Word: fur
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...financial dealings in encyclopedic detail. Born the son of a butcher in the German village of Walldorf,* Astor took passage for America in 1783, when he was barely 19. Less than six months later, while he was serving as a baker's delivery boy, he bought his first fur pelt on the New York waterfront in exchange for some sugar buns. Aided by a loan from his older brother, Astor established headquarters in the Catskills and trekked westward and northward from there...
Astor wanted a Government-sanctioned monopoly, but he was shrewd enough to know he would never get it from President Jefferson. But with the added respectability of the New York State charter granted him by Clinton, he requested Jefferson's approval of the American Fur Co., and got it in a warm letter praising the patriotic motives of the company...
Scant Records. With that kind of start, Astor never was headed. He poured liquor into the frontier areas on the theory that the trader with the whisky was certain of cornering the market. One by one, the independent dealers went out of business or merged with the American Fur Co. Astor's greed was enormous. If company furs were exported in his own ships, he charged the company for the freight. The trappers who supplied him had to buy their clothes and equipment at American Fur Co. posts at a 300%-to-400% markup. But Astor's personal...
...political connections never failed him, and for good reason. President Monroe was so deeply in debt to Astor personally that he had to sell his slaves to repay him. In return, Monroe rescinded several executive orders damaging to Astor, including one forbidding the employment of foreigners in the fur trade (the American Fur Co. employed more foreigners than any other house). Under pressure from the Astor lobby, Congress obligingly laid extra duties on imported nutria skins, cony, wool and Russian hares, all of which competed with Astor's beavers and muskrats in the hatmaking industry...
Pious Coup. But his greatest coup was driving the Government out of the fur business entirely. Since the turn of the century, Government posts had been trading for furs at far more generous prices than Astor was prepared to pay. With the aid of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, he argued successfully that private enterprise was being threatened, and Congress ordered the Government out of the fur trade. Benton was on Astor's payroll as a "legal representative...