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John
Jacob Astor was the head of the Astor family dynasty and the first millionaire
in the United States, primarily making his fortune in the fur trade, but also in
real estate and opium. Born as Johann Jacob Astor on July 17, 1763 in Waldorf,
Germany, Astor was the third son of a butcher. When he was sixteen he moved to
London to work with his brother who had started a business making musical
instruments. While there, he heard that men were making their fortunes in
America and soon decided to join the flock of immigrants “crossing the pond.”
Arriving
in New York in 1783, Astor first worked as a butcher. However, he soon began to
buy furs from trappers and Indians, establishing a fur goods shop in New York.
In 1794, the Jay Treaty between Great Britain and the United States opened new
markets in Canada and the Great Lakes region.
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By 1795, Astor had purchased a
dozen ships and began a thriving import/export business. Five years later, the
man had amassed almost a quarter of a million dollars, and had become one of the
leading figures in the fur trade.
In 1800, Astor began to trade
not only in furs, but also teas, sandalwood, opium, and other products, with
China. However, in 1807, The Embargo Act disrupted his import/export business.
Undaunted, in 1808, Astor established a new venture – the
American Fur
Company in order to control fur trading in the Columbia River and Great
Lakes areas.
Astor began this ambitious
venture to compete with the two great fur-trading companies in Canada - the
Hudson Bay Company and the North West Company. Initially, Astor's operation in
the Columbia River valley of
Oregon was
under a subsidiary called the Pacific Fur Company and his Great Lakes efforts
were under another subsidiary -- the South West Company.
 In
1810 Astor financed the overland Astor Expedition which would discover South
Pass, through which hundreds of thousands settlers would later travel the
Oregon,
California
and Mormon trails through the Rocky Mountains. In April, 1811, he established
Fort Astoria, the first permanent United States community on the Pacific coast
in present day
Oregon.
The War of 1812 nearly
destroyed Astor’s company and he was forced to sell Fort Astoria, which was
renamed Fort George. However, five years later, in 1817, Congress passed an act
which excluded foreign traders from U.S. territory, making the
American Fur
Company the biggest in the Great Lakes region. In 1821, the company
partnered with the Chouteau interests of
St. Louis,
Missouri,
giving the company a monopoly in the
Missouri
River region and later, in the Rocky Mountains. Growing larger each year, the
American Fur
Company made a practice of buying out small businesses or putting them out
of business with stiff competition, virtually having a market on the entire fur
trade by 1830.
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