Had Washington not held far different views from many of his contemporaries, it is a moral certainty that the Central West would, at the close of the Revolutionary War, have been divided up among European powers, who for so long had been sending emissaries to Kentucky and the Mississippi valley to alienate the border settlements from the contemplated union with the colonies. England was ready at any moment to urge Joseph Brant into Pontiac's old rôle of attempting to arouse the old northwest, and she defiantly kept her flag floating over Sandusky and Detroit and Fort Miami for twenty years after Cornwallis's bands played _The World's Turned Upside Down_ at Yorktown. The world looked for a partition of our West among the powers in 1780 as the partition of the great hulk, China, is expected by many today. And indeed we escaped such monstrous catastrophe by a narrower margin than is commonly known. Spanish agents among high Kentuckians were looked upon with favor, and their plan of joining Kentucky to Spain (who then held all the trans-Mississippi realm) was not without advantages which the struggling, bankrupt, jealous colonies, "one nation today, thirteen tomorrow," could not possibly offer. The Cumberland Road, of which Washington was the father, bound the East and West indissolubly together, and "more than any material structure in the land, served to harmonize and strengthen, if not to save, the Union." With this glimpse of this man's ambitions for the commercial advancement of the Central West, let us not omit his subsequent interest in the military operations for its subjugation, an item which even the far-seeing Washington had not fully anticipated. At the time of Crawford's campaign, Washington was fully in favor of the advance toward Sandusky, and it was through his influence or suggestion that the command was given to his old friend of Revolutionary days, Colonel William Crawford. True, Crawford was duly elected by the men he led, but his presence in the expedition was due to Washington's influence. When the immortal ordinance was under discussion, Washington's attitude was strong in its favor, and it incorporated, as has already been shown, his idea of the value of the portages between the rivers as the future routes of commerce. During the long and bitter war with the western Indians, 1790-1795, Washington had a clearer vision than most of his advisers, and with better judgment and knowledge sought to gain the ends best for the nation. His "search for a man" was nearly as pathetic as was Lincoln's in another century, but, despite the intense opposition of Kentucky with its seventy thousand inhabitants, he placed Mad Anthony Wayne in command, who, in the tall grass and felled trees of Fallen Timbers, justified his choice, as Appomattox justified Lincoln's. After the campaign of 1791 under Harmar and the terrible defeat of the brave St. Clair, Washington was the hope of the West. To him the nation looked