This Week in History

On April 6th, 1808, German immigrant John Jacob Astor founds the American Fur Company in New York City. 


Astor also created the Pacific Fur Company as a subsidiary, intending to connect his holdings on the Great Lakes and interior waterways of the west to a port on the Pacific Ocean. He found s a young and able administrator named Wilson Price Hunt to lead an overland expedition following Lewis and Clark’s route westward. Hunt struck out from St. Louis in the fall of 1810 with fifty-nine adventurers despite lacking meaningful experience leading expeditionary parties and predictably getting much more than he had bargained for in the process. He reached Oregon with just fifty-four of the original party, one of whom became mentally ill from the stress of the journey. The stresses included nightly raids from indigenous tribes, extreme hunger, and a general lack of assurance as to the correct route westward.
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Hunt made it and established the outpost of Astoria, Oregon. He was then forced to abandon it when war broke out with the British in 1812. What did this wayward wanderer and man of adventure do next? He opened a shop in St. Louis and later became the postmaster there. Yawn, right? In economic terms, Wilson Price Hunt evaluated the amount of money he would receive for continuing to take extreme risks and found it not worthwhile. Oh, that some of today’s investors took similar stock of their own risk premium. Perhaps, they too, might opt for more yawning and less craziness. But the good news is, there has not been a better time to be conservative/boring in the last two decades. And you don’t need to be a business genius like Astor to see that.