Astoria

Or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains

Reading time

about 11.5 h

Length

161,717 words · 310 pages

Structure

61 chapters · 2 front-matter sections

Language

English

Era

Romantic

John Jacob Astor, already the richest man in America, sends two expeditions — one by sea around Cape Horn, one overland across a continent with no roads — to found a fur-trading outpost at the mouth of the Columbia River, and Washington Irving turns the resulting venture's staggering hardships, shipwrecks, starvation, desertions, and Native diplomacy into a single sweeping narrative of the fur trade's brief, brutal opening of the American West.

Irving wrote Astoria in 1836 at Astor's own request and with access to the company's private papers and surviving participants' accounts, giving the book an eyewitness texture unusual for a commissioned history; it remains one of the fullest contemporary narratives of the Pacific fur trade's earliest years.

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About this edition

The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.

Washington Irving (1783–1859) was born in New York City, the youngest of eleven children, and achieved his first fame with the comic A History of New York (1809), written under the pseudonym "Diedrich Knickerbocker," before The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20) — which included "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" — made him internationally famous and the first American writer to earn a living by his pen alone. He spent seventeen years in Europe as a writer and diplomat before returning to serve as U.S. minister to Spain, and his later work turned increasingly to the American frontier: Astoria (1836) recounts John Jacob Astor's Pacific fur-trading venture, and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837) draws on a U.S. Army officer's own journals of the Rocky Mountain fur trade. He died at his estate, Sunnyside, in Tarrytown, New York.