Shaping the Trans-Mississippi West: 1820-29

As described in the previous blog about shaping the Trans-Mississippi West, at the beginning of 1820, the American West consisted of the state of Louisiana, the territory of Arkansas, and a vast Missouri Territory. That year, however, saw the beginning of an important change with the passage of one of the seminal acts of Congress in the nineteenth century, the Missouri Compromise. This compromise was precipitated primarily by the issues arising out of the nascent development of the American lands west of the Mississippi.

In the early nineteenth century, other than in the well-established state of Louisiana, most early settlement west of the Mississippi was centered on St. Louis. As the major center for trade and supplies for the lands to the west, St. Louis had grown to a city of over 10,000 citizens, with the region around steadily increasing in population as emigrants created new farms and towns.

In 1818, a petition was put forward to create a state of Missouri out of the southeastern part of the vast Missouri Territory. Slavery had been legal since the founding of the Missouri Territory, so the proposal was for the state of Missouri to come into the Union as a slave state. However, by this time the issue of slavery, and the expansion of slavery into newly formed states in the American West, had become a very controversial subject.

In 1818, there was a balance in Congress between the slave and free states and neither side was willing to give the other the advantage of a new state in their camp. Thus Northerners would not consider allowing Missouri to come in as a slave state without the simultaneous admittance of a free state. At this time, however, those in the District of Maine, then part of Massachusetts, were clamoring to be let in as a state, so in 1820 the compromise was reached that Maine would be admitted as a free state at the same time Missouri would come in as a slave state.

The Missouri Comprise also had another element which was important in the development of the American West, the prohibition of new slave states (other than Missouri) north of the 36.30 degree parallel line. This line was the northern border of North Carolina and Tennessee and it was considered something of a dividing line between the North and South. Northern Congressmen would allow Missouri, located above the line, to come in as a slave state, but were not interested in allowing any more slave states above that line.

So it was that in 1821, the southeastern part of the Missouri Territory was admitted as the state of Missouri. The western border was on a line run due north-south from the junction of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers, with the northern border coming off of this line 100 miles above the rivers' junction. If you look at a map of Missouri today, the north western part of the state is not a straight north-south line, for the Platte Purchase of 1835 added to the state what in 1821 was still Indian territory.

In 1821, the rest of the old Missouri Territory became officially unorganized U.S. Territory and it was essentially territory claimed by various Indian tribes. Meanwhile, the U.S. Government was busy trying to move eastern Indian tribes to west of the Mississippi, including the Choctaw, who by the 1820 Treaty of Doak’s Stand, were given land in what was then the western part of Arkansas Territory.

In 1824, in order to separate the Choctaw and other tribes’ lands from the Euro-American settlements in eastern Arkansas, the Arkansas Territory was essentially cut in half, with the new western border starting at a point 40 miles west of the southwest corner of Missouri, and then running due south to the Red River. However, this meant that much of the Choctaw lands was still within the Arkansas Territory and the Choctaw were not ready to give up this territory.

After considerable negotiation (some of it likely more intimidation), the Choctaw agreed to move a bit further west. The United States wanted the new western border to run straight south from the southwest corner of Missouri, but the Choctaw insisted on their land extending to within 100 paces west of the Fort Smith, so the final border ran slightly southeast from the corner of Missouri to just west of Fort Smith and from thence due south.

The boundary changes in the decade from 1820 to 1829 where not many—-the creation of the state of Missouri and the truncating of the Arkansas Territory-—but the Missouri Compromise would continue to reverberate in the history of the American West in the decades to come. The story of the development of the American West continues in the next blog in this series.

Early Denver Prints & Photographs

I continue to work on my research of early views of Denver and one of the issues I find interesting is the role of photography. The first settlement in what would eventually become Denver was in late 1858. This was just about the time when photography was becoming a more practical medium for recording images. Photographers were beginning to travel around the world to take photographs of major events, for instance the Crimean War, and of distant places, of which the American West would become a favorite.

