by Stark, Peter
Making his way to New York City, Astor quickly turned down his older brother Henry’s offer for a job in his Manhattan meat stall, having heard of more promising ways to make money in America. While on his Atlantic passage, he’d met aboard the ship a friendly fellow German passenger who traded furs. From him John Jacob learned that substantial profits could be made by starting with just a few trinkets to trade for individual pelts, especially if the trader developed good London contacts.
Years later, Astor liked to tell the story of his days as a struggling immigrant in the mid-1780s when he was a young man and the United States only a few years old. One day he walked through Lower Broadway in Manhattan where big, new houses were under construction for the prosperous merchants in the fast-growing city, then with a population of twenty-three thousand, and reaching no farther north than Cortlandt Street, but soon to triple in size.
“I’ll build . . . a grander house than any of these,” he pledged to himself, “and in this very street.”
When Astor arrived in Manhattan and made his pledge, the United States was still very much an inchoate nation a mere six years old. Its thirteen colonies had united and declared themselves separate from Great Britain and had recently fought and won a War of Independence against the mother country, but many of the basic workings of its government were still being settled. When Astor walked Lower Broadway envying the solid houses, the U.S. Constitution hadn’t been adopted, nor had the Bill of Rights. The United States didn’t have its own workable form of money. Taxation remained in a state of confusion. George Washington still hadn’t been chosen president, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison worked on what would become the Federalist Papers, and a youngish and recently widowed Thomas Jefferson held the post of U.S. diplomat in Paris.
The economy likewise was only a tiny fraction of what it would one day become. Slaves worked large plantations in the southeastern states that grew tobacco and cotton, while small-scale farming, fishing, and the beginnings of manufacturing supported the economies of northeastern states. But almost all this economic activity and population clustered on the eastern seaboard within a few hundred miles of the Atlantic Ocean. European settlement had barely crossed the Appalachian Mountains. In interior North America lay an expanse of wilderness, inhabited by Indian tribes, that extended an almost unimaginable distance, much of it unknown and unexplored by Europeans.
But the unformed nature of the young United States also opened up tremendous possibility, economic and otherwise. Upon his arrival in New York, young Astor found a ready market for his fine European musical instruments in a fledgling city hungry for culture. Taking his German shipmate’s advice, he also hung about the New York docks to seek out travelers who had picked up a few individual furs—beaver, bear, fox, whatever—from frontier settlers or Indians in the interior wilds. Within a year or so, he’d accumulated enough furs to make a voyage back to London, where he learned the incredible markups that fashion-conscious patrons would pay for elegant, scarce luxury goods.
Astor showed a precocious grasp of international markets, understanding that America lacked refined manufactories while Europe lacked large expanses of wilderness. Selling the fruits of one to the hungry markets of the other yielded steep profits. Thus the immigrant John Jacob Astor set himself up in the mid-1780s in the small city of Manhattan as the purveyor of an unlikely combination of goods—fine musical instruments and wild-animal pelts. While Astor’s chosen markets might have seemed haphazard, in reality he had identified two powerful economic veins in the young North American economy.
“Jacob Astor [has] just imported an elegant assortment of Piano Fortes,” read one 1788 ad in the New York Packet; “he also buys and sells for Cash all kinds of furs.”
Astor’s competitive nature blossomed early, a trait his own siblings may have inadvertently fostered by displaying both an affectionate and yet also dismissive quality in their dealings with their younger brother. When he first arrived in New York, he worked for a time selling bread and cakes from a basket in the streets. “Jacob was nothing but a baker’s boy,” his older sister would later remark. Later, needing to raise capital to expand his trading of furs and instruments, John Jacob approached his older brother Henry, who virtually controlled retail selling prices in the Manhattan meat stalls by reaching outside the city to buy cheaper meat and using aggressive selling tactics. John Jacob asked his flush older sibling for a loan of two hundred dollars.
“I will give you $100 if you will agree never to ask me to loan you any money,” Henry replied.
