Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark

(Ecco, $28)

The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history,” said Sandra Dallas in The Denver Post. In 1810, just four years after Lewis and Clark completed their transcontinental expedition, Manhattan entrepreneur John Jacob Astor launched a largely forgotten scheme to build a global trading empire on the virginal Pacific Coast. Astor planned to dispatch enough men to establish a settlement in what is today Oregon, then use that perch to buy up furs from native tribes and ship the pelts to China in exchange for silks and other luxury goods that would be carried back to New York. President Thomas Jefferson vowed support, even envisioning a day when “Astoria” would mature into an independent democracy. Alas, things didn’t develop as either man hoped.

The venture’s failure doesn’t trouble author Peter Stark, said Joe Streckert in the Portland, Ore., Mercury. In fact, he “seems to revel in everything that went wrong,” going out of his way to paint Astor as a naïve leader oblivious to the suffering he brings upon his hired hands. One group traveled around Cape Horn in a ship called the Tonquin, another over land, and 61 of the original 140 participants died before the project imploded. While neither expedition party had it easy, “a guilty pleasure of the book is watching the unraveling of the Tonquin’s captain, said Dennis Drabelle in The Washington Post. When he gave orders, his crew mocked him and kept playing cards. When he later insulted a tribal chief, he paid for the mistake with his life and the lives of most of his shipmates.

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“For Astor, the venture was a total loss. For the United States, it was not,” said Bruce Ramsey in The Seattle Times. The survivors of the journey did establish an outpost, but Astor’s dream died during the War of 1812, when his partner in Oregon heard that British ships were on their way to seize Astoria and “sold out to the British—literally sold out, for about 30 cents on the dollar.” Still, the expedition made its mark: The route that the overland party thrashed out eventually became the Oregon Trail, and the original American claim to the settlement helped ensure that the entire Pacific Coast wasn’t forfeited to the British. As Stark’s “vivid re-creation” of the venture shows, today’s America owes quite a lot to one man’s hubris.