About this item

In the tradition of The Lost City of Z and Skeleton 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.



About the Author

Peter Stark

Peter Stark is an adventure and exploration writer and historian. Born in Wisconsin, he studied English and anthropology at Dartmouth College, took a master's in journalism from the University of Wisconsin, and headed off to the remote spots of the world writing magazine articles and books. With a home base in Missoula, Montana, he and his family periodically have lived abroad for a year, most recently in a small town in Northeast Brazil.His forthcoming book, "Young Washington: How Wilderness and War Forged America's Founding Father," tells the story of a young and struggling George Washington in the Ohio wilderness of the 1750s. It will be published by Ecco/HarperCollins on May 1st, 2018.His previous book, "Astoria," tells the gripping story of John Jacob Astor's hugely ambitious wilderness expedition to establish the first American colony on the West Coast and a global trade empire. A New York Times bestseller, it received a PEN USA literary award nomination, and has been adapted into an epic, two-part play by Portland Center Stage in Portland, Oregon. A long-time correspondent for Outside magazine, Stark's articles and essays have also appeared in Smithsonian, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Men's Journal, and many others.



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