The Canadian roots of Donald Trump’s wealth

Canadians are well aware that America’s boorish and vulgar president is wealthy.

Donald Trump received a head start in life with money from his father, a real estate developer in New York who bent the rules and skirted legalities while amassing the wealth that he left to his children.

Fred Trump set up trust accounts for his five children, of which Donald Trump was the fourth. By the age of three, he was earning the equivalent of US$200,000 per year in today’s dollars, or about C$276,000. At the time he graduated from college, he was receiving about US$1 million annually (C$1.38 million). By some estimates, he received over US$400 million (C$553 million) from his father.

Most of this is well known. Less well-known are the northern Canadian roots to the family’s fortune. 

In Kallstadt, Germany, in 1885, Donald Trump’s grandfather, Friederich Trump, was 16 years old and didn’t like the thought of working in the family vineyard or as a barber, a job for which he was being trained. So he left a note for his widowed mother and left home one night. He wanted to be rich and headed for Manhattan, eventually becoming an American citizen. 

He moved on to Seattle, where he changed his first name to the more American-sounding Frederick and where he thought the easiest money would be made in the red-light district, known as the Lava Beds. He leased a restaurant, the Poodle Dog, and renamed it the Dairy Restaurant. It had a dining area and a bar, and it advertised “private rooms for ladies.” This was thinly-disguised code for the availability of prostitutes. 

In 1894, he was attracted to an area north of the city named Monte Cristo. He filed a bogus mining claim there and built a cheap hotel that offered food, drink and women.

Three years later, in 1897, he saw newspaper headlines claiming that gold had been discovered in the far North.

He sold his eatery and headed there. The following year, in Bennett, B.C., just south of the Yukon border, he opened a business called the Arctic Restaurant and Hotel. It was a two-story, shoddily-built structure with an impressive façade, where customers could pay their bills with gold dust.

Following the same recipe for success that he had used in the south, Frederick Trump’s business was little more than a brothel.

A reporter for the Yukon Sun wrote, “I would not advise respectable women to go there to sleep as they are liable to hear that which would be repugnant to their feelings and uttered, too, by the depraved of their own sex.” 

His stay there was short. Greener pastures beckoned in Yukon.

Frederick Trump dismantled his flimsily-built hotel in Bennett, loaded it onto a barge, and floated it downriver to Whitehorse. There the Arctic Restaurant occupied a prime location right across from the railway depot. It offered booze and gambling, and of course the company of what were euphemistically called “sporting ladies” in an area curtained off by dark velvet.

The elder Trump made a lot of money in a short time. Whitehorse author Pat Ellis, who wrote Financial Sourdough Starter Stories, said, “He made quick money on booze, and he was a good cook.”

But in 1901 the North-West Mounted Police wanted to curtail gambling and liquor sales, and the business of the “scarlet ladies.”

Frederick Trump left town.

He returned to Germany where he visited his mother and married the girl next door, Elizabeth Christ, in 1902. Shortly thereafter, they immigrated to New York. But Elizabeth became homesick and they returned to Germany. Frederick Trump tried to regain his German citizenship, but was ordered deported.

The couple returned to New York. They had three children. 

When Frederick Trump left Whitehorse, he reportedly had $16,000 in U.S. currency, a sum worth over $600,000 today. He was always careful with money and, in 1910, he began to invest in real estate in Queen’s, a borough of New York City.

He died eight years later, leaving his properties to his wife, who proved to be a capable manager and grew the business.

Eventually his son Fred, who had been only 12 when his father died, took over the enterprise. When he died in 1999, he left a property empire valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

This is the source of Donald Trump’s fortune. It grew from his grandfather’s nest egg, earned through a restaurant, bar and brothel in Whitehorse.

Taissumani is an occasional column that recalls events of historical interest. Kenn Harper is a historian and writer who lived in the Arctic for over 50 years. He is the author of Give Me Winter, Give Me Dogs: Knud Rasmussen and the Fifth Thule Expedition, and Thou Shalt Do No Murder, among other books. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.