This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Whenever I hear that ad about "earning money the hard way," Russell Farnham comes to mind. By the time he arrived in the Rock Island area in 1824 to join George Davenport in the fur trade, he had already outdone any broker at Smith Barney—and Odysseus and Daniel Boone as well.
In 1807, at the age of 23, Russell Farnham was hired by John Jacob Astor to head an exploring expedition to the mouth of the Columbia river in Oregon for Astor's American Fur Company. He was to establish a fort to protect the company business from Russian and English competitors.
Farnham set out from St. Louis with a party of seventy Indians and Europeans. By the time they reached Astoria a year later, blizzards and hostile Indians had killed off all but eight men. Astor had sent two sailing ships around Cape Horn to bring the expedition back home, but Farnham's party, now reduced to three, arrived at the mouth of the Columbia river just in time to see the ships disappearing in the distance. The crews had given up hope of finding them alive.
Russell Farnham's fortunes did not improve. After he killed a Nez Perce Indian whom he caught stealing, Farnham was captured by members of the tribe and taken into Canada. After four years, his captors took him along on a trip to a Russian trading post in Alaska. Here, Farnham was able to send a letter to Astor requesting payment of a ransom for his release. It took the letter another three years to reach Astor and return with the ransom. Farnham then left, traveling across Alaska to Siberia, walking all the way, then from Siberia down through Europe to Denmark, where, ten years after he had left St. Louis, he reported in at the American Fur Company office in Copenhagen.
By sheer necessity, Russell Farnham had become to first man to circle the globe by the overland route. John Jacob Astor was a gentleman about the whole thing. He paid Russell Farnham his full salary for ten years—$1,400. Astor did not even subtract the ransom money.
It was that salary that allowed Russell Farnham to return to the United States and start all over in the fur trade in Rock Island in 1824.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
