Email us for help
Loading...
Premium support
Log Out
Our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy have changed. We think you'll like them better this way.
Friedrich Trump left Germany at age 16 and arrived in New York but soon migrated out west in search of riches.
The gold fever carried him to Bennet, British Columbia-Canada, where, along w/business partner, Ernest Levin, they constructed The Arctic Hotel + Restaurant in 1898 on Front Street. Within a couple of years they made a small fortune selling booze and offering "sporting ladies" to the tired + thirsty gold miners of that area. With an estimated 100,000 prospectors setting out for the Klondike Gold Country Of Northern Canada there was plenty of money to be made providing "services" to these men.
It was open around the clock w/“private boxes for ladies and parties,” according to an advertisement in the Dec. 9, 1899 edition of the Bennett Sun newspaper. The boxes typically included a bed and scale for weighing gold dust used to pay for “services,” according to a three-generational biography by Gwenda Blair, who traced the origins of Trump family’s wealth. Of course, in rough-and-tumble frontier towns of that era, the Arctic’s business model built on food, booze and sex was common.
When a train route came through the area, it drastically diminished influx of miners into Bennett, Friedrich + partner literally took the hotel apart, plank by plank & relocated it further north in town of Whitehorse to carry on business as usual.
Friedrich left Whitehorse in 1901 and after unsuccessfully trying to relocate to his native Kallstadt, Germany, ended up moving to Queens, NYC and used his Gold Rush money to invest in vacant lots around the New York area. By this time, Friedrich was a wealthy man. He had accumulated enough wealth, equivalent to a half a million euros in 2014 terms, to end up funding the Trump family's first residential real estate investments in the New York area.
Thus, the origin of the Trump family wealth
