Books: The First Tycoon

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FURS BY ASTOR by John Upton Terrell. 490 pages. Morrow. $6.95.

Folklore assumes that in the mind of the American Indian the Great White Father meant the President of the U.S. Not necessarily so, says John Terrell. During the 1820s and 1830s, at any rate, the Great White Father was a stumpy man with beaked nose, pursed mouth and billowing chins named John Jacob Astor.

As president of the American Fur Co., Astor ruled the closest thing to a private empire ever established in America. Most of the fur-trading tribes —the Winnebagos, Cherokees, Chickasaws and Sioux—were in perpetual hock to him, and they had a habit of going into battle with medals bearing his likeness strung about their necks. Astor's puffy face, in fact, was thought to be a more powerful talisman than a scalp or even a medicine bonnet.

The man was short of education and loutish of manner; even after he had become the richest man in the country and an intimate of statesmen, he ate ice cream and peas with his knife and wiped his fingers on his neighbors' clothing. But the territory he controlled was larger than Western Europe, its security was protected by strings of private forts erected and maintained by Astor, its commerce was served by a vast private fleet that carried countless thousands of furs to Europe, China, India and South America. In matters of border disputes over the fur trade, the government of Great Britain preferred to deal with Astor rather than with the Government in Washington.

Butcher's Son. Author Terrell tells the story of America's first tycoon in breathless prose that only hints at the character of the man but that traces his serpentine financial dealings in encyclopedic detail. Born the son of a butcher in the German village of Walldorf,* Astor took passage for America in 1783, when he was barely 19. Less than six months later, while he was serving as a baker's delivery boy, he bought his first fur pelt on the New York waterfront in exchange for some sugar buns. Aided by a loan from his older brother, Astor established headquarters in the Catskills and trekked westward and northward from there.

Astor was not a particularly original thinker, Author Terrell believes, but he thoroughly understood something his competitors did not—the value of political influence. In 1808 he appealed to the patriotism of Governor DeWitt Clinton of New York, pointing out to him that three-quarters of the furs purchased in the U.S. were supplied by Canadian companies. A company establishing its headquarters in New York and extending its operations to the Pacific, Astor pointed out, would have the advantage over the Canadians of shorter lines of communication, enabling it to secure the trade for the U.S. and to stabilize the territory.

Astor wanted a Government-sanctioned monopoly, but he was shrewd enough to know he would never get it from President Jefferson. But with the added respectability of the New York State charter granted him by Clinton, he requested Jefferson's approval of the American Fur Co., and got it in a warm letter praising the patriotic motives of the company.