Washington Irving's Problems With History and Romance in Astoria
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8895213 |
|---|---|
| Authors | I S Maclaren (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1990 |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 1-14 |
| Publication date | 1990-05-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras-021-01-01 |
| OpenAlex | W2077058642 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 4 |
The stories of these Sinbads of the wilderness made the life of a trapper perfect romance to me."1 Thus Washington Irving introduced his account of Astoria, the first American attempt at continental commercialism. John Jacob Astor, a Rhenish immigrant who became the United States's first businessman "to attain colossal wealth," launched his dream from New York over a three-and-one-half year period beginning in the summer of 1810, when a ship load of landlubbering fur traders set off round Cape Horn to rendezvous near the mouth of the Columbia River with a boat brigade travelling overland from St. Louis.2 As its scene grew ever more remote, the dream darkened into nightmare: the commercial vision of not only a transcontinental but a pan-Pacific fur trade ran afoul of a series of misfortunes, lamentable misdirection and poor execution
Art · Art history · Dream · French horn · Literature · Romance · Sociology · Wilderness · Australian History and Society · Canadian Identity and History · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History
| Highly cited | No |
|---|