If it could not be found in Virginia, it was roaming those parts of the continent that “remain in their aboriginal state, unexplored and undisturbed.” When, as president, he dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to the Northwest, Jefferson hoped that they would come upon live incognita roaming its forests. “Such is the economy of nature,” he wrote, “that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.”
