what led john jacob astor to corner the fur-trading market?
The man who made the American fur merchandise pre-eminent had a golden touch that stretched across North America.
John Jacob Astor, the man well-nigh closely associated with the American fur merchandise and whose proper name is a synonym for wealth surpassing imagination, became involved in the business without ever setting a trap. The German-born immigrant to the United States, who rose from obscurity to build a fiscal empire, typifies the bully American success story.
Fur became an item of not bad economic importance to the development of America, just information technology was politically of import also. The being of French Canada depended upon the profits of the fur merchandise. France was non going to spend money on an unproductive outpost, and it was fur that kept Canada solvent. The beaver became a cistron of empire, and battles were fought and treaties delayed over who was to control admission to prime number trapping areas. The future of North America depended on the flashing paddle and the beaver trap as much every bit it did on muskets and bayonets.
By 1756, the fur trade was so well established that it survived the upheaval of the French and Indian War with little alteration. The routes to the west continued to run from Hudson's Bay, where an English company was dominant; from New York City up to Albany and out past the Great Lakes to the Illinois country; and the greatest route of all, from Montreal up the Ottawa River, out across Georgian Bay and the Great Lakes, and past the settlement of Grand Portage to the river systems in the heart of the continent.
Later on their victory in the French and Indian State of war, the British ran the fur trade largely as their predecessors had done. From the eastern depots came the annual fleet of canoes belongings 12 men and four tons of appurtenances. At the western end of the Smashing Lakes they were replaced by the northern canoes; in these the traders penetrated equally far every bit the foothills of the Rockies where they wintered and traded with the Indians. As the water ice broke upwards in the jump, the trappers from the w would head for K Portage with their furs. There they met their eastern partners with European goods and drank, fought, feasted, and settled accounts for the year.
Because the pelts were better farther to the due north, the southern trade to the Illinois country was the weakest of the iii areas. But the drawing of an artificial boundary line correct across the heart of the trade and the later quarrel between the Hudson's Bay Visitor and the Montreal-based Northwest Company served every bit an advantage to the American traders. Together they helped make John Jacob Astor one of the richest men in Due north America.
The 3rd son of a butcher, John Jacob was built-in in Walldorf in the Duchy of Baden, Germany, in 1763. His father was a ne'er-do-well, merely his female parent was industrious and frugal to the point of parsimony, though the family often went in rags. The eldest son, George, left home for England, where he fix in the musical instrument business organization. The side by side son, Henry, before long departed for New York Urban center where he became a butcher like his father. John Jacob remained at the small family holding until 1780; by then his mother had died and his male parent had remarried. When relations between John Jacob and his stepmother became strained, he left his begetter'southward house with what money he had to seek his fortune. He headed out on foot for the Rhine Valley.
Young Astor worked his mode down the Rhine River on a timber barge, and by the time he reached salt water he had plenty coin to pay for passage to London. At that place he went to work with his brother George, learning to make musical instruments. He mastered the English linguistic communication and gathered all the information he could about the then-rebellious American colonies. Past the end of the American Revolution in 1783, John Jacob Astor had saved plenty money for passage to the new United States. He took ship in November with almost $25, seven flutes every bit stock-in-merchandise, and a ticket giving him a berth in the crew's quarters.
It was the typical eighteenth-century passage across the Atlantic Ocean, about eight weeks of cold and misery before the ship entered Chesapeake Bay late in January–just in time to be frozen in the ice for ii months. Astor was not 1 to turn down opportunities, fifty-fifty in mid-body of water; on the passage he met another German language emigrant who had been to Northward America before, and who had dealt successfully in the fur trade. He questioned the man extensively, and by the time the ice had melted from the bay, Astor was sure the fur merchandise was for him.
He reached New York in March 1784, and perchance no 21-year-old approaching the urban center has e'er been more determined to make his fortune than John Jacob Astor; certainly few take more completely fulfilled their appetite.
Around 1785 he married Sarah Todd, who was connected to one of the old Dutch families. To the marriage she brought a dowry of $300.00, a keen business organisation sense, and an adept eye for furs. It may accept been the dowry that enabled Astor to gear up a shop of his own, for in 1786 he opened a store on Water Street where he sold musical instruments and bought furs. The Astors tended strictly to business, living frugally, and devoting themselves nearly exclusively to making coin. Astor himself often left the shop in his married woman's intendance while he went off to the borderland.
