In the tradition of The Lost City of Z and Skeletons in the Zahara,
Astoria is the thrilling, true-adventure tale of the 1810 Astor
Expedition, an epic, now forgotten, three-year journey to forge an
American empire on the Pacific Coast. Peter Stark offers a harrowing
saga in which a band of explorers battled nature, starvation, and
madness to establish the first American settlement in the Pacific
Northwest and opened up what would become the Oregon trail, permanently
altering the nation's landscape and its global standing.
Six years after Lewis and Clark's began their journey to the Pacific
Northwest, two of the Eastern establishment's leading figures, John
Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson, turned their sights to founding a
colony akin to Jamestown on the West Coast and transforming the nation
into a Pacific trading power. Author and correspondent for Outside
magazine Peter Stark recreates this pivotal moment in American history
for the first time for modern readers, drawing on original source
material to tell the amazing true story of the Astor Expedition.
Unfolding over the course of three years, from 1810 to 1813, Astoria
is a tale of high adventure and incredible hardship in the wilderness
and at sea. Of the more than one hundred-forty members of the two
advance parties that reached the West Coast--one crossing the Rockies,
the other rounding Cape Horn--nearly half perished by violence. Others
went mad. Within one year, the expedition successfully established Fort
Astoria, a trading post on the Columbia River. Though the colony would
be short-lived, it opened provincial American eyes to the potential of
the Western coast and its founders helped blaze the Oregon Trail.