In the mid-19th century, photography had practical limits in terms of what it could capture. Motion was a problem, so rarely were action “events” portrayed; rather early photographs tended to be of posed portraits, buildings, or landscapes. Also, photographs had a difficulty in showing distant detail, so panoramic images were rarely successful and most photographs focused on a narrow scene, for instance of a building or a street scene.

The Pike’s Peak gold rush, as it was called, began as a trickle in late 1858, but was in full flood by the spring of 1859. In early 1859, a saloon, hotel, sawmill, and newspaper had all appeared in Denver, which had a population of about 1,000. Also, by that summer at least one photographer was in the city recording its rude beginnings. We know this because in the June 11, 1859 issue of the Denver Rocky Mountain News, this report appeared,

“Pike’s Peak.—We observed the other day Mr. Welch, the artist, taking views with the apparatus [a camera] in and around the cities of Denver and Auraria to illustrate Frank Leslie’s Pictorial. Mr. W., we understand, is going into the mountain mines for the same purpose. We doubt not but the views taken from the summit of the Rocky Mountains will grace the pages of the pictorial with delicate sublimity.”

No Mr. Welch is listed as being a resident of Denver and though there are various Welch’s listed as photographers in this period in other cities, it is not clear which of these, if any, was the Mr. Welch in Denver in 1859. It seems that Mr. Welch was part of a group sent by Frank Leslie to chronicle the Pike’s Peak gold rush for his Illustrated Newspaper (an earlier article with images on the gold rush appeared in the April 30 issue) and his photographs were used as the basis of prints in the paper, for in the August 20, 1859 issue was an article, and three pages with eight illustrations entitled “Scenes and Sketches at Pike’s Peak.—From Photographs by our own Correspondent.”

One of the images was a scene of a party of miners, two showed camps of the Leslie’s party and the other five images were scenes of Denver. These are, in fact, the very first printed images of Denver. Perhaps all, but certainly some of these wood engraved views are based on Welch's photographs. The images of the Rocky Mountain News office and of the Leavenworth and Pike’s Peak Co.’s office are very photographic in nature and their source gives them a solid historic authenticity.

These images are a good example of the intelligent use of the different strengths of the two processes of photography and print making. Photography could provide a precisely accurate image of a place, but it was impossible to widely disseminate the image through photography. Newspaper prints, on the other hand, were printed in huge numbers, so transferring the photographic image to a wood engraving allowed the accurate photographic image to be distributed in the tens of thousands.

In the case of these first prints of Denver, none of the original photographs are known to exist, but there is another example of an early Denver wood engraving where the photograph is known. It is interesting to look at these two images.

The wood engraving is from a French magazine entitled Le Tour Du Monde issued in 1868. This included various accounts of travel around the world and one of the accounts was that of Louis L. Simonin, a mining engineer who visited Colorado and Wyoming in 1867. This account was accompanied by a number of interesting prints, some based on original sketches and others based on photographs. One of the latter is entitled “Vue de la ville de Denver.”

This is an interesting and unusual ‘view of Denver.’ It looks out over the back yards of a number of buildings, which allows only a fairly limited view of the streets beyond. Not what one usually would expect from someone trying to give an idea of the appearance of a city.

This makes sense if one realizes that it is based on a photograph of Denver which may have been the only image the publisher had access to. The photograph in question was copyrighted in 1864 by one of the photographers from Denver in the 1860’s, G.D. Wakely. The reason that this strangely composed photograph was taken was not to show the backyards and streets of Denver, but rather to show the devastating flood of Cherry Creek, which can be seen in the background of the photograph.

If you look closely at the wood engraving, you can see the flood, though it is impossible to know what you are seeing unless you are looking for it. Why did the publisher of Le Tour Du Monde use this photograph as the one image of Denver in the article? Probably simply because it was available and he may have had no access to any other scene of the city. The Denver Public Library has a number of versions of this photograph, indicating that it was probably fairly widely disseminated, for a photograph, and the wood engraving in the magazine would have distributed it even more widely, though probably to an audience which had no idea about the actual subject matter!

