The Project Gutenberg EBook of First Across the Continent, by Noah Brooks

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Title: First Across the Continent

Author: Noah Brooks

Release Date: February 11, 2006 [EBook #1236]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by Charles Keller and David Widger

FIRST ACROSS THE CONTINENT

The Story of The Exploring Expedition of Lewis and Clark in 1804-5-6

By Noah Brooks

Chapter I -- A Great Transaction in Land

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 peopl