Colonel William Ledyard, a Revolutionary War soldier who was killed with his own saber after surrendering to the British at the end of the Battle of Groton Heights. he attended Dartmouth College for a year before dropping out via dugout canoe.He ended up on Captain James Cook’s third and fatal voyage to the Pacific, during which he became one of the first Americans to set foot on the west coast of North America. Later, in Paris, he befriended Thomas Jefferson, and together they hatched plans for a North American crossing like that later undertaken by Lewis and Clark. Ledyard was the first to attempt the journey, and he set off in the winter of 1786, heading east across Siberia; he hoped to catch a Russian trading vessel across the North Pacific to Alaska. He made it as far as Yakutsk, deep in the Siberian permafrost, before Catherine the Great had him arrested as a spy. Died in Cairo lookg for the Niger River.