Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen | Page 4

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.

Until the year Eighteen Hundred, Astor lived over his store in Water
Street, but he then moved to the plain and modest house at Two
Hundred and Twenty-three Broadway, on the site of the old Astor
House. Here he lived for twenty-five years.
The fur business was simple and very profitable. Astor now was
confining himself mostly to beaver- skins. He fixed the price at one
dollar, to be paid to the Indians or trappers. It cost fifty cents to prepare
and transport the skin to London. There it was sold at from five to ten
dollars. All of the