The Michaux plan
Jefferson was the next to make a venture in transcontinental
exploration. This time (1793) in his capacity as a vice
president of the American Philosophical Society at
Philadelphia, he made an arrangement therefor with
André Michaux, a distinguished French botanist
then herborizing in the United States. A small subscription
was raised by the society, to which many of the prominent
men of the day contributed, and detailed instructions for
Michaux were drafted by Jefferson.[2]
The intending explorer
was to "cross the Mississippi and pass by land to the nearest
part of the Missouri above the Spanish settlements, that you
may avoid the risk of being stopped;" he was then to "pursue
such of the largest streams of that river as shall lead by
the shortest way and the lowest latitudes to the Pacific ocean."
The previous year, Captain Robert Gray, of Boston, had discovered
the mouth of the Columbia, and Jefferson hoped that
this stream might be found to interlock with the sources of
the Missouri. Just then, however, there had arrived in the
United States Charles Genet, minister of the French Republic,
who was charged with the secret mission of forming a fillbustering
army of American frontiersmen in the Carolinas,
Georgia, and Kentucky to attack Spanish possessions on the
Gulf of Mexico and beyond the Mississippi. Michaux was
selected by Genet as his agent to deal with the Kentuckians,
led by George Rogers Clark, who had proposed, under the
banner of France, to descend the Mississippi with fifteen
hundred borderers and attack New Orleans. Michaux tarried
in Kentucky to carry out these ill-fated plans, with the result
that his project of exploration was abandoned.
[3]
