The qualities that make a youth a good servant are the basic ones for mastership.Astor's alertness,willingness,loyalty,and ability to obey,delivered his employer over into his hands.
Robert Bowne,the good old Quaker,insisted that Jacob should call him Robert;and from boarding the young man with a near-by war widow who took cheap boarders,Bowne took young Astor to his own house,and raised his pay from two dollars a week to six.
Bowne had made an annual trip to Montreal for many years.
Montreal was the metropolis for furs.Bowne went to Montreal himself because he did not know of any one he could trust to carry the message to Garcia.Those who knew furs and had judgment were not honest,and those who were honest did not know furs.Honest fools are really no better than rogues,as far as practical purposes are concerned.
Bowne once found a man who was honest and also knew furs,but alas!he had a passion for drink,and no prophet could foretell his ''periodic,''until after it occurred.
Young Astor had been with Bowne only a year.He spoke imperfect English,but he did not drink nor gamble,and he knew furs and was honest.
Bowne started him off for Canada with a belt full of gold;his only weapon was a German flute that he carried in his hand.Bowne being a Quaker did not believe in guns.Flutes were a little out of his line,too,but he preferred them to flintlocks.
John Jacob Astor ascended the Hudson River to Albany,and then with pack on his back,struck north,alone,through the forest for Lake Champlain.As he approached an Indian settlement he played his flute.The aborigines showed no disposition to give him the hook.He hired Indians to paddle him up to the Canadian border.He reached Montreal.
The fur traders there knew Bowne as a very sharp buyer,and so had their quills out on his approach.But young Astor was seemingly indifferent.His manner was courteous and easy.
He got close to his man,and took his pick of the pelts at fair prices.He expended all of his money,and even bought on credit,for there are men who always have credit.
Young Astor found Indian nature to be simply human nature.
The savage was a man,and courtesy,gentleness and fairly good flute-playing soothed his savage breast.Astor had beads and blankets,a flute and a smile.The Indians carried his goods by relays and then passed him on with guttural certificates as to character,to other red men,and at last he reached New York without the loss of a pelt or the dampening of his ardor.
Bowne was delighted.To young Astor it was nothing.He had in his blood the success corpuscle.He might have remained with Bowne and become a partner in the business,but Bowne had business limitations and Astor had n't.
So after a three years'apprenticeship,Astor knew all that Bowne did and all he himself could imagine besides.So he resigned.
In Seventeen Hundred and Eighty-six,John Jacob Astor began business on his own account in a little store on Water Street,New York.There was 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 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.
