ht from
France. Meriwether Lewis selected for his companion Captain Clark, an
old army friend and comrade. Leading the party, Lewis and his friend
Clark left St. Louis, and pushed westward to the Pacific coast, through
dangers and obstacles that few men would have cared to meet. The famous
expedition of Lewis and Clark has now become a part of the history of
the country. Lewis took possession of the Pacific coast in the name of
the United States. There was a controversy with Great Britain some years
afterwards as to the title of Oregon, but that which Lewis and Clark had
established was finally acknowledged to be the best.

Meriwether Lewis won a name in history because the opportunity came to
him. His name is mentioned here because he was a representative of the
men who settled Upper Georgia,--the men who kept the fires of liberty
alive in the State, and who, after helping to conquer the British and
the Tories, became the conquerors of the wilderness that lay to the west
of them. From Wilkes, Burke, Elbert, and the region where Clarke and his
men had fought, the tide of emigration slowly moved across the State,
settling Greene, Hancock, Baldwin, Putnam, Morgan, Jasper, Butts,
Monroe, Coweta, Upson, Pike, Meriwether, Talbot, Harris, and Muscogee
counties.

Some of the more adventurous crossed the Chattahoochee into Alabama, and
on into the great Mississippi Valley and beyond. Their descendants live
in every part of the South; and Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas have had
Georgians for their governors, and their senators and representatives in
Congress,--men who were descended from the Virginia and North Carolina
immigrants. One of the most brilliant of these was Mirabeau B. Lamar,
scholar, statesman, and soldier, the president of Texas when that
Territory had declared itself a free and an independent republic.

THE COTTON GIN.

Brief mention has been made of Whitney's invention of the cotton gin.
The event was of such world-wide importance that the story should be
told here. Whitney, the inventor of the gin, was born in Massachusetts
in 1765, in very poor circumstances. While the War of the Revolution was
going on, he was earning his living by making nails by hand. He was such
an apt mechanic that he was able to make and save enough money to pay
his way through Yale College, where he graduated in 1792. In that year
he engaged himself to come to Georgia as a private tutor in the family
of a gentleman of Savannah