Page:Centennial History of Oregon 1811-1912, Volume 1.djvu/178

 extent of the Louisiana purchase was hardly anybody knew. It was Astor's business to find out; and he did so. He decided that the entire watershed of the Missouri river was now open to Americans, and closed to the Canadians; and that very likely the Americans had a good title clear through the continent to the Pacific ocean. If this was the fact then a trading station at the mouth of the Columbia river would command the fur trade to China. With President Jefferson he was in perfect accord for years; and when Astor founded Astoria, Jefferson wrote him a letter from his home at Monticello, November 9, 1813, in which he says:

"I view it (Astoria) as the germ of a great, free and indeisendent empire on that side of our continent ; and that liberty and self-government spreading from that as well as this side, will ensure their complete establishment over the whole. It must be still more gratifying to yourself to foresee that your name will be handed down with that of Columbus and Raleigh, as the father of the establishment and founder of such an empire. It would be an afflicting thing indeed, should the English be able to break up the settlement. Their bigotry to the bastard liberty of their own country, and habitual hostility to every degree of freedom in any other, will induce the attempt; they would not lose the sale of a bale of furs for the freedom of the whole world."

And thus, through President Thomas Jefferson, John Jacob Astor and the fur trade. Old Oregon is connected and brought into relations with the United States in the year 1812—one hundred years ago—and the history of this country from that year down to the present is the purpose of this book.

Astor was a dealer in furs, and never sent out trappers or trapping expeditions after the manner of the Canadian companies, or the expeditions of the French from St. Louis. The establishment at Astoria, if it had not been betrayed and destroyed by the British, would have engaged in the fur business of sending its own trappers into the wilderness as well as purchasing furs from the Indians and independent trappers. But his plans were on a still greater scale than anything ever attempted by any other American. He entered into correspondence with the Russian government and had arranged all the details of a large business with the Russian posts and people in Alaska, and through which, if he had not been driven out by the British warships, he would have built up a great commerce and effectively kept the British out of the fur trade on the Pacific coast.

Returning again to Astor 's operations on the Atlantic coast, he is found in 1808 endeavoring to form a business alliance of some sort with the independent fur traders and trappers at St. Louis. A large number of St. Louis venturers into the boundless west had been making money in the fur trade, the leading man of whom was jManual Lisa, a Spaniard. The return of Lisa from the Rocky mountains in the summer of 1808 with very flattering reports on fur trading prospects had induced the leading business men of St. Louis to go into a fur trading enterprise under the name of the St. Louis, Missouri, Fur Company, but commonly called the Missouri Fur Company. The partners in the company were Benjamin Wilkinson, Pierre Chouteau, Sr., Manual Lisa, Augusta Chouteau, Jr., Reuben Lewis, William Clark (of the Lewis and Clark expedition), Sylvester Labadie. all of St. Loiiis; and Pierre Menard and William Morrison, of Kaskaskia, Illinois; Andrew Henry, of Louisiana, Missouri, and Dennis Fitzhugh, of Louisville, Ky. This company sent its first expedition into the Indian