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