Indian prints by W.M. Cary

Next week I am heading off for another Antiques Roadshow taping, this time in Tulsa, Oklahoma. For those interested in western art, this means one thing: the Gilcrease Museum, one of the greatest museums of the art of the West.

My pending visit to Tulsa, together with our recent acquisition of a good collection of prints of the American West from Harper's Weekly, got me thinking about William de la Montagne Cary (1840-1922), better known to print collectors as W.M. Cary. That is because when Cary died, a large collection of his paintings and drawings were acquired by Thomas Gilcrease and they now reside at the Gilcrease Museum.

Cary was one of the significant contributors to the depiction of the American West in illustrated newspapers. His Western prints appeared beginning in the late 1860s and then continuing in subsequent decades, mostly in Harper's Weekly, but also in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and other illustrated periodicals. Like most of his fellow Western illustrators, Cary based his drawings on his own experience in the American West.

Cary began his art career at age fourteen as an apprentice to a commercial engraver. By age 20, he had worked in watercolor and oil, done some sculpture and had contributed a number of drawings to illustrated periodicals, such as the Aldine. Though encouraged by his family to pursue his artistic career through formal study abroad, Cary decided he wanted to seek adventure in the American West.

In early 1861, with two friends, Cary set off on a “sporting expedition” to the West, traveling from St. Louis, aboard American Fur Company steamers, up the Missouri to Montana, surviving a fire and exploding boiler along the way. They spent six weeks at Fort Union, hunting and befriending the Indians camped around the fort. Then the young men joined a wagon train and set off to Fort Benton. Along the way they were captured and then released by a band of Crow Indians, and upon arriving at Fort Benton they stayed for another two weeks hunting and exploring the area. From thence the threesome set off by foot and horseback across the Rockies to Washington State, subsequently returning back to New York City about a year after they had set out.

In 1867, Cary went West again, where he painted portraits of George Custer and William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, the latter becoming a lifelong friend. In 1874, Cary made a last trip to the West, joining in with the U.S. Northern Boundary Survey Commission on the last part of their expedition.

In New York City, Cary had set up a studio and became a well-established artist, known particularly for his western themed art. Cary produced paintings and also a number of images which were made into lithographs, etchings and book plates. His most prolific work, however, were the images he provided for the illustrated publications.

His periodical illustrations are of considerable interest. Many were based on first-hand observations and others were “imaginary scenes suggested by events at the time of their depiction,” (Robert Taft, Artists and Illustrators of the Old West, p. 53) though always informed by his considerable experience in the West. With our recent acquisition of a group of Harper's Weekly wood-engravings of the West, I was particularly struck by W.M. Cary's images of Native Americans.

Relationships between the Plains Indians and the EuroAmerican emigrants from east of the Mississippi, who passed through and then into the region in increasing numbers, had been problematic from 1850s on, with an on-going series of conflicts scattered in among a regular succession of "wars" and treaties. With the discovery of gold and the building of railroads across the Plains, "Indian Wars" were a regular occurrence and readers in the East had an insatiable interest in news of the dramatic events on the frontier.

Accounts appeared in books and periodicals, but the most common form of visual information about the Indian affairs of the West were the wood engravings from the illustrated newspapers. Cary was one of the most prolific contributors to this body of images in the 1860s and 70s, and he probably was the artist whose drawings were the most dramatic. Thus, it is not unlikely that Cary's prints contributed a large element to the visual image that most EuroAmerican's had of the Native Americans.

So what were they like; what sort of image did Cary give on the American Indian? The sample is somewhat small and so my thoughts that follow are very speculative, but I think it is interesting see what we can discern by looking at Cary's prints.

The prints from the 1860s were drawn when Cary was still in his 20s and not long after he had lived through a number of his own adventures in the West. These prints show the Indians as blood-thirsty and with exotic customs. They are shown attacking a fort and a boat-load of trappers and sneaking up to ambush peaceful settlers. The centerpiece of his "Life of An Indian" shows a brave proudly holding up his "First Scalp," while other images show him hunting and undergoing the "Trial of Endurance." It should be noted that in this print there is a nice vignette of an Indian mother and infant and also of a brave playing a flute for his son. Still, the Cary images of this period emphasize the wild and war-like.

