mother country fought for the Northwest as the field of Indian trade in
all the wars from 1689 to 1812. The management of the Indian trade led
the government under the lead of Franklin and Washington into trading on
its own account, a unique feature of its policy. It was even proposed by
the Indian Superintendent at one time that the government should
manufacture the goods for this trade. In providing a new field for the
individual trader, whom he expected the government trading houses to
dispossess, Jefferson proposed the Lewis and Clarke expedition, which
crossed the continent by way of the Missouri and the Columbia, as the
British trader, Mackenzie, had before crossed it by way of Canadian
rivers. The genesis of this expedition illustrates at once the
comprehensive western schemes of Jefferson, and the importance of the
part played by the fur trade in opening the West. In 1786, while the
Annapolis convention was discussing the navigation of the Potomac,
Jefferson wrote to Washington from Paris inquiring about the best place
for a canal between the Ohio and the Great Lakes.[250] This was in
promotion of the project of Ledyard, a Connecticut man, who was then in
Paris endeavoring to interest the wealthiest house there in the fur
trade of the Far West. Jefferson took so great an interest in the plan
that he secured from the house a promise that if they undertook the
scheme the depot of supply should be at Alexandria, on the Potomac
river, which would be in connection with the Ohio, if the canal schemes
of the time were carried out. After the failure of the negotiations of
Ledyard, Jefferson proposed to him to cross Russia to Kamschatka, take
ship to Nootka Sound, and thence return to the United States by way of
the Missouri.[251] Ledyard was detained in Russia by the authorities in
spite of Jefferson's good offices, and the scheme fell through. But
Jefferson himself asserts that this suggested the idea of the Lewis and
Clarke expedition, which he proposed to Congress as a means of fostering
our Indian trade.[252] Bearing in mind his instructions to this party,
that they should see whether the Oregon furs might not be shipped down
the Missouri instead of passing around Cape Horn, and the relation of
his early canal schemes to this design, we see that he had conceived the
project of a transcontinental fur trade which should center in Virginia.
Astor's subsequent attempt to push through a similar plan resulted in
the founda