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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.
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Peter Stark is an adventurer and historian. He is the author of
Astoria: Astor and Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire, a
New York Times bestseller and a PEN USA Literary Award finalist. A former correspondent for
Outside magazine, Stark has also been published in
Smithsonian,
The New Yorker,
The New York Times Magazine, and
Men’s Journal. His other books include
Young Washington: How Wilderness and War Forged America’s Founding Father, a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize; and
Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison's Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation. Based in Montana, he and his family have also lived in Mozambique and Brazil.
