Astoria and the Fur Trade: First on the Columbia

In the spring of eighteen eleven, a party of traders working for John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company rowed ashore at the mouth of the Columbia River and began building a trading post. They called it Astoria. It was, by most reckonings, the first permanent American settlement on the Pacific Coast, planted at the edge of a continent the United States had only recently reached.

John Jacob Astor was at that moment one of the richest men in North America, and he was attempting something genuinely audacious: a transcontinental fur trade network anchored on the Pacific, with ships running between New York, Astoria, and China. The Columbia River mouth was the chosen pivot. Control the river mouth, control the trade route.

The trading post sat at the intersection of several worlds. The Chinook peoples had run a sophisticated trade economy at the Columbia's mouth for centuries before the fur traders arrived. They traded dried salmon, canoes, and shells for goods from the interior. Astor's men entered an already-functioning market and plugged into it. The Clatsop people nearby served as suppliers, guides, and intermediaries. Without Indigenous trade networks and knowledge, the Pacific Fur Company's enterprise would have failed immediately.

It almost failed anyway. In the fall of eighteen twelve, word arrived at Astoria that the United States and Great Britain were at war. The Pacific Fur Company, facing the likely arrival of a British warship, sold the post to the North West Company of Canada rather than risk losing it outright. The sale went through in October of eighteen thirteen. The British warship HMS Racoon arrived about two months later, in December, only to find the American flag already down and the name of the post changed to Fort George. The captain was reportedly furious at having been robbed of a capture.

Astoria was nominally returned to the United States under the Treaty of Ghent of eighteen fourteen, but physical restoration did not occur until eighteen eighteen, when an American naval vessel arrived and the British flag came down. It never returned to American commercial control. Astor himself never visited the post that bore his name.

What Astoria began, though, was a pattern. The fur trade brought the first sustained contact between Euro-Americans and the peoples of the Oregon Country. It drew the maps. It established the river routes. It created the commercial logic that would bring missionaries, then settlers, then a hundred thousand emigrants on the Oregon Trail, all of whom followed corridors the fur traders had walked first.

The house of cards that was the global pelt economy eventually collapsed, as all such economies do, when the fashion changed and the beaver nearly ran out. What it left behind was a map of a continent, and a town at the river's mouth.