Donald Trump’s Grandfather: German Immigrant Friedrich Drumpf Amassed Fortune Setting Up Brothels
Donald Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich Drumpf, was a German immigrant who amassed his fortune setting up brothels near mines in New York.
Daily Mail researched more about Trump’s family history and how his story resulted in him becoming the massively successful billionaire he is today.
Donald Trump steadfastly remains the Republican presidential front-runner and has a hard-line stance to deport illegal immigrants. Ironically, his own grandfather was an immigrant who left his native Germany for New York City at the age of 16. He boarded a boat headed for America in 1885 to join his older sister where they could find work.
Does Donald Trump even know his grandfather’s life story? https://t.co/MjToIL2Pcz pic.twitter.com/FggqYSvYui
— The Conversation (@ConversationUK) February 28, 2016
According to the report, Friedrich Drumpf — who later changed his name to “Fred Trump” — came to the U.S., where he went from being a barber who lived in a small apartment for six years to setting up a number of brothels and restaurants near mines in the northwest and Canada at the height of the Klondike gold rush.
After he settled in Seattle in 1891, the Trump patriarch launched the brothel, The Poodle Dog. It was situated among liquor stores and opium parlors. From there he took the business a few miles closer to where workers were in the mining town of Monte Crisco. It was only the first of many profitable decisions he made.
When the gold rush emerged, Trump and a friend — Ernest Levin — moved on starting their business in a tent located where travelers had to reach the mine on White Pass, also known as “Dead Horse Trail.” The area was known for being incredibly difficult for horses to travel on due to narrow trails, steep hills, and atrocious terrain. Up to 3,000 horses died from starvation, injuries, or falling off cliffs.
The former Friedrich Drumpf and Levin made use of the dead animals by cooking horse meat for businessmen who ventured into the region to inspect mines. Eventually, they moved the business to a two-storey building in Bennett Town and called it New Arctic Restaurant and Hotel. Twenty-four hours of liquor and women on sale translated into a big success. A vast array of foods, drinks, and so forth made it a raging hit since it was a pinnacle of luxury over what the other two restaurants offered patrons on the trail.
“Customers depended on him for food, liquor, and women,” writes Gwenda Blair, the Trump biographer. Blair described Friedrich as “hard living and hard drinking.”
A local deemed the Arctic “depraved” in a letter to the Yukon Sun newspaper and advised “respectable women traveling alone” to avoid it.
The local added in the letter that the Arctic had “excellent accommodations as well as the best restaurant in Bennett” for single men, highly advised that respectable women should not 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.”
The Arctic’s location was no longer a bustling place of business by the time a railroad in 1897 linked Skagway and Whitehorse to their Bennett Town location. At that point, Trump rebuilt the New Arctic on Whitehorse’s Front Street.
Canadian magazine Up Here reported that the restaurant and brothel was open around the clock. It served as many as 3,000 meals a day to the men who’d come in and women working its bars and bedrooms.
A Chip Off Ye Olde Block: Donald Trump’s Grandfather Was A Really Nasty Guy https://t.co/NeniYBjzS9 pic.twitter.com/EU1Dhb3K3M
— Liberal America Org (@LibAmericaOrg) February 25, 2016
Things for Trump and Levin were beginning to sour as Levin had a penchant for booze and started racking up debts up around town. With three good years of business behind him around the Pacific Northwest and Canada, Trump cashed out and never looked back. His earnings from the Arctic gave him enough funds to travel back to Germany.
During the time Donald Trump’s grandfather was in the United States, he dodged army service and avoided having to pay taxes back home in Germany. He tried returning home to Kallstadt to marry a woman who was once his neighbor — Elizabeth Christ — but he was refused repatriation due to forfeiting his citizenship by emigrating. Fred Trump then married Christ and went to New York City to start a family.
In 1905, Donald Trump’s father — Fred Trump, Jr. — was born.
Donald Trump’s grandfather died in Queens at the age of 49 during the Spanish flu epidemic. The senior Trump had made a fortune of $31,642.54, according to his will as seen on Ancestry.com. Back then, that amount was equivalent to $542,000. Fred Trump, Sr. left his money to Elizabeth, and she used that to go into business with her eldest son, Fred, Jr.; he was 15 at the time.
Donald Trump has taken over the Trump empire from his father.
According to KIRO 7, Blair explains that Trump isn’t that interested in talking about the past.
“He was not very interested in talking about history, his grandfather,” Blair said. “Donald is a guy who’s looking forward. He does not have a rear view mirror. He very much was interested in talking about his own, considerable accomplishments.”
It’s been said that very successful people are the types who don’t look back, but forward. Donald Trump is emblematic of this, even when it comes to his own family history.
[AP Photo/Brynn Anderson]
