Comparatively inexpensive manufactured goods were to be shipped to commercial stations for trade with various Indigenous nations for fur pelts.

The sizable number of furs collected were then to be brought to the port of Canton, as pelts were in high demand in the Qing Empire.

This was planned in part to prevent the rival Montreal based NWC to gain a presence along the Pacific Coast, a prospect neither the Russian colonial authorities or Astor favored.

Before John Jacob Astor founded his enterprise in the Oregon Country, European descendants throughout previous decades had suggested creating trade stations along the Pacific Coast.

Peter Pond, an active American fur trader, offered maps of his explorations in modern Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories to both the United States Congress and to Henry Hamilton, Lieutenant Governor of Quebec in 1785.

While it has been conjectured that Pond wanted funding from the Americans to explore the Pacific Coast for the Northwest Passage,[5] there is no documentation of this and it is more likely that he had sent a copy of the map to Congress due to personal pride.

In it he called for "a supreme Civil & Military Establishment" on Nootka Island, with two additional posts located on the Columbia River and another in the Alexander Archipelago.

Forming establishments on the Pacific shoreline to harness the economic potential would be "my favorite plan" as Henry described in a letter to a New York merchant.

In correspondence with the Mayor of New York City, DeWitt Clinton, Astor explained that a state charter would offer a particular level of formal sanction needed in the venture.

[5] He in turn requested the Federal government grant his operations military support to defend against Indians and control these new markets.

The bold proposals were not given official sanction however, making Astor to continue to promote his ideas among prominent governmental agents.

Astor gave a detailed plan of his mercantile considerations, declaring that they were designed to bring about American commercial dominance over "the greater part of the fur-trade of this continent..."[5] This was to be accomplished through a chain of interconnected trading posts that stretching across the Great Lakes, the Missouri River basin, the Rocky Mountains, and ending with a fort at the entrance of the Columbia River.

The chief representative of Astor in the daily operations was Wilson Price Hunt, a St. Louis businessman with no outback experience.

[18] Cargo ships en route from the Columbia were planned to then sail north for Russian America to bring much needed provisions.

[4] A tentative agreement for merchant vessels owned by Astor to ship furs gathered in Russian America into the Qing Empire was signed in 1812.

This was done in a manner that "the Americans were forced to acknowledge that Astor's dream" of a multi-continent economic web "had been realized... by his enterprising and far-sighted competitors.

For a time, it seemed that the company had been destroyed but, following the war, the United States passed a law excluding foreign traders from operating on U.S. territory.

Through his profits from the company, John Jacob Astor made numerous, lucrative land investments and became the richest man in the world and the first multi-millionaire in the United States.

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 Fort Benton, Montana, and Astoria, Oregon developed around American Fur Company trading posts.