It’s easy to imagine John Jacob pledging to out-succeed Henry, as well as outbuild the prosperous merchants with their big houses on Lower Broadway.
Only a year and a half after arriving in America, John Jacob married his landlady’s daughter, Sarah Todd, whose widowed mother ran a boardinghouse at 81 Queen Street. Deeply religious, Sarah Todd displayed a shrewdness for business matters in her own right (Astor called her the best judge of furs he ever knew), and brought to their marriage a dowry of three hundred dollars, which he badly needed for capital, as well as talents that complemented his own. Related to one of New York’s oldest Dutch families, the Brevoorts, Sarah urged the awkward young immigrant with the thick German accent to befriend the city’s prominent traders who hung out at merchants’ coffeehouses like the Tontine at Wall and Water streets, a kind of precursor to the New York Stock Exchange when the city was a small but growing Atlantic port.
Mutually ambitious, both lovers of good music and fond of family life, the couple took two upstairs rooms in Mrs. Todd’s boardinghouse—a room in front for their music-and-fur shop and one in back to sleep. Children soon arrived in this warm and busy household. Sarah’s family had lived in Manhattan for decades and had witnessed the little settlement’s creeping growth northward from the tip of the island. Perhaps it was Sarah who suggested that she and John Jacob invest surplus fur profits in purchasing building lots and bare land farther north up Manhattan Island, beyond the leading edge of the town. Eventually they bought a parcel of largely rural land known—as it still is today—as Greenwich Village, and another property called Eden Farm, which would one day be the site of Times Square and much of Midtown.
JOHN JACOB AND SARAH ASTOR both viscerally understood that, in those early days, the great riches of interior North America were in furs. Furs and land. Where the Spanish conquistadores captured troves of gold and silver far to the south, the early French and British in the cold forests of the north instead had discovered a wealth of mammals growing luxurious coats—beaver, lynx, mink, fox—that fetched staggeringly high prices among Europe’s status-conscious aristocrats. Men killed each other staking claims to fur territory. It was the raison d’être for the great trading companies of the Canadian north, such as the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company.
By the time Astor arrived in North America in the late 1700s, French traders, intermixing with Native Americans, had been gathering furs from the continent’s interior wilds, largely centering on the Great Lakes, for two centuries. Still farther to the north, British merchants had organized the Hudson’s Bay Company, acquiring a royal British monopoly to furs from lands draining into Hudson Bay. The French and British fur traders, guided by Indians, had discovered canoe routes not only through the Great Lakes and Hudson Bay regions, but deep into the continent’s northern and western interior as far as Lake Athabasca, another five hundred miles beyond Hudson Bay. But a great deal of the North American interior, especially to the west, remained unexplored by Europeans.
As Astor delved into the business of buying and selling furs in the 1780s and 1790s, his own travels took him farther from the docks of America’s Atlantic seaports and deeper into the interior. With Sarah’s blessing, the stocky, energetic, young family man John Jacob left their lively household full of young children and boarded sailing sloops on long journeys up the Hudson River to visit the Indian tribes of upstate New York. He walked the forest paths with a backpack of trinkets, or drove
a wagon that bogged down on the muddy tracks. He slept in front of the big kitchen fireplaces in settlers’ wilderness homes. He learned how to barter with Indians, who had been trading goods between tribes for untold centuries and were highly astute bargainers. The conscientious young trader picked up enough of their languages and techniques to close his deals in Seneca, Mohawk, or Oneida.
“Many times,” reminisced an old resident of Schenectady, New York, “I have seen John Jacob Astor with his coat off, unpacking in a vacant yard near my residence a lot of furs he had bought dog-cheap off the Indians. . . .”
Soon Astor’s fur-buying trips took him to Montreal—then the continent’s center of the fur trade, and the portal to the great interior wildernesses where the Canadian companies captured their furs. In Montreal, Astor was wined and dined by the partners of Canada’s North West Company, the more southerly counterpart to the Hudson’s Bay Company, at their luxurious Beaver House. One summer in the mid-1790s the company’s Scottish fur traders invited their valued New York customer, who bought pelts in volume, to accompany them as their guest in a huge voyageur canoe all the way to the key North West Company post at Grand Portage, on the western shore of Lake Superior. This served as the jumping-off point to the waterways of the western interior. Astor thus became one of the few white men in the late 1700s, except for the traders themselves, to travel so deeply into North America’s wild heart.
