"From the experience of many years, I have found distant property in land more pregnant of perplexities than profit. I have therefore resolved to sell all I hold on the Western waters, if I can obtain the prices which I conceive their quality, their situation, and other advantages would authorize me to expect." A circular advertising his Western lands was issued in Philadelphia, dated February 1, 1796. It described 32,317 acres in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky for sale; the terms were one-fourth payment down, and the remainder to be paid in five years with interest "annually and punctually paid." With this story of Washington's acquaintance with the West and his speculations there in mind, it is now possible to take up, knowingly, the great result to which they led--the first grand plan of American internal improvements, of which Washington was the father. As early as 1754, Washington, then just come of age, made a detailed study of the Potomac River, and described in a memorandum all the difficulties and obstructions to be overcome in rendering that river navigable from tide-water to Fort Cumberland (Cumberland, Maryland). At the time of Washington's entrance into the House of Burgesses in 1760, the matter of a way of communication between the colonies and the territory then conquered from France beyond the Alleghanies was perhaps uppermost in his mind, but various circumstances compelled a postponement of all such plans, particularly the outrageous proclamation of 1763, which was intended to repress the Western movement. By 1770 conditions were changed. In 1768 the Treaty of Fort Stanwix had nominally secured to Virginia all the territory south of the Ohio River, the very land from which the proclamation of 1763 excluded her. On July 20 of this year, Washington wrote to Thomas Johnson, the first State Governor of Maryland, suggesting that the project of opening the Potomac River be "recommended to the public notice upon a more enlarged plan [_i. e._, including a portage to the Ohio Basin] and as a means of becoming the channel of conveyance of the extensive and valuable trade of a rising empire." Johnson had written Washington concerning the navigation of the Potomac; in this reply Washington prophesied the failure of any plan to improve the Potomac that did not include a plan to make it an avenue of communication between the East and the West. He also prophesied that, if this were not done, Pennsylvania or New York would improve the opportunity of getting into commercial touch with that "rising empire" beyond the Alleghanies, "a tract of country which," he wrote, "is unfolding to our view, the advantages of which are too great, and too obvious, I should think, to become the subject of serious debate, but which, through ill-timed parsimony and supineness, may be wrested from us and conducted through other channels, such as the Susquehanna."