Within a few years he knew the fur merchandise well and had established connections, not simply throughout the American Northwest territories, merely also in Montreal, which was the heart of the trade. He gained a great advantage over his competitors in 1796 when Jay'south Treaty, betwixt the United States and Keen Great britain, was put into forcefulness. Prior to that information technology had been agreed that neither British nor American traders were to exist hindered by the international boundary. Jay's Treaty did away with that; the British were already beginning their fourth dimension-honored practice of seeking American friendship at Canada'due south expense, and the Canadian fur traders were left in the lurch.
Their misfortune was Astor'southward proceeds. He and the United States would aggrandize together. Astor not merely took over territory that had been closed to the Canadians, he was so clever enough to make a bargain with the Northwest Visitor so that he could import goods through them. Thanks to the treaty makers, he was able to insert himself into the American terminate of the Canadian trade. Past 1800, Astor was recognized as the leading American merchant in the fur trade and was thought to be worth a quarter of a million dollars. He was still only outset.
By at present Astor was starting to human action and look similar a comfortable capitalist. He moved into a new house in New York Urban center and established worldwide connections, becoming the very picture of early nineteenth-century American merchant enterprise. His horizons were always expanding, at to the lowest degree equally far as profits were concerned.
Soon afterwards the turn of the century, he became interested in the Orient. American ships were just starting their Prc merchandise, and Astor, on a visit to London, obtained from a friend a license to trade in whatever East India Company port. Armed with this mandate, Astor persuaded another friend in New York to join in his venture, and they sent a merchandise ship to Canton, Cathay. When it returned successfully, Astor's share of the profit was $50,000. New vistas were opening up earlier him, though fur was still his primary involvement. Part of his profit from the venture into People's republic of china went into the purchase of real estate in New York City, belongings that later proved to exist the real basis of the Astor fortune.
Some idea the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 was an act of folly for the immature republic, but Astor was not one of them. With that immense territory under Usa control, it became possible to see the fur merchandise extending all the way to the Pacific coast. The return of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1806 added fuel to his ambition, and by the next year he and his agents were fighting to drive the Canadian fur traders out of the upper Mississippi Valley.
These were the years of Astor's peak activity. In 1808 he incorporated as the American Fur Visitor, a move that consolidated his holdings and prepared for an all-out assail on the Far West. He was not, of course, without competition, and it was really the antagonism of the fur traders of St. Louis that led him into his most grandiose scheme.
By this time, the best fur lands were being establish farther to the west. In the Usa traders were in the Rockies already, and in Canada they were working to the due north and toward the mountains. The increasing length of the journeying from the Great Lakes area to the W cut into the profits of the trade, shortened the time that could be spent among the Indian tribes, and mostly narrowed the margin on which the traders operated.
A western entrance to the trading areas had long been desired, but to this point, none had been plant. Canadians had already searched; a Scottish Canadian named Alexander MacKenzie had gear up out for the Pacific from the Athabasca country in 1780, but he did not reach it. Instead he found the Arctic by what he called the River of Disappointment–today's MacKenzie River.
In 1793-94, he tried again, and this fourth dimension he almost reached his goal. He wanted to find the Columbia River, and American and Canadian history might have been different had he done so. Merely he was a couple of hundred miles north of his aim when he crossed the Continental Separate, and instead of the easy Columbia, he found the turbulent and unnavigable Fraser River. The Canadians kept trying; an employee of the Northwest Company, David Thompson, was deep in the Rockies, surveying, exploring, and preparing a last bulldoze to the Columbia River.
Montreal was itself nigh in the heart of the continent, and to the Canadians it was logical to notice a western terminal as an extension of their already existing trade network. To Astor, it was less sensible to expedition all the way across the continent than to sail southward around South America and land at the back door. He would do information technology the easy manner.
Information technology took more than a year to formulate his plans. This was not to be a one-shot stab in the dark; it was to be a big enterprise, and Astor foresaw the depot he hoped to establish on the Columbia River as the focus of the whole western trade. Even Astor did not have the money for the venture lone, and he approached the Northwest Company with his project, offering the organization a 1-3rd interest in his proposed Pacific Fur Company.
Officially the Northwest Company was uninterested; it was feeling its manner to the declension, and was confident that in any struggle it could control the surface area. Even so, iii old members of the visitor agreed to join Astor. Internal dissension was a role of the history of the Northwest Company, and there were always Montreal men around who, for i reason or another, had been squeezed out. The articles of incorporation of the Pacific Fur Visitor were signed in June of 1810, and the venture was ready to be launched.
