Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/70

44 "The scheme was grand in its aim, magnificent in its breadth of purpose, and area of operation. Its results were naturally feasible and not over anticipated. Aster made no miscalculation, no ommission; neither did he permit a sanguine hope to lead him into any wild or imaginary venture. He was practical, generous, broad. He executed what Sir Alexander MacKenzie urged as the policy of British capital and enterprise. That one American citizen should have individually undertaken what two mammoth British companies had not the courage to try, was but an additional cause which had intensified national prejudice into embittered jealousy on the part of his British rivals."

The war of 1812 with England breaking out soon after, and before any sufficient effort could be made to prove the practical success of the enterprise, and while Mr. Hunt was absent to Alaska on a trading expedition with the Beaver—a second ship that Astor had sent out with supplies and men—two of Astor's partners, MacDougal and MacTavish, turned traitor to the enterprise and sold it out to the Canadian Company for fifty-eight thousand dollars, property which had cost Astor over two hundred and fifty thousand together with a large amount of furs that had been accumulated. They not only betrayed and robbed their partner of his property in the absence of his American agent, but they conspired to turn the fort and all its property and advantages over to the British government, prohibiting the young American employees from raising the stars and stripes over their own fort. The whole disgraceful chapter of treachery and dishonesty to Astor and enmity to the United States ending with the seizure of the fort by the British man-of-war. Raccoon, on December 1, 1813.

This chapter of perfidy to Astor and seizure of an American fort, and commercial post, practically put an end to all American settlement in Oregon for thirty years. There were independent American trappers who sold their furs to the Hudson Bay company which succeeded the Canadian company, but there was not a single American trading post, merchant or establishment in all Oregon, that dared fly the American flag until Joe Meek led off at Champoeg, in an appeal to "Rally around the flag boys."

But while the American enterprise was thus crushed out west of the Rocky mountains, the hardy pioneers were pushing out from St. Louis, to the east side of the Rocky mountains. In 1823, General William H. Ashley, led an expedition across the plains. He met with resistance from the Indians, and lost fourteen men in battle. In 1824 Ashley discovered a southern route through the Rocky mountains, led his expedition to Great Salt lake, explored the Utah valley, and built a fort. Two years later a six-pounder cannon was hauled from the Missouri river across the plains and over the mountains, twelve hundred miles to Ashley's fort. A trail was made; many loaded wagons passed over it, and within three years Ashley's men gathered and shipped back to St. Louis over two hundred thousand dollars worth of furs. Ashley was a native of Virginia, commenced selling goods and trading in the west before he was eighteen years of age, and manufactured saltpeter for powder before he went into fur trading to the west. The Indians in the employ of the Hudson Bay Company, made war on him, on the upper Missouri, and he gathered an army of border men and drove the Indians, Hudson bay men and all over into Montana.

Jim Bridger—whose portrait we give on another place—is another St. Louis contribution to the winning of the west by the fur trading route. Bridger was another old Virginia boy, born in 1804. When ten years old, his father and mother having died, the boy began earning a living for himself and sister by working on a flat boat. Stories from the wilderness west stirred the lad, and when he was eighteen, he joined a party of trappers and took to the Rocky mountains, and continued in a wandering, trapping, exploring life for twenty-five years. He discovered Great Salt lake in 1824; the south pass in 1827; visited Yellowstone lake and the Geysers in 1830; founded Fort Bridger in 1843; opened the overland route by Bridger's pass to great Salt lake; a guide