Washington's ethics and his enterprise with reference to his Western speculations were both admirable, but we can only hint of them here. He was strict with himself and with others, but he knew how to be lenient when leniency would not harm the recipient. To his later agent, Thomas Freeman (Crawford was captured and put to death by the Indians in 1782), he wrote in 1785: "Where acts of Providence interfere to disable a tenant, I would be lenient in the exaction of rent, but when the cases are otherwise, I will not be put off; because it is on these my own expenditures depend, and because an accumulation of undischarged rents is a real injury to the tenant." While his agents were ordered to use all legal precautions against allowing his lands to be usurped by others, Washington was particular that needy people, stopping temporarily, should not be driven off; and he was exceedingly anxious from first to last that no lands should be taken up for him that were anywise claimed by others. It is a fact that Washington had few disputes in a day when disputes over lands and boundaries were as common as sunrise and sunset. No landholder in the West had so little trouble in proportion to the amount of land owned. The intensity of Washington's business energy is not shown more plainly than by his enterprise in finding and exploiting novelties. One day he was studying the question of rotation of crops; the next found him laboring all day with his blacksmith fashioning a newfangled plough. The next day he spent, perhaps, in studying a plan of a new machine invented in Europe to haul trees bodily out of the ground, an invention which meant something to a man who owned thirty thousand acres of primeval forest. He ordered his London agent to send on one of these machines regardless of cost, if they were really able to do the feats claimed. Again he was writing Tilghman at Philadelphia concerning the possibility and advisability of importing palatines from Europe, with which to settle his Western farms. Now he was examining veins of coal along the Youghiogheny and experimenting with it, or studying the location of salt-springs and the manufacture of salt, which in the West was twice dearer than flour. A whole essay could be devoted to Washington's interest in mineral springs at Saratoga, Rome, New York, and in the West, and to his plan outlined to the president of the Continental Congress to have the United States retain possession of all lands lying immediately about them. We do not know who built the first grist-mill west of the Alleghanies, but it is doubtful if there was another save Washington's at Perryopolis, Fayette County, Pennsylvania, before the Revolutionary War. "I assure you," wrote Crawford, "it is the best mill I ever saw anywhere, although I think one of a less value would have done as well." It is the boast of Ohioans that the millstones for the first mill in the old Northwest were "packed" over the mountains from Connecticut.