nd Indian War, and
the Revolution soon following, tended to discourage the aspirations
of the adventurers, and the organization finally lapsed. Western land
speculators were as active in those days as now, and Washington was
chief among them. We find him first interested in the valley, through
broad acres acquired on land-grants issued for military services in
the French and Indian War; Revolutionary bounty claims made him a
still larger landholder on Western waters; and, to the close of the
century, he was actively interested in schemes to develop the region.
We are not in the habit of so regarding him, but both by frequent
personal presence in the Ohio valley, and extensive interests at stake
there, the Father of his Country was the most conspicuous of Western
pioneers. Dearly did Washington love the West, which he knew so well;
when the Revolutionary cause looked dark, and it seemed possible that
England might seize the coast settlements, he is said to have cried,
"We will retire beyond the mountains, and be free!" and in his
declining years he seemed to regret that he was too old to join his
former comrades of the camp, in their colony at Marietta.

As early as 1754, Franklin, in his famous Albany Plan of Union for the
colonies, had a device for establishing new states in the West, upon
lands purchased from the Indians. In 1773, he displayed interest in
the Walpole plan for another colony,--variously called Pittsylvania,
Vandalia, and New Barataria--with its proposed capital at the mouth
of the Great Kanawha. There were, too, several other Western colonial
schemes,--among them the Henderson colony of Transylvania, between
the Cumberland and the Tennessee, the seat of which was Boonesborough.
Readers of Roosevelt well know its brief but brilliant career,
intimately connected with the development of Tennessee and Kentucky.
But the most of these hopeful enterprises came to grief with the
political secession of the colonies; and when the coast States ceded
their Western land-claims to the new general government, and the
Ordinance of 1787 provided for the organization of the Territory
Northwest of the River Ohio, there was no room for further enterprises
of this character.[A]

The story of the Ohio is the story of the West. With the close of the
Revolution, came a rush of travel down the great river. It was more or
less checked by border warfare, which lasted until 1794; but in
that year, Anthony Wayne, at the Battle o