Across the Great Divide: Robert Stuart and the Discovery of the Oregon Trail

by Laton McCartney

Overview

Resurrecting a pivotal moment in American history, Across the Great Divide tells the triumphant never-before-told story of the young Scottish fur trader and explorer who discovered the way West, changing the face of the country forever.
In the heroic tradition of Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage comes the story of Robert Stuart and his trailblazing discovery of the Oregon Trail. Lewis and Clark had struggled across the high Rockies in present-day Montana and Idaho, but their route had been too perilous for wagon trains to follow. Then, six years after the Corps of Discovery returned from the Pacific, Stuart found the route that would make westward migration possible.
Setting out in 1812 on the return trip from establishing John Jacob Astor's fur trading post at Astoria on the Oregon Coast, Stuart and six companions traveled from west to east for more than 3,000 grueling miles by canoe, horseback, and ultimately by foot, following the mountains south until they came upon the one gap in the 3,000-mile-long Rocky Mountain chain that was passable by wagon.
Situated in southwest Wyoming between the southern extremes of the Wind River Range and the Antelope Hills, South Pass was a direct route with access to water leading from the Missouri River to the Rockies. Stuart and his traveling party were the first white men to traverse what would become the gateway to the Far West and the Oregon Trail. In the decades to come, an estimated 300,000 emigrants followed the corridor Stuart blazed on their way to the fertile farmlands of the Willamette Valley and the goldfields of California.
Across the Great Divide brings to life Stuart's ten-month journey and the remarkable courage, perseverance, and resourcefulness these seven men displayed in overcoming unimaginable hardships. Stuart had come to the Pacific Northwest to make his fortune in the fur trade, but during his stay in the wilderness he emerged as a pioneering western naturalist of the first rank, a perceptive student of Native American cultures, and one of America's most important, if least-known, explorers. Today Stuart's expedition has largely been forgotten, but it ranks as one of the great adventure odysseys of the nineteenth century.
A direct descendant of Stuart, award-winning journalist Laton McCartney has obtained unique access to Stuart's letters and diaries from the expedition, lending depth and unparalleled insight to a story that is at once an important account of a pivotal time in American history and a gripping, page-turning adventure.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781476730035
Publisher:	Free Press
Publication date:	11/26/2012
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	371,790
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Laton Mccartney grew up on cattle ranches in Colorado and Wyoming and is a graduate of Yale University. Winner of the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award, McCartney has written for numerous publications including The Washington Post, Upside, Fortune, Manhattan Inc., [More], Catalyst, Town & Country, and Newsweek International. He is the author of the national bestselling Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story and lives in Manhattan and Wyoming with his wife, Nancy.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Mr. Astor's Proposal

In February 1808, Thomas Jefferson, sixty-five years old and in the waning months of his second term as president, received a letter from the New York merchant John Jacob Astor asking him to support a far-flung trading venture beyond the Mississippi.

Astor had already begun to amass an enormous fortune in trading furs and exporting and importing goods, yet he was not widely known outside New York and Montreal, where he did much of his trading. The president had never met Astor — in fact, he had likely never heard of him, though Astor cited his fellow New Yorker, George Clinton, Jefferson's vice president, as someone who could attest to his good character and accomplishments. Based on the ambitious proposal Astor outlined in his letter to Jefferson, however, the nation's chief executive may well have concluded its author was either a man of great ambition and vision or perhaps someone suffering from delusions of grandeur.

Astor wanted to create a great fur-trading company that would operate through a network of posts he intended to build along the route followed by Lewis and Clark from St. Louis all the way to the Pacific. To be called the American Fur Company (AFC), this enterprise would put the entire fur trade in the northern half of Louisiana Territory — all the area included in the Louisiana Purchase of April 30, 1803 — under U.S. control within four or five years, Astor asserted. To succeed, the company needed the president's blessing as well as the full support of the American government.

The proposal captured Jefferson's attention. Assuming Astor had the resources and business and organizational acumen to mount such an ambitious and costly endeavor — and the president was well aware that few men in the United States possessed such qualifications — this fur-trading enterprise of his might well serve Jefferson's own agenda for bringing Louisiana into the bosom of the Republic.

