The people of the young Republic of
the United States were greatly astonished, in the
summer of 1803, to learn that Napoleon Bonaparte,
then First Consul of France, had sold to us the vast
tract of land known as the country of Louisiana.
The details of this purchase were arranged in Paris
(on the part of the United States) by Robert R. Livingston
and James Monroe. The French government was represented
by Barbe-Marbois, Minister of the Public Treasury.
The price to be paid for this vast
domain was fifteen million dollars. The area
of the country ceded was reckoned to be more than one
million square miles, greater than the total area
of the United States, as the Republic then existed.
Roughly described, the territory comprised all that
part of the continent west of the Mississippi River,
bounded on the north by the British possessions and
on the west and south by dominions of Spain.
This included the region in which now lie the States
of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, parts of
Colorado, Minnesota, the States of Iowa, Nebraska,
South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, a part of Idaho,
all of Montana and Territory of Oklahoma. At that
time, the entire population of the region, exclusive
of the Indian tribes that roamed over its trackless
spaces, was barely ninety thousand persons, of whom
forty thousand were negro slaves. The civilized
inhabitants were principally French, or descendants
of French, with a few Spanish, Germans, English, and
Americans.
The purchase of this tremendous slice
of territory could not be complete without an approval
of the bargain by the United States Senate. Great
opposition to this was immediately excited by people
in various parts of the Union, especially in New England,
where there was a very bitter feeling against the
prime mover in this business, - Thomas Jefferson,
then President of the United States. The scheme
was ridiculed by persons who insisted that the region
was not only wild and unexplored, but uninhabitable
and worthless. They derided “The Jefferson
Purchase,” as they called it, as a useless piece
of extravagance and folly; and, in addition to its
being a foolish bargain, it was urged that President
Jefferson had no right, under the constitution of the
United States, to add any territory to the area of
the Republic.
Nevertheless, a majority of the people
were in favor of the purchase, and the bargain was
duly approved by the United States Senate; that body,
July 31, 1803, just three months after the execution
of the treaty of cession, formally ratified the important
agreement between the two governments. The dominion
of the United States was now extended across the entire
continent of North America, reaching from the Atlantic
to the Pacific. The Territory of Oregon was already
ours.
This momentous transfer took place
one hundred years ago, when almost nothing was known
of the region so summarily handed from the government
of France to the government of the American Republic.
Few white men had ever traversed those trackless plains,
or scaled the frowning ranges of mountains that barred
the way across the continent. There were living
in the fastnesses of the mysterious interior of the
Louisiana Purchase many tribes of Indians who had
never looked in the face of the white man.
Nor was the Pacific shore of the country
any better known to civilized man than was the region
lying between that coast and the Big Muddy, or Missouri
River. Spanish voyagers, in 1602, had sailed as
far north as the harbors of San Diego and Monterey,
in what is now California; and other explorers, of
the same nationality, in 1775, extended their discoveries
as far north as the fifty-eighth degree of latitude.
Famous Captain Cook, the great navigator of the Pacific
seas, in 1778, reached and entered Nootka Sound, and,
leaving numerous harbors and bays unexplored, he pressed
on and visited the shores of Alaska, then called Unalaska,
and traced the coast as far north as Icy Cape.
Cold weather drove him westward across the Pacific,
and he spent the next winter at Owyhee, where, in
February of the following year, he was killed by the
natives.
All these explorers were looking for
chances for fur-trading, which was at that time the
chief industry of the Pacific coast. Curiously
enough, they all passed by the mouth of the Columbia
without observing that there was the entrance to one
of the finest rivers on the American continent.
Indeed, Captain Vancouver, a British
explorer, who has left his name on the most important
island of the North Pacific coast, baffled by the
deceptive appearances of the two capes that guard the
way to a noble stream (Cape Disappointment and Cape
Deception), passed them without a thought. But
Captain Gray, sailing the good ship “Columbia,”
of Boston, who coasted those shores for more than
two years, fully convinced that a strong current which
he observed off those capes came from a river, made
a determined effort; and on the 11th of May, 1792,
he discovered and entered the great river that now
bears the name of his ship. At last the key that
was to open the mountain fastnesses of the heart of
the continent had been found. The names of the
capes christened by Vancouver and re-christened by
Captain Gray have disappeared from our maps, but in
the words of one of the numerous editors of the
narrative of the exploring expedition of Lewis and
Clark: “The name of the good ship ‘Columbia,’
it is not hard to believe, will flow with the waters
of the bold river as long as grass grows or water
runs in the valleys of the Rocky Mountains.”
It appears that the attention of President
Jefferson had been early attracted to the vast, unexplored
domain which his wise foresight was finally to add
to the territory of the United States. While he
was living in Paris, as the representative of the
United States, in 1785-89, he made the acquaintance
of John Ledyard, of Connecticut, the well-known explorer,
who had then in mind a scheme for the establishment
of a fur-trading post on the western coast of America.
Mr. Jefferson proposed to Ledyard that the most feasible
route to the coveted fur-bearing lands would be through
the Russian possessions and downward somewhere near
to the latitude of the then unknown sources of the
Missouri River, entering the United States by that
route. This scheme fell through on account of
the obstacles thrown in Ledyard’s way by the
Russian Government. A few years later, in 1792,
Jefferson, whose mind was apparently fixed on carrying
out his project, proposed to the American Philosophical
Society of Philadelphia that a subscription should
be opened for the purpose of raising money “to
engage some competent person to explore that region
in the opposite direction (from the Pacific coast), - that
is, by ascending the Missouri, crossing the Stony
(Rocky) Mountains, and descending the nearest river
to the Pacific.” This was the hint from
which originated the famous expedition of Lewis and
Clark.
But the story-teller should not forget
to mention that hardy and adventurous explorer, Jonathan
Carver. This man, the son of a British officer,
set out from Boston, in 1766, to explore the wilderness
north of Albany and lying along the southern shore
of the Great Lakes. He was absent two years and
seven months, and in that time he collected a vast
amount of useful and strange information, besides learning
the language of the Indians among whom he lived.
He conceived the bold plan of travelling up a branch
of the Missouri (or “Messorie"), till, having
discovered the source of the traditional “Oregon,
or River of the West,” on the western side of
the lands that divide the continent, “he would
have sailed down that river to the place where it is
said to empty itself, near the Straits of Anian.”
By the Straits of Anian, we are to
suppose, were meant some part of Behring’s Straits,
separating Asia from the American continent. Carver’s
fertile imagination, stimulated by what he knew of
the remote Northwest, pictured that wild region where,
according to a modern poet, “rolls the Oregon
and hears no sound save his own dashing.”
But Carver died without the sight; in his later years,
he said of those who should follow his lead:
“While their spirits are elated by their success,
perhaps they may bestow some commendations and blessings
on the person who first pointed out to them the way.”