This journey and his contact with these traders was pivotal in Astor’s life—and the continent’s destiny. Here, at the edge of the great western wilderness, he heard stories directly from the mouths of the coureurs de bois—the French-Canadian “runners of the forest”—and from knowledgeable Indian chiefs of the continent’s vastness and its incredible abundance of furs farther to the west. He gained an understanding of its unmapped western geography—the run of its rivers, the lay of its mountains, and, so very far away, the glimmering Pacific Ocean, which marked the continent’s edge. Only one white man, Alexander Mackenzie, a Scottish trader with the North West Company, and his little party had paddled the northern forests and portaged the mountain spines to see it, arriving at the Pacific in the summer of 1793. At just about the same time, the first British and American trading vessels had begun to explore the fur-trading potential of the continent’s Northwest Coast.
Astor never forgot the vision of continental geography that he glimpsed from the wild western shore of Lake Superior and the stories of the traders who frequented it. He married this vision with the stories he’d begun to hear about the first British and American fur-trading ships landing on the Northwest Coast. These first ships had landed just a few years earlier, starting in 1788, bartered with Coastal Indians for sea otter and other pelts, and taken them across the Pacific to sell in Chinese ports for unheard-of sums. Astor’s genius turned in part on his ability to look far beyond the obvious horizons of time and place and meld fragments of information on geography, politics, and trade potential into a much greater vision. He quickly came to the realization that, one day, a wealthy trading empire would exist on the West Coast of North America. The Pacific Rim would emerge as a new world stage—a much larger version of what the North Atlantic was during his own era, a vast, globally important region ringed by powerful countries and fueled by a busy transoceanic trade.
The question was, whose West Coast empire would it be?
Alexander Mackenzie posed exactly that same question to his British readership in his account of his Canadian overland journey to the Pacific. Writing in his Travels, published in 1801, Mackenzie highlighted the enormous stakes that would go to whichever nation first established settlements on the Pacific Coast and the Columbia River and connected these via an inland water route to the East Coast and the Atlantic. That nation, Mackenzie wrote, would possess “the entire command of the fur trade of North America . . . from latitude 48, North to the pole . . . the fishing of both seas, and the markets of the four quarters of the globe.”
THE MOMENT FOR ASTOR TO ACT on his vision arrived in early 1808. It had been twenty-three years since the immigrant baker’s boy had hawked his cakes on Lower Broadway and enviously eyed the big brick houses. Now a wealthy fur merchant, he lived comfortably in one of them, a double row house at 223 Broadway, just a few steps up the street from St. Paul’s Church. He also worked the profitable tea trade from China with several of his own ships and was a substantial Manhattan landowner. One day that winter of 1808, Astor, still a relatively young man in his mid-forties, sat at his writing desk, dipped his pen, and began a letter of introduction to be dispatched to the Federal City in Washington.
Five years earlier, in 1803, President Jefferson had acquired the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon at bargain prices, and, with Congress’s eventual approval, added to U.S. territory nearly a million square miles up to the Rockies’ spine. Enormous as it was, the Louisiana Purchase still stopped far short of the Pacific Coast. The Northwest remained a mostly unknown and largely unclaimed (by Western powers) region of North America, a piece of real estate roughly the size of Western Europe available by squatters’ rights.
President Jefferson dispatched Lewis and Clark on their 1804–1806 expedition to discover a river route through the new lands and push beyond the Louisiana Purchase border, over the Rockies, and down the mountains’ far slope to the Pacific. He had read Alexander Mackenzie’s 1801 warnings to his British countrymen about the urgent necessity of controlling the Columbia’s mouth and Pacific Coast. With Britain distracted by the Napoleonic Wars, President Jefferson felt compelled to get there first—before his long-hated British, with their “bastard liberty,” and who, as he contemptuously put it, “would not lose the sale of a bale of fur for the freedom of the whole world.”
