and arrived at St.
Petersburgh after the empress had left that place to pass the winter, I
think, at Moscow. His finances not permitting him to make unnecessary
stay at St. Petersburgh, he left it with a passport from one of the
ministers; and at two hundred miles from Kamschatka, was obliged to take
up his winter quarters. He was preparing, in the spring, to resume his
journey, when he was arrested by an officer of the empress, who by this
time had changed her mind, and forbidden his proceeding. He was put into
a close carriage, and conveyed day and night, without ever stopping,
till they reached Poland; where he was set down and left to himself. The
fatigue of this journey broke down his constitution; and when he
returned to Paris his bodily strength was much impaired. His mind,
however, remained firm, and he after this undertook the journey to
Egypt. I received a letter from him, full of sanguine hopes, dated at
Cairo, the fifteenth of November, 1788, the day before he was to set out
for the head of the Nile; on which day, however, he ended his career and
life: and thus failed the first attempt to explore the western part of
our northern continent.

In 1792, I proposed to the American Philosophical Society that we should
set on foot a subscription to engage some competent person to explore
that region in the opposite direction; that is, by ascending the
Missouri, crossing the Stony mountains, and descending the nearest river
to the Pacific. Captain Lewis being then stationed at Charlottesville,
on the recruiting service, warmly solicited me to obtain for him the
execution of that object. I told him it was proposed that the person
engaged should be attended by a single companion only, to avoid exciting
alarm among the Indians. This did not deter him; but Mr. Andre Michaux,
a professed botanist, author of the Flora Boreali-Americana, and of the
Histoire des Chesnes d'Amerique, offering his services, they were
accepted. He received his instructions, and when he had reached Kentucky
in the prosecution of his journey, he was overtaken by an order from the
minister of France, then at Philadelphia, to relinquish the expedition,
and to pursue elsewhere the botanical inquiries on which he was employed
by that government: and thus failed the second attempt for exploring
that region.

In 1803, the act for establishing trading houses with the Indian tribes
being about to expire, some modifications of it were recommended to
co