Who was to be this envoy? The mission called for a person of unusual capacity: a diplomat, a soldier, and a frontiersman. There were five hundred miles to be threaded on Indian trails in the dead of winter. This was woodsman's work. There were cunning Indian chieftains and French officers, trained in intrigue, to be met, conciliated, influenced. This, truly, demanded a diplomat. There were forts to be marked and mapped, highways of approach to be considered and compared, vantage sites on river and mountain to be noted and valued. This was work for a soldier and strategist. After failing to induce one or two gentlemen to undertake this perilous but intrinsically important task, a youthful Major, George Washington, one of the four adjutant-generals of Virginia, offered his services, and the despairing Scotch governor, whose zeal always approached rashness, accepted them. But there was something more to the credit of this ambitious youth than his temerity. The best of Virginian blood ran in his veins and he had already shown a taste for adventurous service quite in line with such a hazardous business. Acquiring, when a mere lad, a knowledge of mathematics, he had gone surveying in Lord Fairfax's lands on the south branch of the Potomac. There he spent the best of three years, far beyond the settled limits of Virginia, fortifying his splendid physique against days of stress to come. In other ways this life on his country's frontier was of advantage. Here he met the Indian--that race over which no man ever wielded a greater influence than Washington. Here he came to know frontier life, its charms, its deprivations, its fears, and its toils--a life for which he was ever to entertain so much sympathy and so much consideration. Here he studied the Indian traders, a class of men of much more importance, in peace or war, than any or all others in the border land--men whose motives of action were as hard to read as an Indian's, and whose flagrant and oft practiced deceptions on their fellow white men were fraught with disaster. It was of utmost fortune for his country that this youth went into the West in his teens, for he was to be, under Providence, a champion of that West worthy of its influence on human affairs. Thus he came to it early and loved it; he learned to know its value, to foresee something of its future, to think for and with its pioneer developers, to study its roads and rivers and portages; thus he was fortified against narrow purposes, and made as broad in his sympathies and ambitions as the great West was broad itself. No statesman of his day knew and believed in the West as Washington did; and it is not difficult to think that had he not so known and loved it, the territory west of the Alleghany Mountains would never have become a portion of the United States of America. There were far too many serious men like Thomas Jefferson who knew little about the West and boasted that they cared less. Yet today the seaboard states are