 This is called Jefferson's Confidential Letter to Congress. And it certainly is more than it seems. It's often put with the collection of the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery materials. And essentially it's the letter where he asked money for money from Congress for getting money for the Corps of Discovery. And he asked for $2,500, but it's not till the very end. And what's interesting about it, and the reason I like it and I teach with it, is because it's clearly not about the money. He's trying to tell Congress a much bigger story, and you really get a large idea in this one little letter of his whole theory of where the country should go and expansion and his philosophy of expansion and Indian policy and where Congress fits into it. At the beginning you get no indication that he's going to be asking for money and what it's for, anything like that. But I think the most important phrase here is that he ends with the public good because that's going to be a theme throughout the letter. Then he says, The Indian tribes residing within the limits of the United States have for a considerable time been growing more and more and easy at the constant diminution of the territory they occupy, although affected by their own voluntary sales. And the policy has long been gaining strength with them of refusing absolutely all further sale on any conditions in so much at this time it hazards their friendship and excites dangerous jealousies in their minds to make any overture for the purchase of the smallest portions of their land. A very few tribes only are not yet obstinately in these dispositions. So basically the same that we've been purchasing land from these Indian tribes and also they're not very happy about it anymore and they won't do it anymore. So we're going to have to figure something else out. First, to encourage them to abandon hunting, to apply to the raising stock, to agriculture and domestic manufacture and thereby prove to themselves that less land and labor will maintain them in this better than in their former mode of living. The extensive force necessary in the hunting life will then become useless and they will see advantage in exchanging them for the means of improving their farms and of increasing their domestic comforts. This is my favorite part of this letter because it's basically trying to ask the Indians to do what he-