Influence
During its heyday, the American Fur Company was one of the largest enterprises in the United States and held a total monopoly of the lucrative fur trade in the country. The company provided the income for the land investments that catapulted John Jacob Astor to the position of richest man in the world and the first multi-millionaire in America. The German-born Astor remains the eighteenth wealthiest person of all time, and the eighth to create that fortune in the United States. He used part of his fortune to found the Astor Library in New York City. Later it merged with the Lenox Library to form the New York Public Library.
On the frontier, the American Fur Company opened the way for the settlement and economic development of the Midwestern and Western United States. Mountain men working for the company improved Native American trails and carved others that led settlers into the West. Many cities in the Midwest and West, such as Astoria, Oregon and Fort Benton, Montana, developed around American Fur Company trading posts. The American Fur Company played a major role in the development and expansion of the young United States.
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Famous quotes containing the word influence:
“For character too is a process and an unfolding ... among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protruberent there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The higher the state of civilization, the more completely do the actions of one member of the social body influence all the rest, and the less possible is it for any one man to do a wrong thing without interfering, more or less, with the freedom of all his fellow-citizens.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)