In Seventeen Hundred Eighty-six, John Jacob Astor began business on his own account in a little store on Water Street, New York. There were 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 the 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 other 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 flourmills 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 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 a 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 whom 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 sack.