In 1803, Jefferson received congressional approval and an appropriation of twenty-five hundred dollars to send a military expedition to explore the upper Missouri River to its headwaters in the Rocky Mountains. From there, what would become known as the "Corps of Discovery" was to follow the first westward-flowing river the explorers came upon to the Pacific Ocean. Jefferson had chosen his private secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, to lead the expedition. In turn, Lewis asked his friend William Clark to serve as coleader. Their chief objectives were twofold: advance the geographic and scientific knowledge of the continent and pave the way for advancement of the American fur trade to the various Indian tribes they encountered on their journey. In the three years that elapsed between the time Lewis and Clark began to organize their expedition in the summer of 1803 and their return to St. Louis in the fall of 1806, the Corps of Discovery had traveled eight thousand miles and had accomplished its mission, setting the stage for expansion into the trans-Mississippi West.

The commercial gains that Jefferson had assured Congress would come as the result of the expedition, however, had been slow to materialize. By the time Jefferson received Astor's letter, almost five years since the United States had acquired Louisiana from France and eighteen months since the return of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the president's enemies were still characterizing the Louisiana Purchase as a costly folly. Worse, the government's efforts to extend America's commercial reach beyond the Mississippi had faltered badly, especially in upper Louisiana Territory, then known as the Old Northwest. There, two major Canadian trading companies — North West Company (NWC) and the more recently formed Michilimackinac, a NWC subsidiary — were securing huge quantities of furs from the Indians of the region while turning these tribes against the United States.

At the time, the fur trade ranked as perhaps the largest business in North America. Some six million pelts — mostly beaver for felt hats worn by European and American gentry; sable, ermine, and marten for coats, fur muffs, and trimming; as well as less valuable muskrat, fox, buffalo, and raccoon hides — were sold annually at prices ranging from fifteen cents to five thousand dollars per pelt.

With the North West traders encroaching on the upper Missouri and Old Northwest and Michilimackinac rapidly gaining control of the upper Great Lakes and Mississippi, American traders were being excluded from their own territory by what had emerged as a quasimonopoly. Moreover, the pelts secured by the Canadians and British traders in U.S. territory were sold at a significant premium within the United States, which imported three-fourths of its furs from Canada and England. In other words, Americans were paying more for furs that had been trapped within their own borders than were the British.

Jefferson had done what he could to counter the Canadian influence. In 1807, he sent William Clark back to St. Louis to serve as superintendent of Indian affairs. Meriwether Lewis was scheduled to join Clark there in March, when he would take office as governor of Missouri Territory. Jefferson was counting on the two former Corps of Discovery commanders to be his eyes and ears on the frontier and do what was needed to aid in the further development of Louisiana.

The government had also dispatched an expedition lead by Zebulon Pike up the Mississippi to warn off British traders while convincing a reluctant Congress to fund the building of trading posts west of the Mississippi on the Arkansas, Natchitoches, and Bellefontaine rivers. Subsidized by the government, these outposts would, Jefferson hoped, serve as supply bases for American traders and a means of attracting the Indians with prices that were far more competitive than those being paid by the British.

But, by itself, the American government didn't have the resources to match the Canadians. Together the NWC and Michilimackinac had a capitalization of close to two million dollars, almost as much as the entire federal budget at the time. Then, too, three years into his second term and getting ready to retire, Jefferson had shifted his own focus, out of necessity, to foreign affairs.

With Great Britain and Napoleonic France at war, both countries routinely blockaded U.S. shipping and seized American vessels with impunity. On one such instance, on June 22, 1807, the HMS Leopard, acting under the orders of British Vice Admiral George C. Berkeley, fired repeated broadsides at the defenseless American frigate Chesapeake after Commodore James Barron, in command, refused to allow the British to search for English deserters. Three Americans were killed and eighteen wounded.

Enraged, Jefferson responded by enacting the Embargo Act of 1807, which prevented all exports and most imports, and put himself in charge of enforcing it, a role that normally would have fallen to Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. Intended to force the British and French to recognize American sovereignty without provoking outright war, the embargo proved largely counterproductive and hugely unpopular, especially in the Federalist Northeast, which suffered most from the lack of foreign commerce.

