ition to these,
Astor saw that his profits could be still further increased by investing
the money that he received from the sale of his furs in England, in
English goods and importing them to the United States. By this process,
the profit from a single beaver skin could be made to reach ten dollars.
At that time the United States depended upon British manufactures for
many articles, especially certain grades of woolen goods and cutlery.
These were sold at exorbitant profit to the American people. This trade
Astor carried on in his own ships.

HIS METHODS IN BUSINESS.

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. Not so, however, regarding the
methods of the greatest and most successful of his fur gathering
enterprises, the American Fur Company. The "popular writer" referred to
before says that the circumstances of Astor's fur and shipping
activities are well known. On the contrary, they are distinctly not well
known nor have they ever been set forth. None of Astor's biographers
have brought them out, if, indeed, they knew of them. And yet these
facts are of the most absolute significance in that they reveal the
whole foundation of the colossal fortune of the Astor family.

The pursuit and slaughter of fur animals were carried on with such
indefatigable vigor in the East that in time that territory became
virtually exhausted. It became imperative to push out into the fairly
virgin regions of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers and of the Rocky
Mountains. The Northwest Company, a corporation running under British
auspices, was then scouring the wilds west and northwest of the Great
Lakes. Its yearly shipments of furs were enormous.[74] Astor realized
the inconceivably vaster profits which would be his in extending his
scope to the domains of the far West, so prolific in opportunities for
furs.

In 1808 he incorporated the American Fur Company. Although this was a
corporation, he was, in fact, the Company. He personally supplied its
initial capital of $500,000 and dictated every phase of its policy. His
first ambitious design was to found the settlement of Astoria in Oregon,
but the war of 1812 frustrated plans well under way, and the expedition
that