Donald Trump’s grandfather, Frederick or Frederich Trump, made his money from operating a decadent restaurant and hotel during the Gold Rush at Klondike in the Yukon.
That’s a nice way of saying it.
“Trump made his first fortune operating boom-town hotels, restaurants, and brothels“, is more accurate, according to the CBC news report, “Donald Trump’s grandfather ran Canadian brothel during gold rush, author says”. Author Gwenda Blair simply wrote, “The bulk of the cash flow came from the sale of liquor and sex.”
Trump’s grandfather was born in Germany, to parents who were employed by a vineyard. He moved to New York City in 1885 where he became a barber. After six years of this, Frederick Trump moved across the United States to Seattle, Washington, where he owned and operated what he referred to as a “decadent restaurant” that was actually called “Poodle Dog” in Seattle’s red light district. Interestingly, the name and concept that had already been established in San Francisco. (He named his restaurant after a dog but would later make money selling horse meat) Around this time Frederick Trump became a US citizen.
A Yukon Sun Newspaper writer described his business: “For single men the Arctic has excellent accommodations as well as the best restaurant in Bennett, but 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”.
Trump moved to Monte Cristo, Wash. in 1894, and then four years later, shortly after the Klondike gold rush began, he relocated again to Bennett, British Columbia. Here he ran the “Actic Restaurant and Hotel”. He would next build the “White Horse restaurant and Inn” in Whitehorse, Yukon.
An article published this year by Politico, explains that Frederick Trump sold off his investments and returned to Germany in 1901, as he sensed the end of the gold rush and a subsequent end to prostitution. The following year, he married his former neighbor, Elizabeth Christ in his native German town of Kallstadt. Then he came under heavy scrutiny by the German government,
The country had compulsory military service for men which had to be fulfilled by the age of 35. Donald Trump’s grandfather waited until he was 35 to go back to Germany. He had already amassed great wealth worth well more than half a million US dollars, or 80,000 marks. While his town council was eager to keep Trump and his money, who billed himself as a man who “avoided bars” and led “a quiet life”, other German authorities had a different plan, the Politico article explains. In their view, Trump had relocated to Germany in order to avoid both tax and military-service obligations.
“…the regional authorities refused to let Trump off the hook. Unlike his grandson, who would become too big to fail in business and, more recently, to ignore in politics, Friedrich Trump was not big enough to get away with being a draft-dodger. He and his wife, then pregnant with Fred, Donald’s father, would not be allowed to resume their German citizenship and it would not be extended to their daughter; instead, they were deported—the same fate that Donald would like to impose on undocumented immigrants in the U.S. today.”
The fact that Donald Trump has done so well in the Republican polls is quite amazing, as the party that we think of as conservative, would be expected to shun a man who created exploitative beauty pageants and was born rich strictly because of the nefarious activities of his ancestors.
