The Tonquin's Wake: Astor's Fur Empire and the Nations of the Lower Columbia

The canoes left the beach on the ebb, twelve boats and then fifteen, with no sound but the soft tap of blade on gunwale. Behind them cedar smoke rose from the plank houses, and above the tide line split salmon darkened on the drying racks. The lower Columbia ran four miles wide here, a drowned country of islands and sloughs, and to the Chinookan towns along its banks it was "a house with many rooms." Its trade reached from the dentalium shells of the coast to the fishing scaffolds at Celilo Falls and the beaver country beyond the mountains.

In 1810 the New York merchant John Jacob Astor formed the Pacific Fur Company to take that trade and carry its furs to Canton. He sent the Tonquin around Cape Horn under Captain Jonathan Thorn, and an overland party under Wilson Price Hunt up the Missouri. In the spring of 1811 his men began building Fort Astoria on Chinookan ground near the river's mouth, where the Chinook headman Concomly's influence ran from the coast to the Cascades.

Then the venture came apart. The Tonquin sailed north to trade that June and never returned. Hunt's overland men straggled in the next winter, half-starved. The War of 1812 carried its quarrel to the Pacific, the partners sold out to the rival North West Company in 1813, and a British flag went up over the post, renamed Fort George. What the traders never settled is the question the closing chapters take up: whose ground was the Columbia country?