10 THE FUR TRADERS. 



simply make the system self-sustaining, instead of dealing 

 with traders who, in spite of their presents and plausible 

 representations, were taking every advantage of his ignor- 

 ance, and at the same time slandering one another to such 

 a degree that the disgusted Indian finally became hostile 

 to all Americans and traded entirely with the British 

 agents who lived near the boundary. The overthrow of the 

 factory system in March, 1822, as the result of this "open 

 competition" of individual traders with the Government, 

 robbed responsible American merchants of their main out- 

 let for Indian supplies, and demonstrated that in a field 

 "free for all" there is bound to be a commercial rivalry, in 

 which it is not always the strongest or even the fittest, but 

 very often the most unscrupulous who survive. Under 

 such conditions even a monopoly is better than unrestrained 

 competition. 



What the Government failed to do was accomplished later 

 by a private individual. John Jacob Astor, who was born 

 at Waldorf, near Heidelberg, Germany, on July 17, 1763, 

 had settled in New York in 1783; and after profitably 

 disposing of the stock of musical merchandise which he had 

 brought over with him from London, had followed the ad- 

 vice given him by a traveling companion and invested his 

 capital in peltries, which he bought at Montreal and ship- 

 ped to London and China. When the treaty of 1795 ceded 

 to the United States, the military posts formerly occupied 

 by the British, at Oswego, Niagara, Detroit, Machilimack- 

 inac, and other points on the American side of the Great 

 Lakes,' Mr. Astor, who had been very successful in his 

 trading operations, saw an opportunity to gratify a long- 

 cherished ambition to secure a monopoly of the fur trade 

 in the United States. He began establishing trading posts 

 of his own at the points mentioned, and along the Missouri 

 and Nebraska Rivers into the country where the Missouri 

 Company was operating. The situation then confront- 

 ing Mr. Astor was this: The Hudson's Bay and North- 

 west Companies, who were struggling for supremacy in 

 1 the country northwest from Lake Superior, had extended 

 their southern line of operations well into the United 

 States territory. The Mackinaw Company with other 

 traders controlled the territory about the upper lakes, 

 and westward to the Mississippi. The trade along the 