In the meantime, the president was receiving reports of British agents operating on the western frontier and raids on American trading parties by the Aricaras and other tribes along the upper Missouri. Jefferson suspected that the British traders had incited these attacks.

Astor's proposal had come at a propitious time. Perhaps his chain of commercial trading posts would serve to keep the British and Canadians in check, acting as a commercial barricade extending to the western sea. But who exactly was this man? What were his bona fides? Jefferson asked Secretary of War General Henry Dearborn to find out all he could about Astor from New York Governor De Witt Clinton. "Governor speaks well of Astor, as a man of large property & fair character, and well acquainted with the fur & peltry business," Dearborn reported on April 8, 1808. That was enough to satisfy Jefferson. A few days later, he gave the New Yorker his blessing for the plan to undertake trans-Mississippi trade with the western Indians.

"All beyond the Mississippi is ours exclusively, and it will be in our power to give our own traders great advantages over their foreign competitors," Jefferson wrote Astor. "You may be assured that in order to get the whole of this business passed into the hands of our own citizens, and to oust foreign traders, who so much abuse the privilege by endeavoring to excite the Indians against us, every reasonable patronage and facility in the power of the Executive will be afforded."

In July, the president wrote excitedly to Meriwether Lewis in St. Louis, now governor of Missouri Territory, informing his friend and former secretary that a powerful company was being formed to carry on the Indian trade on a large scale with the intention of securing for the United States "exclusive possession of that commerce." This new enterprise would be under the command, Jefferson explained, of "a most excellent man, a Mr. Astor, of New York, long engaged in the business and perfectly master of it."

Copyright © 2003 by Laton McCartney

Table of Contents

	Foreword	9
1	Mr. Astor's Proposal	20
2	A Highlander's Progress	28
3	Hidden Agenda	44
4	In Pursuit of Castor canadensis	57
5	Starting Over	65
6	Final Preparations	71
7	Aboard the Tonquin: New York to the Falkland Islands	84
8	Paradise	105
9	Arrival	118
10	Getting Settled	125
11	The Overlanders: From Montreal to the Missouri	143
12	Visitors	160
13	The Diplomat	173
14	The Rainy Season	191
15	The Overlanders: From the Missouri to Astoria	199
16	Dangerous Passage, Reunion, and Rescue	228
17	Bearers of Bad News	245
18	Taking Stock	255
19	Send-Off	266
20	Jeopardy	272
21	Up the Columbia	278
22	The Snake	307
23	Shortcut	336
24	Crows	345
25	To the Tetons	358
26	Hunger	379
27	South Pass	389
28	The Chateau of Indolence	405
29	Reversals	418
30	Uprooted	425
31	Winter March	433
32	Surrender	442
33	Down the Platte	448
34	St. Louis and New York	472
	Afterword	488
	Notes	496
	Bibliography	519
	Acknowledgments	525

Editorial Reviews

Douglas Brinkley Director, The Eisenhower Center for American Studies, and Professor of History, University of New Orleans What a truly wonderful book. Historian Laton McCartney brings to life the extraordinary -- and largely neglected -- story of how fur trader Robert Stuart discovered the trail that would lead 300,000 immigrants over the Rocky Mountains to the fertile valleys of Oregon. Brimming with lively anecdotes, fresh insights, and clear prose, this landmark study is a major new contribution to our understanding of the phenomenon known as "Western Expansionism." "Across the Great Divide" belongs next to "Undaunted Courage" on everybody's bookshelf.

Howard R. Lamar Sterling Professor Emeritus of History, Yale University A splendidly written biography of Robert Stuart, a key but long-neglected transcontinental explorer who discovered the most famous gateway to the American West in the nineteenth century. His entire life was a fascinating, action-packed adventure story. Laton McCartney's "Across the Great Divide" deserves high praise.

Page Stegner Author of "Winning the Wild West: The Epic Saga of the American Frontier, 1800-1899" How fitting that in the bicentennial year of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Robert Stuart, the man who first pioneered the Oregon Trail that 300,000 emigrants would cross on their way to the Pacific Coast, would finally get his due. Laton McCartney's "Across the Great Divide" is a superb narrative of that historic adventure.

