8 THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE AND WESTWARD EXPANSION The most significant event of the expansion period came in 1803 when the United States bought the enormous western territory called Louisiana from France The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States and provided a powerful impetus to westward expansion In 1804 President Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on an expedition to explore the Louisiana Purchase and the Pacific Northwest Lewis and Clark led their party up the Missouri River to its source Then they crossed the Rocky Mountains the western boundary of the Louisiana Territory and went down the Columbia River to the Pacific coast Soon American settlers and traders began to travel over the route Lewis and Clark had blazed Other hardy Americans made their own trails through and beyond the Rockies The pioneers pushing toward the Southwest and the Pacific coast braved the hos tility of foreign powers Mexico owned both Texas and California and the British had a strong claim to Oregon In each case the Americans first penetrated and then won complete control of the area With the admission of California to the Union in 1850 the United States finally stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific Its Manifest Destiny had been realized The American frontier was an escape and a place of hope for those willing and able to take their futures into their own hands Celebrated then and ever since in poetry short stories novels drama films music and
INTRODUCTION 9 paintings the epic westward movement in the United States has never failed to stir the imagination At the same time the westward push brought devastation to the original inhabitants of the land the Native Americans The bold adventurousness of the pioneers and the brutal clash of cultures make the period of expansion both one of the most exciting and most tragic chapters in American history
CHAPTER ONE 1010 EUROPEAN EXPLORATION AND SETTLEMENT OF LOUISIANA The early history of the land that would become Louisiana is dominated by the French Although the Spanish first explored the region in the 1540s it was the French who later settled it They made it part of their North American colony known as New France which stretched from eastern Canada in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south Yet for all the vast territory that France laid claim to in North America New France was never effectively colonized Many permanent communities were founded but the main interest of the mother country was com mercial exploitation especially the fur trade Under French and later Spanish rule all these settlements including Baton Rouge and New Orleans in Louisiana
EUROPEAN EXPLORATION AND SETTLEMENT OF LOUISIANA 11 remained frontier outposts Only after 1800 when citi zens of the United States began trekking westward in search of plentiful inexpensive land did they really grow FRENCH EXPLORATION OF LOUISIANA During the 17th century a great number of Frenchmen traders missionaries and soldiers traversed the wilderness from eastern Canada to New Orleans They ventured throughout the Great Lakes region and the Mississippi River valley claiming the territory for the king of France The most famous of these explorers was René-Robert Cavelier sieur lord de La Salle The father of the Louisiana Territory La Salle was the first European to voyage down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico As a result of this 1682 expedition France laid claim to the entire Mississippi Valley La Salle named the terri tory Louisiana for the French king Louis XIV France’s claim to Louisiana was strengthened by the efforts of In this print published in Edward Sylvester Ellis’s The History of Our Country 1899 Sieur de La Salle lays claim to the entire Mississippi Valley in the name of France