The prints from the 1870s do, I think, exhibit a different emphasis (that is excepting Cary's wonderful image from the Aldine in 1873, showing the results of an Indian attack on a Pike's Peak gold-rusher, illustrated at the bottom). In his prints from the 1870s, Cary shows more images of Indian life, such as a canoe race, breaking a pony, and dealing with death.

In 1874, Cary did produce two images entitled "Sketches of Indian Warfare," including a scene of the Scalp Dance, but the other engraving shows the Indian less threatening than threatened. A chief stands on his horse, raising his hand to try to stop a wagon train passing through his lands. The Indian, armed only with a bow, spear and tomahawk, is facing men clearly armed to the teeth with guns and a train of innumerable wagons. One gets the sense that Cary no longer saw the Indians as wild savages (though it is not clear he ever did, for the earlier emphasis may have been more for popular consumption than his true feelings), but as members a doomed culture worthy of trying to understand.

Shaping the Trans-Mississippi West: 1810-1819

In the previous blog in this series, we saw how in the first decade of the nineteenth century, the United States approximately doubled its size with the acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase, from which the Territory of Orleans—-consisting of those relatively settled lands in the southernmost part of the purchase-—was broken off as a separate entity.

While the basic outline of the Louisiana Purchase was fairly clear, essentially encompassing the lands west of the Mississippi River, drained by that river and its tributaries, the exact borders between the new American lands and those of New Spain in the southernmost part were open to debate. The Americans claimed that the Sabine River should be the border, whereas the Spanish claimed a border further to the east at the Calcasieu River.

Negotiations between the countries broke down in 1805, with Spain severing diplomatic relations with the United States. Over the next year there was conflict, in words and deeds, between the two countries over the lands between these two rivers. Finally in 1806, an agreement was signed to establish this as a neutral ground, which neither side would settle nor try to govern. Inevitably, into this lawless land, lawless individuals gathered and it became a hotbed for bandits who preyed on travelers. The border was eventually established as the Sabine River by the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819.

As I mentioned in the previous blog in this series, the large territories which were added to the United States west of the Mississippi River in the nineteenth century were divided into smaller units as they became settled; usually these smaller units were created first as territories, then later admitted as states once they reached a certain level of development.

In 1812, the Territory of Orleans became the State of Louisiana, but this had as much to do with the issue of slavery as with the region's development. Since the founding of the nation, there had been a fairly even balance between slave and non-slave states, but this was disturbed with the admission of Ohio in 1803, which would soon be followed by other non-slave states created out of the old Northwest Territory. Southerners were keen to add a new slave state to balance this trend, so Louisiana was admitted less than a decade after Orleans had been created as a separate territory.

That same year, in order that it not be confused with the new state of Louisiana, what had been the Louisiana Territory was renamed as the Missouri Territory. This was the remainder of the original Louisiana Purchase outside the new state. At that time, these borders were still not firmly established, but by the end of the second decade of the century, the borders in the north and south were defined by agreement with Britain and Spain respectively.

To the north, the border with the British in what is today Canada was established by the Anglo-American Convention of 1818, to follow the 49th parallel from Lake of the Woods to the continental divide. This in effect gave the United States the southernmost part of the Red River Valley and the British the northernmost part of the Missouri River Valley. The Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819, which had fixed the border of the new state of Louisiana, also clarified the rest of the border between Spanish and American claims for the new Missouri Territory. The United States gave up its claim over Texas and also gave to the Spanish lands between the Red and Arkansas Rivers, essentially in exchange for Florida.

In the same year as the Adams-Onis Treaty, the Territory of Arkansas was established from the lands south of the 36.30 degree parallel, running from the Mississippi River to the new border with the Spanish lands. The year before, in 1818, Missouri had applied for statehood. Centered on St. Louis, the pattern of settlement in Missouri had left something of a gap between the proposed state and Louisiana, so it seemed prudent to organize those lands into this new territory, especially given the large immigration there beginning in 1810, of both Anglo-Americans and Native Americans.

