The Washington Historical Quarterly Volume 1, No. 4 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 Excerpt: ...War extended as far north as San Francisco and Monterey. Spanish mariners, seeking vainly for a transcontinental waterway that should furnish a short route between Spain and India, had by this time become familiar with the Northwest coast up to the modern Sitka, and developed a considerable trade with the natives, chiefly at Nootka Sound, on the western shore of Vancouver's Island; while adventurous Spanish missionaries had contemporaneously penetrated eastward to the Great Basin. Russian trading vessels had ventured southward from Alaska to Nootka Sound. In 1778 Captain Cook touched the Northwest'Coast on his third voyage around the world; and by 1785 traders of several nations--English, American, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese--were plying these waters in a world-wide commerce for furs, and rapidly extending a knowledge of our Western shores and of their savage inhabitants. Such was the situation when Thomas Jefferson--philosopher, seer, statesman--always interested in the Middle West, first felt within him yearnings for a more intimate knowledge of the vast country lying beyond the Mississippi River. That the Province of Louisiana belonged to Spain gave him no pause; he felt that so long as British traders from Canada were exploiting the transMississippi interior, Americans might be excused for opening through this wilderness a trade route to the Pacific, and incidentally extending the bounds of human knowledge in geography and the natural sciences. In 1783 he proposed such an expedition to George Rogers Clark,1 but nothing came of the suggestion. Three years later, when American minister to Paris, he arranged with the adventurous John Ledyard, of Connecticut, who had been with Captain Cook around the globe, to penetrate to the Missouri from the west, a...