Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.” So goes the oft-invoked refrain of territorial expansion—first over the Appalachian Mountains, then across the Mississippi, and through the Rockies to the Pacific—even as it obscures the true story of migration to our region.
In the late 1770s and into the 1780s, after many colonists on the East Coast rebelled against King George, some found themselves pulled west in pursuit of riches. Long before people traveled overland in wagons to the Louisiana Territory, Texas, New Mexico, or much of the Northwest, sailors boarded minuscule vessels to venture around the tip of South America and up the shoreline of the Americas. Call it an early version of the California dream. They were traders, not settlers, men who had heard a seductive tale that originated with John Ledyard, an irrepressible outdoorsman from Connecticut. Ledyard had enlisted in Captain James Cook’s third and final expedition to the Pacific and was thus among the first Euro-Americans to behold the mysterious northwest coast. He detailed the 1776–1779 voyage in a journal that was published upon his return to the East Coast. In it, he described how sea otter pelts could be obtained from local Indigenous people; transported to Canton, China; and sold there at incredible prices. He declared the Pacific coast–China fur trade to be “the greatest commercial enterprise that has ever been embarked on in this country.”
This article appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
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At the time, China constituted about a third of the world’s population. The Asian behemoth could not help but move markets even if it traditionally sought few products from overseas. But the influence of the Manchus—a ruling dynasty from beyond the Great Wall whose members rode horses and dressed in skins—caused a boom in furs. Among the most prized imports were the pelts of sea otters, marine mammals especially abundant from Alaska to Baja California.
Ledyard’s exciting descriptions of “astonishing profit” planted the seeds of industry. Between 1788 and 1828, New York’s John Jacob Astor and other capitalists launched at least 127 voyages from the East Coast to the Pacific Northwest and China. Yet the sailors were reluctant to abandon their ships and sink roots into the western edge of North America; the fur-trading enterprise required constant movement to locate dwindling sea otter colonies. And given its relative proximity to Asia, some fur traders chose Hawaii for their supply bases.
During the 1790s, the Hawaiian Islands served as a combination food mart, repair shop, recruitment center, and winter abode for traders. Hawaii loomed at the start and end of many early American ventures to the West Coast and China. “The islands”—a usage pointing to their outsize importance—maintained their role as a way station en route to the Far East for decades. A long-running ban on trading with outsiders that was enforced by the West Coast’s Spanish missions, presidios, and settlements also contributed to the Hawaiian Islands’ central role.
Yet by the start of the 19th century, American ships made up 82 percent of documented maritime traffic in coastal California. Eventually, Americans would insert themselves into this corner of the Spanish empire by making a host of claims ranging from broken masts and urgent need of supplies to fierce storms, attacks by Indigenous groups, and other distresses. And owing to overhunting, the trade in sea otter furs would end by about 1820.
But what began with the sartorial choice of China’s ruling dynasty set a precedent for the booms and busts that would distinguish the American West. On January 24, 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill.•
Andrés Reséndez is a history professor at UC Davis and the author of five books, including The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, which was a finalist for a 2016 National Book Award and the winner of a 2017 Bancroft Prize. His latest book is Conquering the Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery.
