Irving’s Astoria and the Forms of Enterprise

Abstract

Washington Irving’s Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprise beyond the Rocky Mountains (1836), is usually read, when it is read at all, as a lament for an unrealized empire and a call for further US expansion. The wide-ranging text narrates John Jacob Astor’s designs for a Pacific fur empire, the foundation of the American Fur Company (AFC), the two voyages—by sea and by land—that he commissioned to found a trading fort at the mouth of the Columbia River, and the eventual sale of Fort Astoria during the War of 1812 to the Montreal-based North West Company (NWC). Near the end of Astoria, Irving sounds an elegiac note: “In a word, Astoria might have realized the anticipations of Mr. Astor, so well understood and appreciated by Mr. Jefferson, in gradually becoming a commercial empire beyond the Mountains, peopled by ‘free and independent Americans, and linked with us by ties of blood and interest’” (596).1 The tension in Jefferson’s words—between national identity and commercial empire—pervades Irving’s text.