Excerpt from In the Old West, Vol. 1

When we bought the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon, in 1803, it was not from any pressing need of land, for we still had millions of fertile acres east of the Mississippi. The purchase was made to forestall complications with foreign pow ers, either with the arch-conqueror himself, whose ambition was supposed to be the mastery of the whole world, or with Great Britain, to which the western country was sure to fall in case France should be defeated. Possession of Louisiana was essential to our free navigation of the Mississippi.

The vast domain thus added to our boundaries was term incognito. Aside from its strategic importance no one knew what it was good for. So Lewis and Clark were sent out from the fron tier post of St. Louis to find a route to the Pacific and to report on what the new country was like.

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