he home-builder, however, went the speculator. It has been
remarked that "from the time when Joliet and La Salle first found their
way into the heart of the great West up to the present day when far-off
Alaska is in the throes of development, 'big business' has been engaged
in western speculation." * In pre-revolutionary days this speculation
took the form of procuring, by grant or purchase, large tracts of
western land which were to be sold and colonized at a profit. Franklin
was interested in a number of such projects. Washington, the Lees, and
a number of other prominent Virginians were connected with an enterprise
which absorbed the old Ohio Company; and in 1770 Washington, piloted
by Croghan, visited the Ohio country with a view to the discovery of
desirable areas. Eventually he acquired western holdings amounting to
thirty-three thousand acres, with a water-front of sixteen miles on the
Ohio and of forty miles on the Great Kanawha.

* Alvord, Mississippi Valley in "British Politics," vol. I, p.86.

In 1773 a company promoted by Samuel Wharton, Benjamin Franklin, William
Johnson, and a London banker, Thomas Walpole, secured the grant of two
and a half million acres between the Alleghanies and the Ohio, which
was to be the seat of a colony called Vandalia. This departure from the
policy laid down in the Proclamation of 1763 was made reluctantly,
but with a view to giving a definite western limit to the seaboard
provinces. The Government's purpose was fully understood in America, and
the project was warmly opposed, especially by Virginia, the chartered
claimant of the territory. The early outbreak of the Revolutionary
War wrecked the project, and nothing ever came of it--or indeed of any
colonization proposal contemporary with it. By and large, the building
of the West was to be the work, not of colonizing companies or other
corporate interests, but of individual homeseekers, moving into the new
country on their own responsibility and settling where and when their
own interests and inclinations led.

Chapter III. The Revolution Begins

One of the grievances given prominence in the Declaration of
Independence was that the English Crown had "abolished the free system
of English laws in a neighbouring province, establishing therein an
arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it
at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same arbitrary
rule into these colonies." The