University of Virginia Library

JOHN JACOB ASTOR was the youngest of four sons, and as many daughters. The brothers ran away early in life, and went to sea or joined the army. One of these boys came to America, and followed his father's trade of butcher.

Jacob Astor, the happy father of John Jacob, used to take the boy with him on his pig-killing expeditions. This for two reasons—one, so the lad would learn a trade, and the other to make sure that the boy did not run away.

Parents who hold their children by force have a very slender claim upon them. The pastor of the local Lutheran Church took pity on this boy, who had such disgust for his father's trade and hired him to work in his garden and run errands.

The intelligence and alertness of the lad made him look like good timber for a minister.

He learned to read and was duly confirmed as a member of the church.

Under the kindly care of the village parson John Jacob grew in mind and body—his estate was to come later. When he was seventeen, his father came and made a formal demand for his services. The young man must take up his father's work of butchering.

That night John Jacob walked out of Waldorf by the wan light of the moon, headed for Antwerp. He carried a big red handkerchief in which his worldly goods were knotted, and in his heart he had the blessings of the Lutheran clergyman, who walked with him for half a mile, and said a prayer at parting.

To have youth, high hope, right intent, health and a big red handkerchief is to be greatly blessed.

John Jacob got a job next day as oarsman on a lumber raft.

He reached Antwerp in a week. There he got a job on the docks as a laborer. The next day he was promoted to checker-off. The captain of a ship asked him to go to London and figure up the manifests on the way. He went.

The captain of the ship recommended him to the company in London, and the boy was soon piling up wealth at the rate of a guinea a month.

In September, Seventeen Hundred and Eighty-three, came the news to London that George Washington had surrendered. In any event, peace had been declared—Cornwallis had forced the issue, so the Americans had stopped fighting.

A little later it was given out that England had given up her American Colonies, and they were free.

Intuitively John Jacob Astor felt that the "New World" was the place for him. He bought passage on a sailing ship bound for Baltimore, at a cost of five pounds. He then fastened five pounds in a belt around his waist, and with the rest of his money—after sending two pounds home to his father, with a letter of love—bought a dozen German flutes.

He had learned to play on this instrument with proficiency, and in America he thought there would be an opening for musicians and musical instruments.

John Jacob was then nearly twenty years of age.

The ship sailed in November, but did not reach Baltimore until the middle of March, having to put back to sea on account of storms when within sight of the Chesapeake. Then a month was spent later hunting for the Chesapeake. There was plenty of time for flute-playing and making of plans.

On board ship he met a German, twenty years older than himself, who was a fur trader and had been home on a visit.

John Jacob played the flute and the German friend told stories of fur trading among the Indians.

Young Astor's curiosity was excited. The Waldorf-Astoria plan of flute-playing was forgotten. He fed on fur trading.

The habits of the animals, the value of their pelts, the curing of the furs, their final market, was all gone over again and again. The two extra months at sea gave him an insight into a great business and he had the time to fletcherize his ideas. He thought about it—wrote about it in his diary, for he was at the journal-age. Wolves, bears badgers, minks, and muskrats, filled his dreams.

Arriving in Baltimore he was disappointed to learn that there were no fur traders there. He started for New York.

Here he found work with a certain Robert Bowne, a Quaker, who bought and sold furs.

Young Astor set himself to learn the business—every part of it. He was always sitting on the curb at the door before the owner got around in the morning, carrying a big key to open the warehouse. He was the last to leave at night. He pounded furs with a stick, salted them, sorted them, took them to the tanners, brought them home.

He worked, and as he worked, learned.

To secure the absolute confidence of a man, obey him. Only thus do you get him to lay aside his weapons, be he friend or enemy.

Any dullard can be waited on and served, but to serve requires judgment, skill, tact, patience and industry.

The qualities that make a youth a good servant are the basic ones for mastership. Astor's alertness, willingness, loyalty, and ability to obey, delivered his employer over into his hands.

Robert Bowne, the good old Quaker, insisted that Jacob should call him Robert; and from boarding the young man with a near-by war widow who took cheap boarders, Bowne took young Astor to his own house, and raised his pay from two dollars a week to six.

Bowne had made an annual trip to Montreal for many years.

Montreal was the metropolis for furs. Bowne went to Montreal himself because he did not know of any one he could trust to carry the message to Garcia. Those who knew furs and had judgment were not honest, and those who were honest did not know furs. Honest fools are really no better

than rogues, as far as practical purposes are concerned. Bowne once found a man who was honest and also knew furs, but alas! he had a passion for drink, and no prophet could foretell his "periodic," until after it occurred.

Young Astor had been with Bowne only a year. He spoke imperfect English, but he did not drink nor gamble, and he knew furs and was honest.

Bowne started him off for Canada with a belt full of gold; his only weapon was a German flute that he carried in his hand. Bowne being a Quaker did not believe in guns. Flutes were a little out of his line, too, but he preferred them to flintlocks.

