Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/128

114 that to the United States." Jefferson's proposal was accepted by Ledyard, and steps were at once taken to secure from the Empress of Russia permission for him to cross her dominions. Failing to secure permission of the Empress, she being absent from her capital in a distant part of her dominions, Ledyard, impatient of longer delay, set out on his own responsibility, and got to within two hundred miles of Kamchatka, when he was arrested by an order of the Empress and taken back to Poland, where he was released. "Thus failed," writes Jefferson, "the first attempt to explore the western part of our Northern Continent."

The attempt failed, but Jefferson's interest in the exploration of this region did not die with it. Of a second attempt some years later he writes: "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 an opposite direction—that is, by ascending the Missouri, crossing the Stony Mountains, and descending the nearest river to the Pacific." This plan too was attempted, but the seriousness of the projector's purpose was severely tried by the delay of years in raising the necessary funds. When at last, under the leadership of Captain Meriwether Lewis, later of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the explorers were well started on the way, the expedition failed through an order of the French minister recalling the botanist of the expedition, who was a citizen of France. "Thus failed," writes Jefferson again, "the second attempt to explore the Northern Pacific region."

Jefferson's interest in the exploration of the Northwest did not die with the failure of this second attempt. Delay in raising the necessary funds for the expedition had brought the setting out of the explorers down to the eve of an event that placed Jefferson in a position to further