PRESIDENTS AND Native Peoples

THIRTY YEARS BEFORE HE became the first president of the United States, George Washington already was lusting after the American West.

Born into wealth in colonial Virginia, Washington was a 27-year-old Army commander in 1759 when he made Mount Vernon his full-time residence. He would spend the next four decades raising the roof of the modest farmhouse and transforming it into a mansion.

He also moved the main entrance, reorienting the mansion from eastward-facing to westward, symbolizing his conviction “that the future lay in those wild and wooded lands of the Ohio Country,” biographer Joseph Ellis writes. Washington had been a surveyor as a young man and was adept at getting the lay of the land. As a 21-year-old major in 1754, more than two decades before the beginning of the Revolutionary War, he had ventured into the Ohio River Valley to contain French ambitions there. His actions would inadvertently give rise to the French and Indian War, but seeing the fertile frontier beyond the Allegheny Mountains would reinforce for him the importance of controlling the western edges of a nascent United States, and of connecting it with the eastern seaboard. Writes Ellis: “Even when ensconced on the eastern edge of the continent at Mount Vernon, Washington spent a good deal of his time and energy