John Jacob Astor, the man most closely associated with the American fur trade and whose 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 financial empire, typifies the great American success story.

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Fur became an item of great economic importance to the development of America, but it was politically important as well. The existence of French Canada depended upon the profits of the fur trade. France was not going to spend money on an unproductive outpost, and it was fur that kept Canada solvent. The beaver became a factor of empire, and battles were fought and treaties delayed over who was to control access to prime trapping areas. The future of North America depended on the flashing paddle and the beaver trap as much as 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.

After their victory in the French and Indian War, the British ran the fur trade largely as their predecessors had done. From the eastern depots came the annual fleet of canoes holding 12 men and four tons of goods. At the western end of the Great Lakes they were replaced by the northern canoes; in these the traders penetrated as far as the foothills of the Rockies where they wintered and traded with the Indians. As the ice broke up in the spring, the trappers from the west would head for Grand 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 north, the southern trade to the Illinois country was the weakest of the three areas. But the drawing of an artificial boundary line right across the heart of the trade and the later quarrel between the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Montreal-based Northwest Company served as an advantage to the American traders. Together they helped make John Jacob Astor one of the richest men in North America.

The third son of a butcher, John Jacob was born in Walldorf in the Duchy of Baden, Germany, in 1763. His father was a ne’er-do-well, but his mother 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 set up in the musical instrument business. The next son, Henry, soon departed for New York City 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 father had remarried. When relations between John Jacob and his stepmother became strained, he left his father’s house with what money he had to seek his fortune. He headed out on foot for the Rhine Valley.

Young Astor worked his way down the Rhine River on a timber barge, and by the time he reached salt water he had enough money to pay for passage to London. There he went to work with his brother George, learning to make musical instruments. He mastered the English language and gathered all the information he could about the then-rebellious American colonies. By the end of the American Revolution in 1783, John Jacob Astor had saved enough money for passage to the new United States. He took ship in November with about $25, seven flutes as stock-in-trade, 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 two months. Astor was not one to pass up opportunities, even in mid-ocean; on the passage he met another German emigrant who had been to North 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 trade was for him.

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