The Life and Ventures of the Original John Jacob Astor

These webpages contain the full book The Life and Ventures of the Original John Jacob Astor by Elizabeth Louisa Gebhard.

John Jacob Astor (1763-1848) was the first multi-millionaire in the United States. In today's dollars, he would have been worth about $100 to $200 billion. This puts him in the same league as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie. However, the name Astor is not as well-known. This is despite the many lessons that can be learned from his life. His life took place in a chaotic era. It was the time of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars. During all these events, Astor managed to establish a fur trading empire.

This book was originally written in 1915, which makes the language sometimes hard to read. Yet, the old-fashioned language does convey a sense of the time in which Astor lived, so we decided to publish the original text.