rate, he fired the ambition of his hearer, and the
latter decided to enter the fur business without delay. Upon landing in
New York, therefore, he at once secured a position in the shop of a
Quaker furrier, and after learning all the details of the business,
opened a shop of his own.

Perhaps no one ever worked harder in establishing a business than John
Jacob Astor did. Early and late he was at his shop, except when absent
on long and arduous purchasing expeditions into the wilderness. More
than that, he possessed admirable business judgment, so that, after
fifteen years of work, he had succeeded in accumulating a fortune of a
quarter of a million dollars. With careful and sagacious management, the
business prospered so that Astor was soon able to send his furs to
Europe in his own vessels, and bring back European goods. And about this
time, he began working on a grandiose and picturesque enterprise.

The English Hudson Bay Company, established many years before, with
hundreds of trappers and traders and scores of trading-posts, controlled
the rich fur business of Canada and the northwest. We have seen how,
years after the events which we are now narrating, the agents of the
company tried to save Oregon for England and how Marcus Whitman foiled
them. Astor's plan, in outline, was to render American trade independent
of the Hudson Bay Company by establishing a chain of trading-posts from
the great lakes to the Pacific, to plant a central depot at the mouth of
the Columbia river, and to acquire one of the Sandwich Islands and
establish a line of vessels between the western coast of America and
the ports of Japan, China and India. Surely a man who could conceive a
plan like that was something more than a mere trader, and Astor
proceeded at once to carry it into effect.

Two expeditions were sent out, one by land and one by sea, to open up
intercourse with the Indians of the Pacific coast, and the settlement of
Astoria was planted at the mouth of the Columbia river. Whether Astor
would have been able to carry out the remainder of his plan is purely
problematical, for before he had it fairly under way, the war of 1812
began, and he was forced to abandon the enterprise. The story of this
far-reaching project has been told by Washington Irving in his
"Astoria." Until his death, he continued to enlarge and increase his
business, and left a fortune estimated at twenty millions of dollars.

The Astor plan of investment is one