oyage in 1775, when he sighted the mouth of a river supposed to be the
Columbia.

{242}

CHAPTER IX

1778-1790

JOHN LEDYARD, THE FORERUNNER OF LEWIS AND CLARK

A New England Ne'er-do-well, turned from the Door of Rich Relatives,
joins Cook's Expedition to America--Adventure among the Russians of
Oonalaska--Useless Endeavor to interest New England Merchants in Fur
Trade--A Soldier of Fortune in Paris, he meets Jefferson and Paul Jones
and outlines Exploration of Western America--Succeeds in crossing
Siberia alone on the Way to America, but is thwarted by Russian Fur
Traders

When his relatives banged the door in his face, turning him destitute
in the streets of London, if John Ledyard could have foreseen that the
act would indirectly lead to the Lewis and Clark exploration of the
great region between the Mississippi and the Pacific, he would
doubtless have regarded the unkindness as Dick Whittington did the cat,
that led on to fortune. He had been a dreamer from the time he was
born in Groton, opposite New London, Connecticut--the kind of a dreamer
whose moonshine lights the path of other men to success; but his
wildest dreams never dared the bigness of an empire many times greater
than the original states of the Union.

{243} Instead he had landed at Plymouth, ragged, not a farthing in the
bottom of his pockets, not a farthing's possession on earth but his
hopes. Those hopes were to reach rich relatives in London, who might
give him a lift to the first rung of the world's climbers. He was
twenty-five years old. He had burned his ships behind him. That is,
he had disappointed all his relatives in America so thoroughly that he
could never again turn for help to the home hands.

They had designed him for a profession, these New England friends. If
Nature had designed him for the same thing, it would have been all
right; but she hadn't. The son of a widowed mother, the love of the
sea, of pathless places, of what is just out of sight over the dip of
the horizon, was in his blood from his father's side. Friends thought
he should be well satisfied when he was sent to live with his
grandfather at Hartford and apprenticed to the law; but John Ledyard
hated the pettifogging of the law, hated roofed-over, walled-in life,
wanted the kind of life where men do things, not just dicker, and
philosophize, and compromise over the fag-ends of things other men have
done. At twenty-one years of age, without any