On his triumphant return to Washington, D.C., Meriwether Lewis strongly urged President Jefferson, as Mackenzie had urged the British, to create a seaport on the Pacific Rim as an outlet to China for furs from the western sector of North America, despite the lack of an easy water route through the Rockies. But President Jefferson felt that the U.S. government by itself had neither the will nor the funds to extend itself far west enough to settle the far edges of the continent. However much he wished to see it, he thought a Pacific Rim seaport was best left to private enterprise.
Astor’s timing was perfect. Not long after Lewis reported in to Jefferson about the need for a port on the Pacific, a letter posted from New York and dated “27 Feb 1808” in a flowing, deeply forward-slanted hand, arrived at the president’s house in Washington.
Sir,
It was my intention to have presented myself before you & to have stated to you my wish of engaging in an extensive trade with the Indians . . . [that] may in time embrace the greater part of the fur trade on this continent the most of which passes now through Canada. . . .
President Jefferson vetted Astor through his New York contacts. He learned that Astor was “a man of large property & fair character, and well acquainted with the fur & peltry business.”
The president replied enthusiastically to Mr. Astor:
The field is immense, & would occupy a vast amount of capital. . . .
You may be assured that in order to get the whole of this business passed into the hands of our own citizens . . . every reasonable patronage & facility in the power of the Executive will be afforded.
Thus introduced to each other via letter, President Jefferson and John Jacob Astor then arranged a meeting at the president’s house in Washington, D.C., in the spring or early summer of 1808.
TWO YEARS LATER, on a warm summer Sunday in 1810, a strange craft came winging from the north down the Hudson River, bearing the first recruits of the great undertaking. Hundreds of spectators—out of the city’s ninety-six thousand people—crowded to the docks that were clustered at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. The huge birch bark canoe, nearly forty feet long, surged through the water far faster than any Yankee rowboat. This was a vessel of the North, the racehorse of the fur trade, propelled by nine French-Canadian
voyageurs who had paddled from the great fur-trading center of Montreal. The canoe jumped forward as they planted each stroke of their blades. Feathers and ribbons fixed to their hats streamed jauntily behind them on the breeze. The lyrics to their French boat songs, chanted in unison to the rhythm of their paddles, punctuated by the lilting solos of the steersman, echoed across the water and rolled along the Hudson’s wooded shores. The Sunday strollers had never seen anything like it.
Dans mon chemin j’ai rencontré
Trois cabalières bien montées*
The canoe glided alongside the lower Manhattan docks, now so packed with spectators—sailors, strolling couples, vagrants, wharf rats, curious young men, mothers and children, stout businessmen—that the voyageurs could barely find a spot to land. They hopped out. With graceful Gallic manners and dipping flourishes of their feathery hats, they cordially greeted the crowd. They were short men—few over five feet six, the better to fold their legs into cargo-jammed canoes. They wore gaudy sashes tied around their waists, from which hung beaded tobacco pouches, easily accessible for their regular pipe breaks while paddling for long days through wilderness lakes and rivers. Deerskin moccasins and leather leggings covered their spindly legs. Their upper bodies, however—arms, shoulders, and torsos—bulged with outsized strength.
Two of the voyageurs now reached down, one at the bow and one at the stern of the canoe that was thinly sheathed with birch bark, its seams stitched with spruce roots and caulked with spruce gum. The two men seized it by the thwarts, plucked it out of the water, and easily slung the giant, dripping hull on their shoulders.
The crowd gasped with astonishment at their strength.
Astor now stepped forward from the crowd. In his mid-forties, he was prosperously stout and dressed simply but emanated a lively energy, intensified by his long shocks of straw-colored hair and bright, curious eyes. In his thick German accent, he greeted this exotic feather-bunted flock. Reaching into his pocket, he approached the two voyageurs hefting the big, featherweight craft.