John Jacob Astor ascended the Hudson River to Albany, and then with pack on his back, struck north, alone, through the forest for Lake Champlain. As he approached an Indian settlement he played his flute. The aborigines showed no disposition to give him the hook. He hired Indians to paddle him up to the Canadian border. He reached Montreal.

The fur traders there knew Bowne as a very sharp buyer, and so had their quills out on his approach. But young Astor was seemingly indifferent. His manner was courteous and easy.

He got close to his man, and took his pick of the pelts at fair prices. He expended all of his money, and even bought on credit, for there are men who always have credit.

Young Astor found Indian nature to be simply human nature.

The savage was a man, and courtesy, gentleness and fairly good flute-playing soothed his savage breast. Astor had beads and blankets, a flute and a smile. The Indians carried his goods by relays and then passed him on with guttural certificates as to character, to other red men, and at last he

reached New York without the loss of a pelt or the dampening of his ardor.

Bowne was delighted. To young Astor it was nothing. He had in his blood the success corpuscle. He might have remained with Bowne and become a partner in the business, but Bowne had business limitations and Astor had n't.

So after a three years' apprenticeship, Astor knew all that Bowne did and all he himself could imagine besides. So he resigned.

In Seventeen Hundred and Eighty-six, John Jacob Astor began business on his own account in a little store on Water Street, New York. There was one room and a basement. He had saved a few hundred dollars; his brother, the butcher, had loaned him a few hundred more, and Robert Bowne had contributed a bale of skins to be paid for "at thy own price and thy own convenience."

Astor had made friends with the Indians up the Hudson clear to Albany, and they were acting as recruiting agents for him. He was a bit boastful of the fact that he had taught an Indian to play the flute, and anyway he had sold the savage the instrument for a bale of beaver pelts, with a bearskin thrown in for good measure. It was a musical achievement as well as a commercial one.

Having collected several thousand dollars' worth of furs he shipped them to London and embarked as a passenger in the steerage. The trip showed him that ability to sell was quite as necessary as the ability to buy—a point which with all of his shrewdness Bowne had never guessed.

In London furs were becoming a fad. Astor sorted and sifted his buyers, as he had his skins. He himself dressed in a suit

of fur and thus proved his ability as an advertiser. He picked his men and charged all the traffic would bear. He took orders, on sample, from the nobility and sundry of the gentry, and thereby cut the middleman. All of the money he received for his skins, he invested in "Indian Goods"—colored cloth, beads, blankets, knives, axes, and musical instruments.

His was the first store in New York that carried a stock of musical instruments. These he sold to savages, and also he supplied the stolid Dutch the best of everything in this particular line from a bazoo to a Stradivarius violin.

When he got back to New York, he at once struck out through the wilderness to buy furs of the Indians, or better still, to interest them in bringing furs to him. He knew the value of friendship in trade as no man of the time did.

He went clear through to Lake Erie, down to Niagara Falls, along Lake Ontario, across to Lake Champlain and then down the Hudson. He foresaw the great city of Buffalo, and Rochester as well, only he said that Rochester would probably be situated directly on the Lake. But the water-power of the Genesee Falls proved a stronger drawing power than the Lake Front. He prophesied that along the banks of the Niagara Falls would be built the greatest manufacturing city in the world. There were flour-mills and sawmills there then. The lumber first used in building the city of Buffalo was brought from the sawmills at "The Falls."

Electric power, of course, was then a thing unguessed, but Astor prophesied the Erie Canal, and made good guesses as to where prosperous cities would appear along its line.

In Seventeen Hundred and Ninety, John Jacob Astor married Sarah Todd. Her mother was a Brevoort, and it was

brought about by her coming to Astor to buy furs with which to make herself a coat. Her ability to judge furs and make them up won the heart of the dealer. The marriage brought young Astor into "the best Dutch New York society," a combination that was quite as exclusive then as now.

This marriage was a business partnership as well as marital and proved a success in every way. Sarah was a worker, with all the good old Dutch qualities of patience, persistence, industry and economy. When her husband went on trips she kept store. She was the only partner in which he ever had implicit faith. And faith is the first requisite in success.

Captain Cook had skirted the Pacific Coast from Cape Horn to Alaska, and had brought to the attention of the fur-dealing and fur-wearing world the sea-otter of the Northern Pacific. He also gave a psychological prophetic glimpse of the insidious sealskin sacque.

In Seventeen Hundred and Ninety, a ship from the Pacific brought a hundred otterskins to New York. The skins were quickly sold to London buyers at exorbitant prices.

The nobility wanted sea-otter, or "Royal American Ermine," as they called it. The scarcity boomed the price. Ships were quickly fitted out and dispatched. Boats bound for the whale fisheries were diverted, and New Bedford had a spasm of jealousy.

Astor encouraged these expeditions, but at first invested no money in them, as he considered them "extra hazardous." He was not a speculator.