It is of the greatest importance to ascertain Astor's methods in his fur trade, for it was fundamentally from this trade that he reaped the enormous sums that enabled him to become a large landowner. What these methods were in his earlier years is obscure. Nothing definite is embodied in any documentary evidence. Not so, however, regarding the methods of the greatest and most successful of his fur gathering enterprises, the American Fur Company. The "popular writer" referred to before says that the circumstances of Astor's fur and shipping activities are well known. On the contrary, they are distinctly not well known nor have they ever been set forth. None of Astor's biographers have brought them out, if, indeed, they knew of them. And yet these facts are of the most absolute significance in that they reveal the whole foundation of the colossal fortune of the Astor family. The pursuit and slaughter of fur animals were carried on with such indefatigable vigor in the East that in time that territory became virtually exhausted. It became imperative to push out into the fairly virgin regions of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers and of the Rocky Mountains. The Northwest Company, a corporation running under British auspices, was then scouring the wilds west and northwest of the Great Lakes. Its yearly shipments of furs were enormous.[74] Astor realized the inconceivably vaster profits which would be his in extending his scope to the domains of the far West, so prolific in opportunities for furs. In 1808 he incorporated the American Fur Company. Although this was a corporation, he was, in fact, the Company. He personally supplied its initial capital of $500,000 and dictated every phase of its policy. His first ambitious design was to found the settlement of Astoria in Oregon, but the war of 1812 frustrated plans well under way, and the expedition that he sent out there had to depart.[75] Had this plan succeeded, Astor would have been, as he rightly boasted, the richest man in the world; and the present wealth of his descendants instead of being $450,000,000 would be manifold more. MONOPOLY BASED ON FORCE.