Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival

Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival

The global business ambitions of John Jacob Astor collide with the reality of one of the corners of the earth farthest from European civilization.

Launched in 1810, the idea was to create the seed of a colony on the west coast of North American - which belonged to no country in that day and age - to take advantage of the fur trade, and, perhaps, to found a new country or further the reach of the nascent United States.  

The expedition was not the success Astor had envisioned, and it would be nearly another 30 years before the Oregon Trail came to see larger numbers of emigrants headed for the Oregon territory.

The book was especially interesting for me, having been born and raised in western Oregon.  As something of a failure, the expedition doesn't get mentioned nearly as much as the Lewis and Clark expedition, or the Oregon Trail of later years.  But it's a fascinating bit of Oregon history.  Part of what did not work out for the expedition was the horrible, gray, damp weather that dominates the northern Oregon coast during winter.

Indeed, the Spanish, who were already in California, apparently were not much interested in the area to the north:

Spaniards first had sailed northward from their colonies in Mexico as far as today’s Oregon in the 1600s. But the cool, wet, rugged Northwest Coast inhabited by Indian tribes living in wooden longhouses and traveling in large cedar canoes didn’t compel them like the benign climates and monumental, gold-encrusted civilizations of the Aztecs and Incas far to the south.

The expedition was a two-pronged approach, with a boat going around Cape Horn and an overland expedition.  It took the overland expedition more than a year to finally reach Astoria, after much wandering.  As was often the case with the earliest white explorers, they very likely would have all perished had it not been for the kindness and hospitality of local Indians at various points on their route.

Without spoiling the story, there was also a fair amount of conflict with other Indian groups.

When both groups had finally arrived at their destination, and settled in, their existence was a bleak one:

Then imagine the rude shock of arrival in the coastal winter or early spring: It’s cold, it’s raining—as it is nearly two hundred days a year at the mouth of the Columbia; the infinite gray coastline stretches away, backed by the thick, dark rain forest—soggy, choked with rotting cedar logs, prehistoric sword ferns, and the dark columns of towering fir and spruce whose outstretched limbs are draped with lichen in giant, ghostly cobwebs. This was a far cry from the euphoric expanses and brilliant starry skies of the high plains, or even the snowy sparkle of the Rockies.

and

...set the mood of life on the Northwest Coast—the anxious, paranoid, exposed life in the dripping rain forest, along the swashing tidal rivers and surf-pounded headlands. This was not a warm, friendly place. In this dank, dark setting, fringed by violent death, personalities like McDougall spied malevolence lurking behind every tree.

As a now former resident of western Oregon, I think these descriptions do the place justice: if you like the sun and aren't a fan of damp weather, it's not a good place to be!

What put the nail in the coffin of the attempted settlement was the war of 1812 and the arrival of a British/Canadian group who (peacefully) took control of the fort and oversaw it for the next 30 some odd years, when the US/Canadian border was settled at its present location.

A few of the French-Canadian members of the expedition, including Marie Dorion, settled in the upper Willamette valley, becoming some of the first non-natives in the area.

An interesting footnote is that ships going around the horn would, rather than crawl up the coast, go to Hawaii and then double back.  The seagoing expedition took on some Hawaiians as crewmen on their way to Oregon.  One can only imagine the shock of going from a tropical paradise to the cold rain of the Pacific Northwest.

I found the book to be a very interesting read and would recommend it, especially if you have any connections to the places involved.

Return of the Outlaw & West of Vermillion

Return of the Outlaw and West of Vermillion

I like to read a western from time to time, to relax and think about a world about as far from technology as possible. C.M. Curtis has written a fine pair of westerns, which are disappointingly hard to find these days.

The good guys are good, the bad guys bad, and there is not a lot of gray in between.  The plots are long and woven around multiple characters, which keeps the books interesting.   Both are set in indeterminate places, with Return of the Outlaw somewhere hot and dry with many Mexican inhabitants, and West of Vermillion seemingly somewhere in the Rockies.

Of the two, I think I prefer West of Vermillion in that it's a bit more complex. Return of the Outlaw is a story of bad guys, and the good guy "who they done wrong" who reclaims what is rightfully his.

If you don't care for westerns, I wouldn't bother, but if you do, these are worth your while.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

http://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-Others/dp/0739341340?tag=dedasys-20

This book had been on my wish list for a while, but I never quite got around to buying it.  On the recommendation of Rob Walling, I finally got around to reading it, and I wish I had done so earlier: it's got lots of great advice on how to more effectively communicate an idea in a way that people will remember it.

The book revolves around a checklist for really sticky ideas: "SUCCESS"

• Simplicity is about boiling your idea down to the core element.  The authors don't claim this is easy, but it is necessary in order to effectively get something across.
• Unexpectedness gets your attention and makes you sit up and take notice.
• Concrete: "sticks to your mind like crazy glue" provides you with something tangible, if not real, that you can picture.  "Improves memory retention 28%" is, on the other hand, very abstract.
• Credibility is how we get people to believe our ideas, perhaps with an authority figure, or with details that make it more real.
• Emotions are really important for convincing people - even those of us who want to believe we make rational, logical decisions
• Stories are much easier to recall and pass along than a series of abstract facts.  Storytelling has been part of the human experience for thousands of years.  Going over a story in your mind also helps someone prepare to act.

That's the really brief version anyway, but each chapter is fairly rich in details and suggestions about the different ways each of these factors comes into play.  This book definitely passes the "business book test" in that way - you'd actually lose out on quite a bit by reading a summary rather than the full book.  Here area few quotes:

This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it.

This point is visited several times, and it's an important one: once you know a lot about something, it's had to remember what it was like to not know all about it.  This can make it very difficult to communicate well with people who don't have all the background knowledge in their heads that you do:

One of the worst things about knowing a lot, or having access to a lot of information, is that we’re tempted to share it all.

I know I'm guilty of that - trying to shotgun blast people with a huge spray of information.  It's too much though, and people will forget all of it.  If on the other hand, you can craft a simple, memorable message that gets to the heart of what you are trying to pass on, it's much more likely to stay with people.