The Lewis And Clark Expedition

Quite possibly one of the most important purchases in the

history of The United States was the one in which Thomas

Jefferson enabled the size of the country to double. The

territory was the Louisiana Territory, the 820,000 square mile

piece of land was bought for 15 million dollars which equaled

out to about three cents an acre.

The United States originally only wanted to buy the port of

New Orleans. Thomas Jefferson wanted to buy this because there

was a risk that the half million Americans living west of the

Appalachian would secede from the Union. Purchasing the port

would keep them from seceding because they would then have a

port that they could easily use to get to the ocean. The

people in that region had been using the port until the Spanish

stopped letting them use it. This posed a serious problem

because then the only way to get goods to the ocean was over

the Appalachian Mountains, and there were few roads that

crossed the mountains. By adding the land west of the

Mississippi the United States had the potential to become a

very powerful nation.

Jefferson learned that France had just obtained the

Louisiana Territory from Spain. He proceeded to send James

Monroe and the ambassador to France, Robert Livingston to the

current leader of France Napoleon Bonapart. Napoleon needed

money for the upcoming war with Britain, realizing that he had

little hope for an empire in America any time soon he declared

that the united States could have the port if it bought the

entire territory. Jefferson quickly passed the treaty through

congress and although there doubts about the purchase on April

30, 1803 the United States doubled it’s size.

Jefferson had been planning to map out and explore the west

for two decades. Before even acquiring the land Jefferson had

been planning a small trip to explore the land he was so

captivated by. His personal library had more books on the land

than any other place. However many of the descriptions of the

land were simply made up in the minds of people that had never

been there in there lives. Maps of the land were also based on

little or no actual facts from the land. Many showed the Rocky

Mountains as smaller than the Appalachians. So in 1803

Jefferson proposed to c...

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... they traveled in a way that resembles the gondolas of

Vennice italy. They would take poles that reached the river

bottom and walk from the front of the boat to the back. They

also sailed, rowed and even waded in the water and pulled the

boat. To cross mountains they put there gear on horses. They

crossed the Rockies at the Bitterroot Mountains, on a trail

used by the Shoshone.

The Corps of Discovery found several interesting geographic

features. They saw the towering falls of missouri. They also

saw the Rocky Mountains which were almost ten thousand feet

higher than the Appalachians. They also saw a high sandstone

peak that Clark named Pompy’s tower after Sacagawea’s son. In

conclusion the Lewis and Clark Expedition was a great succes,

it acheived many feats and opened the door to a new era of

american history.

Works Sighted Page

Lewis and Clark Page.PBS. 28 Feb 2000

<http://www.pbs.org/lewisandclark/>

Appleby, Brinkley, and McPherson. The American Journey Building

a Nation. New York: Glencoe McGraw-Hill, 2000

“Lewis and Clark Expedition.” Compton’s Encyclopedia. 1989 ed.