Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 3).djvu/38

34 seemed to many about him to be the idlest dreaming.

Had Washington not held far different views from many of his contemporaries, it is a moral certainty that the Central West would, at the close of the Revolutionary War, have been divided up among European powers, who for so long had been sending emissaries to Kentucky and the Mississippi valley to alienate the border settlements from the contemplated union with the colonies. England was ready at any moment to urge Joseph Brant into Pontiac's old rôle of attempting to arouse the old northwest, and she defiantly kept her flag floating over Sandusky and Detroit and Fort Miami for twenty years after Cornwallis's bands played The World's Turned Upside Down at Yorktown. The world looked for a partition of our West among the powers in 1780 as the partition of the great hulk, China, is expected by many today. And indeed we escaped such monstrous catastrophe by a narrower margin than is commonly known. Spanish agents among high Kentuckians were looked upon with favor, and their plan of joining Ken-