On March 22, 1811, the American barque (or small ship) “Tonquin” – 96 feet long, built in New York in 1807 – sailed into view of the mouth of the great River of the West, also known as the mighty Columbia.
This was about five years after American explorers Lewis & Clark had wintered near the Columbia on the Pacific Coast in what’s now Oregon and Washington. One of the concepts the duo’s Corps of Discovery brought to the attention of American entrepreneurs was the notion of profiting from trading furs, collected on the Northwest Coast, with merchants in China.
John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company
Thus, on board the Tonquin was a group of aspiring fur traders known as the Pacific Fur Company, a business venture financed by American entrepreneur John Jacob Astor. The objective was to establish a post (which they called “Astoria”) and begin trading with Indigenous people to collect furs to export to the Far East. British ventures known as the Hudson’s Bay Company and Northwest Company were already doing the same, mixing commerce with Great Britain’s political interest in claiming the Northwest Coast for the crown.
The man hired by Astor to take charge of the ship was a strict disciplinarian. His name was Captain Jonathan Thorn, and his character had become clear not long after the Tonquin left New York the previous September and sailed around Cape Horn, and then to the Northwest Coast by way of Hawaii.
Thorn was a former U.S. Navy officer, but the clerks and partners of the Pacific Fur Company aboard the ship weren’t willing to being ordered around as if they were midshipmen or even officers. There may have been anger-management issues, too; Captain Thorn clearly had a short temper.
Graveyard of the Pacific
The arrival of the Tonquin at the mouth of the river meant crossing the treacherous Columbia Bar, an area which later came to be known as the “Graveyard of the Pacific.” The Tonquin’s attempted crossing proved deadly to a number of crew members, mostly due to Captain Thorn’s impatience and poor judgement. Unfortunately, the violence and death that resulted from Thorn’s leadership during the ship’s arrival proved to be something of a foreshadowing of what was to come just a few months later.
When Captain Thorn’s career came to an abrupt and deadly end on the coast of what’s now British Columbia in June 1811, an estimated 100 others died along with him. Though many have searched, the exact place of the disaster has never been identified, and the Tonquin has never been found.
The fur traders left behind at Astoria didn’t make out so well, either. When the War of 1812 broke out between the United States and the British, Astor’s managers ultimately sold Astoria to the Northwest Company rather than face potential attack by the Royal Navy. Still, when Royal Navy Captain William Black arrived at Astoria sometime after the sale, he insisted on formally occupying the stockade and acting out a performative “capture” of it for King George – even though a British company had already bought it from the Americans.
Bizarre Twist Helps Secure the Old Oregon Country for the United States
Later, in a bizarre twist because of provisions laid out in the 1814 Treaty of Ghent, Captain Black’s actions came back to bite Great Britain. The treaty formally ended hostilities between the U.S. and Great Britain, and required the British to return all captured territory. When Captain Black acted out the fake surrender and seizure of Astoria, the land comprising the Old Oregon Country – most of what’s now Washington, Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia – had not formally claimed by any country, so the faux capture and forced return helped bolster American claims. In the decades of complicated diplomatic wrangling that followed, Captain Black’s bogus taking of Astoria ultimately only strengthened American claims. In 1846 when the land was formally divided and the international boundary drawn some 250 miles north of the Columbia River, the American share of the Old Oregon Country was far greater than Great Britain had ever imagined.