Word: jacob
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Inspired by the discovery of paintings showing the fur trade, "Across the Wide Missouri" follows the climax and downward spiral of a gigantic enterprise. Beaver, a million coats and hats, was the lure. From 1832 to 1838 the industry reached a peak in both volume and competition. John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company pulled all the steps to squash its competitors and they all combined against Britain's Hudson's Bay Company. Willful trapping destroyed the beaver, glutted the market and prices dropped. In a short time Astor was left holding the field...
...ability was his only passport to a raw life that revolved around beaver, whiskey, and squaws. The mountain men opened a territory and thereby insured their own extinction. Contrast the trappers with Nat Wyeth, a shrewd New England merchant with big ideas. 'On paper Wyeth was approximating John Jacob Astor." Theory wouldn't work in the Rockies and Wyeth returned without his fortune...
Characteristically, Brooks is far more successful in bringing to life Whitman's optimistic, spacious, fervent democratic faith than Melville's tortured, Jacob-like wrestling with his own soul. He casts a wishful haze over mid-19th Century American life...
...Hollywood, Producer Sam Goldwyn got good news: the U.S. Treasury reported that he had overpaid his 1945 income tax by $383,4071n Manhattan, gourd-shaped John Jacob Astor, 35, well-known for his ancestors, lay abed with cracked vertebrae, after skidding on a polished floor and bumping downstairs...
...John Jacob Astor and Mrs. Elizabeth Cullum, a granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton...