Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival Read Free Page A

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.
    J OHN J ACOB AND S ARAH A STOR 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