Ted Morgan Author of "Wilderness at Dawn: The Settling of the American Continent" This thrilling account of the discovery of the Oregon Trail, which made possible the settling of the American West, ranks with the finest books on the continent's explorers.

From the Publisher

Lewis and Clark might have won all the early acclaim for their transcontinental journey, but the actual opening of the West to American settlement came a few years later as part of a commercial enterprise. Robert Stuart was a member of a venture financed by John Jacob Astor that set up an outpost near the mouth of the Columbia River as an initial step in a plot to monopolize fur trade in the western territories. In June 1812, Stuart was chosen to lead a small party on a journey back east to give Astor an update on how they were faring. After wandering around the northwest for a bit, they eventually found the one gap in the Rocky Mountains wide enough to cross by wagon. In the decades following, about 300,000 pioneers would take the Oregon Trail to settle in the western territories. It would be easy for McCartney (Friends in High Places), a direct descendant of Stuart, to focus solely on his ancestor's accomplishments, and there's no shortage of stunning vistas and threatening experiences with Native American war parties. But McCartney never loses sight of the big picture, depicting the fierce competition among early 19th-century fur traders and the impending threat to Astor's project from the onset of the War of 1812. Despite the hoopla surrounding his return, Stuart's reputation eventually languished for more than a century. This gripping account may not lift him fully out from under the shadow of his more famous predecessors, but it should guarantee he won't soon be forgotten again. Photos. Agent, Charlotte Sheedy. (Sept.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

This is a welcome addition to the literature of the fur trade and of Western overland trails. McCartney uses primary documents, including family letters and journals, to create a credible historical narrative of his ancestor, Robert Stuart, who traveled from Astoria to St. Louis in 1812-13 by way of the South Pass, which eventually became the route of the Oregon Trail, a major route of settlement from east to west through Wyoming during the 19th century. Stuart and his fellow Astorians have not received a great deal of attention from modern historians for their explorations, in which they became the first Euro-Americans to travel over the continental divide via the South Pass, so this work helps to address a neglected area in the history of western American expansion. This book is somewhat of a surprise, as the author is a journalist known more for writing on business (Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story) than for frontier history. Nonetheless, this smoothly written work should prove of interest for many. Recommended for public and academic libraries.-Nathan E. Bender, Buffalo Bill Historical Ctr., Cody, WY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Set amid a homey and observant history of early trading in the Pacific Northwest, McCartney (Friends in High Places, 1988) tells the story of the trek that opened the wagon route west. In 1812, a young fur trader, Robert Stuart, working for John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company, set off eastward from Astoria, with six companions, to find a suitable route across the continent for traders. Working from letters and the journal Stuart kept (when the ink ran out, he used berry juice and his own blood), McCartney-a descendent of Stuart-tells of tribulations ranging from fleas, bloodsuckers, and rattlesnakes, to mental illness, horse theft, hunger, and despair. Yet McCartney tells the story with command, never getting breathless. He manages to bring the native populations into focus as distinct entities-Chinooks, Clatsops, Brules, Mandans, Absarokas, Wishrams, Wahkiacums, Echeloots, Tetons, Yankstons, and many more. He makes sense, too, out of the rivalries among Russians, British, French, Canadians, and Americans. He paints the landscape broadly, for Stuart had an interest in nature and culture as well as in trade and exploration. McCartney discusses Astor's political gamesmanship as he secured Astoria and then tried to circumvent the embargo of the War of 1812. He details the even more arduous voyage of Wilson Price Hunt, who had followed the Lewis and Clark route four years later. And he relates the expedition's truly golden discovery (it wasn't beaver pelts) with cool understatement: South Pass, located by Stuart on a tip from the Shoshone, was an Old Crow trail through the Rockies and the only one traversable by wagon: "Though they were preoccupied at the time of the crossing withimmediate life-and-death concerns-finding firewood, food and water and retaining their scalps-the returning Astorians clearly understood the significance of what they'd discovered." Although the thrill here is in the discovery of South Pass, the weight of the story is in its political and economic setting. McCartney handles both with aplomb. (Illustrations) Agent: Charlotte Sheedy

Kirkus Reviews