Ahead of the 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.
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