First Across the Continent

First Across the Continent

The Project Gutenberg EBook of First Across the Continent, by Noah
Brooks This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and
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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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ACROSS THE CONTINENT ***

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 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