Astor by Anderson Cooper EPUB & PDF

Astor by Anderson Cooper EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online

• Status: Available for Free Download
• Author: Anderson Cooper
• Language: English
• Genre:History eBooks of Women
• Format: PDF / EPUB
• Size: 22.86 MB
• Price: Free

New York
1784
He who has the most whiskey generally carries off the most furs.
—Colonel Josiah Snelling
Tricking a beaver into resting one tender paw in just the right place took
skill and cunning, and John Jacob Astor employed both when kindling his
fortune to life.

Beavers can weigh as much as sixty pounds, and they live along rivers
and in ponds in dense lodges they make themselves. They are the only
animals (apart from humans) to take an active role in reshaping the
landscape to suit their needs. The lodges have multiple entrances and exits
under the surface of the water, part of a complex network built for hiding
and making quick escapes, designed to hold teeming masses of warm,
breathing life, not unlike a hotel or tenement house.

The traps used to catch them in the years of the blossoming North
American fur trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
were made of steel, forged by blacksmiths into two semicircular jaws,
occasionally toothed, connected by a spring. The traps could cost as much
as six dollars each, which was a chunk of change at the time—more than a
hundred dollars in today’s currency.

1 Clanking, they were carried in sacks
by trappers, slung over the flank of a mule or chucked into the bottom of a
canoe paddled up the Missouri River and portaged overland. When the traps
were pried open, the jaws were held under extreme tension by a trigger,
called a “dog,” which was released when a beaver’s paw pressed the metal
pan at the center, causing the jaws to clamp shut with a sharp, metallic snap
and hold the startled animal fast.

2.Trappers positioned the yawning steel jaws in a few inches of water, on
the shore of a pond or river.

3 Attached to each trap, a forged metal chain of
several feet would be held by a wooden stake driven into the silty mud
deeper in the water. The trapper would then take a twig, splintered at one
end and perhaps with a few leaves or pine needles still clinging to it, and
dip it into the “medicine” he carried in a small bottle made of animal horn.

4.The “medicine,” a musky aroma designed to lure a passing beaver in for a
sniff, would be the trapper’s own proprietary blend of castoreum (the
yellowish, waxy substance beavers exude from sacs at the base of their tails
to scent-mark their territory) and other additions of his own devising—
camphor, maybe, or juniper oil or other arcane ingredients.

5 Trappers
guarded their medicine recipes with a tenacity known only, perhaps, by the
Coca-Cola Company a hundred years later. Once the twig was dipped into
the secret scent, the trapper would place it in the mud along the water’s
edge, dangling it at beaver nose height, only a foot or so away from death.
If the trap clamped on a paw only, the desperate beaver could still get
free—if it was able to gnaw its own limb off through the bone. But if the
trap hit higher on the animal’s leg, sinking its teeth into a haunch,

For More Read Download This Book

EPUB