Dearborn on the present site of Chicago. Astor commended this, and
said: "From a fort you get a trading post, and from a trading post you
will get a city."

He pointed out to Jefferson the site, on his map, of the Falls of St.
Anthony. "There you will have a fort some day, for wherever there is
water-power, there will grow up mills for grinding grain and sawmills,
as well. This place of power will have to be protected, and so you
will have there a post which will eventually be replaced by a city."
Yet Fort Snelling was nearly fifty years in the future and St. Paul and
Minneapolis were dreams undreamed.

Jefferson took time to think about it and then wrote Astor thus, "Your
beginning of a city on the Western Coast is a great acquisition, and I
look forward to a time when our population will spread itself up and
down along the whole Pacific frontage, unconnected with us, excepting
by ties of blood and common interest, and enjoying like us, the rights
of self-government."

The Pilgrim Fathers thought land that lay inward from the sea as
valueless. The forest was an impassible barrier. Later, up to the
time of George Washington, the Alleghanies were regarded as a natural
barrier. Patrick Henry likened the Alleghany Mountains to the Alps
that separated Italy from Germany and said, "The mountain ranges are
lines that God has set to separate one people from another."

Later, statesmen have spoken of the ocean in the same way, as proof
that a union of all countries under an international capital could
never exist.

Great as was Jefferson, he regarded the achievement of Lewis and Clarke
as a feat and not an example. He looked upon the Rocky Mountains as a
natural separation of peoples "bound by ties of blood and mutual
interest" but otherwise unconnected. To pierce these mighty mountains
with tunnels, and whisper across them with the human voice, were
miracles unguessed. But Astor closed his eyes and saw pack-trains,
mules laden with skins, winding across these mountains, and down to
tide-water at Astoria. There his ships would be lying at the docks,
ready to sail for the Far East. James J. Hill was yet to come.

A company was formed, and two expeditions set out for the mouth of the
Columbia River, one by land and the other by sea.

The land expedition barely got through alive--it was a perilous
undertaking, with accidents by flood and field and in the imminent
deadly breech.

But the route by the water