In the spring of 1811 the ship Tonquin arrived on the Pacific coast, and a fort was built at the mouth of the Columbia River. The traders named it subsequently their employer, and thus Astoria was born. Six weeks later on the American flag had been hoisted over the lilliputian stockade, a political party of white men came downwards the river from the interior–David Thompson and his fellows of the Northwest Company. He had lost time in surveying one river as well many, and so the Oregon coast became American instead of Canadian.
Astor'southward plan for his fur empire was actually world-broad. He proposed to ship out one or two ships a year from New York around Cape Horn to Oregon. These ships would conduct American manufactured goods for trading with the Indians. The furs obtained in this exchange would not render to New York, however, other ships would carry them to the all-time marketplace for fur, the Orient. At Canton they would be traded for Oriental goods. These in plow would exist carried through the Indian Ocean to Europe. There they would be traded–e'er at a profit–for European goods that would and then be brought beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. The scheme had a great deal to recommend it and deserved to succeed.
Unfortunately for Astor, however, it was a failure. One of the ships was lost to an explosion, with all easily. There were difficulties with the Indians, and the outbreak of the State of war of 1812 and the disruption of normal trading patterns were altogether too much for the enterprise. In 1813 an expedition of the Northwest Visitor, commissioned by the British government in Canada, arrived and demanded the cession of the fort. Astor's agent sold it to them for $58,000, succumbing to a combination of military and business organization force per unit area.
Aside from the premature demise of the Pacific Fur Company, Astor had little cause to regret the State of war of 1812. His ain involvement in it, as always, was economic profit. Because of connections in Washington, D.C., he was able to secure concessions allowing him, in effect, to keep the fur trade in Canada throughout the war.
During the disharmonize, Astor bought upwards Canadian furs at a better price and less risk than London merchants and made enormous profits from them in New York. Ostensibly these furs were from American belongings owned in the Northwest at the time of the outbreak of war. In 1812, Astor amassed $50,000 worth of raw furs. That was his poorest twelvemonth of the war.
The fur merchandise continued to exist basic to his interests, merely he never let his profits lie idle. By the end of the war, the United states of america government was on the brink of bankruptcy. Astor'southward response, together with a consortium of assembly from Philadelphia, was to purchase high-interest bonds with debased currency, and he emerged from the war in far better shape than the Federal Government. At the aforementioned fourth dimension, he enlarged his New York Urban center holdings so that by the time peace was made, Astor was immensely wealthy and fix to take over virtually the whole of the American fur trade.
Now, Astor once again looked beyond the Mississippi River to the Westward. He helped persuade Congress in 1816 to pass an human action excluding Canadians from the American fur trade unless employed by an American company. Astor so bought out the holdings of the Northwest Company inside American territory for a fraction of its worth. The company was at that point engaged in a struggle with the Hudson's Bay Company and was in no status to defend itself.
Five years later, trading competition in the Missouri River state was all but nonexistent, leaving the surface area practically free for Astor. The St. Louis interests tried to fight him for a while, simply they lacked the strength for a long contest and were finally captivated. Astor pushed farther west yet and challenged Jim Bridger's Rocky Mount Fur Company for its territory. This was a hard-fought and vigorous competition; Bridger and his people knew their land, were effective traders, and were most as unscrupulous as Astor'southward men.
By the late 1820s, the fur trade was starting time to die. Geography and economics were working against it. The distances and costs were becoming too great for the returns, and in Europe styles were changing and the price of furs was in turn down. Perhaps because his business acumen never left him, or considering he was getting tired, Astor determined to leave the trade, and in June 1834, he sold all of his commercial interests. He spent the concluding 14 years of his life administering his estate, until his expiry in 1848.
If his astuteness never left him, neither did his dear of money. He died the richest human in America past far, leaving an manor estimated at more than $20,000,000. Washington Irving thought him a great human being; Astor'southward official biographer, James Parton, considered him ruthless and selfish, but added, he was "one of the ablest, boldest, and about successful operators that e'er lived." His obituary printed in the New York Herald stated that he "exhibited at best but the ingenious powers of a self-invented money-making machine."
In his later on years, Astor tried to laissez passer himself off equally a liberal humanitarian, but the pose was too unnatural, and it never became credible. To the end, money was his passion, and to make it his men evicted widows and debauched Indians. Though some writers, notably in the tardily nineteenth century, have regarded him as a great American hero, history has not accepted the verdict. Today, in a more complex era, Americans ask more than of their heroes than the power to make money.
James 50. Stokesbury specializes in Canadian-American History.
Source: https://www.historynet.com/john-jacob-astor-fur-empire/
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