockies, and another’s perilous sea voyage around Cape Horn—both converging on a single, dangerous prize.
• High-Stakes Global Trade: The grand ambition of John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson to build a commercial empire that would rival the British and transform the United States into a Pacific power.
• A Brutal Fight for Survival: A gripping account of the battles against starvation, madness, and violence that claimed nearly half the expedition’s members.
• A Forgotten Chapter of History: The forgotten saga of Fort Astoria, the first American settlement in the Pacific Northwest, and how its founders helped blaze what would become the Oregon Trail.