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This body, influenced by the public uproar over the transaction, refused to recognize Astor's title. The whole State was aroused to a pitch of indignation. Astor's claim was generally regarded as an audacious piece of injustice and robbery.
Furs and skins were casually collected by the country traders in their dealings with the Indians or the white hunters, but the main supply was derived from Canada. As Mr. Astor's means increased, he made annual visits to Montreal, where he purchased furs from the houses at that place engaged in the trade.
None of these traders became wealthy; Astor's company absorbed the profits. It required its clerks, or factors, to pay an advance of 81-1/2 per cent on the sterling cost of the blankets, strouds, and other English goods, in order to cover the cost of importation and the expense of transportation from New York to Mackinaw.
But most of Astor's employees were British subjects derived from men of the North-west and Mackinaw Companies; and when, in 1812, war broke out between the United States and Great Britain, a British war vessel came up the Pacific coast to Astoria and promptly turned it into "Fort George". Forthwith the North-west Company bought up the derelict property of Mr.
Astor's earnest injunctions with regard to the natives been attended to. Had this ship performed her voyage prosperously, and revisited Astoria in due time, the trade of the establishment would have taken its preconcerted course, and the spirits of all concerned been kept up by a confident prospect of success.
Vincent Astor and William Dobbyn, Colonel Astor's secretary, greeted her and hurried her to a waiting limousine which contained clothing and other necessaries of which it was thought she might be in need. The young woman was white-faced and silent. Nobody cared to intrude upon her thoughts. Her stepson said little to her. He did not feel like questioning her at such a time, he said.
"I don't know anything, except that she can't lie this way much longer." His harsh voice faltered and his stern mouth trembled. He laid the hands back, went to the window and stood there till the room grew dusky and the lamp was brought in. As Nellie closed the door after her, the doctor came to the hearth, and said sharply "I would not be in your place for John Jacob Astor's fortune."
It is of the greatest importance to ascertain Astor's methods in his fur trade, for it was fundamentally from this trade that he reaped the enormous sums that enabled him to become a large landowner. What these methods were in his earlier years is obscure. Nothing definite is embodied in any documentary evidence.
The result was precisely the same as in the West, except that the consequences were not so overt, and the perpetration could not be so easily distinguished. In the West, death marched step by step with Astor's accumulating fortune; so did it in the East, but it was not open and bloody as in the fur country.
Although apparently innocent and in accord with the laws and customs of the times, Astor's real estate transactions were inseparably connected with consecutive evasions, trickeries, frauds and violations of law. Extraordinarily favorable as the law was to the propertied classes, even that law was constantly broken by the very classes to whom it was so partial.
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