The line between the proposed state of Missouri and Arkansas was set at the 36.30 degree line, the same parallel that separated Tennessee and Kentucky. The one exception was the Missouri “Boot Heel,” which consisted of the lands east of the St. Francis River between the 36.30 and 36 degree lines. The reason for this land being assigned to Missouri and not Arkansas was essentially that the economy and settlers of the boot heal were intimately connected with the rest of Missouri, but some interesting legends about its creation have been put forth.

One story has it that a farmer who lived there asked the government to not make his land part of Arkansas, because he heard it was so sickly in Arkansas, “Full of bears and panthers and copperhead snakes, so it ain’t safe for civilized people to stay there overnight even.” Another story tells of a love-struck surveyor who ran the line further south in order to spare the feelings of a window who lived there and believed she lived in Missouri.

While the Arkansas Territory was created in 1819, the state of Missouri didn’t appear until the following year---a story to be told in the next blog in this series. So at the beginning of 1820, the United States west of the Mississippi had its borders fairly well established and it consisted of the state of Louisiana, the territory of Arkansas, and a large Missouri Territory encompassing all else.

Multi-view prints

In previous blogs I have discussed my interest in what I call “novelty prints”, and mentioned the amazing collection of Richard Balzer. Many prints fall into this novelty category because there are multiple ways of looking at them. Today I will discuss prints which are structured in a three-dimensional manner so that they look different depending on the angle at which you view them.

We recently acquired a very interesting example of this sort of print, which you might call a “two-way” or “accordion” print (I have never come across one of these before, so do not know if there is a proper name for this sort of print). This print was issued in Paris sometime in the nineteenth century and it is a hand colored lithograph, but of definitely unusual form.

This print has the shape of an accordion, so that if you angle it to the left, you see an image of a flower vase, and if you angle it to the right, you see portraits of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus. It is a little hard to tell how it was put together and I have not wanted to take it out of the frame, as it appears quite fragile, but as best I can tell this print was created by taking three prints (the vase, and then the two portraits), cutting them into strips, then pasting them on a backing sheet folded into the accordion shape.

A similar type of print appeared in the nineteenth century in America, but these add a third view, so that you see one image if the print is angled left, one image if angled right, and one image if viewed straight on. Richard Balzer calls these prints “triceniums.” These are made using three prints, two of which are cut into strips and glued back to back. These double-sided strips are then stretched on their sides, and spaced a couple inches apart above the third print. If you look at the print straight on, the strips do not block your view of the print at the back, but when viewed at an angle you see one of the other two prints.

All the triceniums that I have seen use Currier & Ives portraits related to the Civil War. They have had either George Washington or Abraham Lincoln as the print when seen straight on, and various generals (such as Grant, McClellan, Scott and Sherman) used as the two angled prints. Years ago one of these, with Lincoln used as the print at the back, hung in the Ford Theater in Washington, but I am not sure it is still there.

I have also seen a “southern” version with Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson (which I did an on-air appraisal of in an early Antiques Roadshow show), and I have been told by a fellow print dealer that he has seen a Currier & Ives tricenium with flower images.

All the ones I know of, at least those produced in America, use Currier & Ives prints. So were these published in this form by Currier & Ives? I have looked for years for any sort of advertisement or mention of this sort of print as being published by Currier & Ives themselves, but have never found any. Currier & Ives prints were ubiquitous around the time of the Civil War, and the firm did sell their prints to print sellers, bookshops, and framers around the country, so it is certainly a reasonable possibility that these prints were put together by a reseller and not Currier & Ives themselves.

Until someone finds a reference to these prints being sold or produced in the nineteenth century, the question of who put these together will be something we cannot answer. If anyone knows of any such reference or comes across one, I’d love to hear about it! I would also be keen to hear of any other examples of these multi-view prints, either using Currier & Ives prints or those by other publishers. These are a lot of fun and very little research has been done on them, something it would be nice to rectify.

Antiques Roadshow: Eugene

I have been remiss about getting new blog postings up, mostly because I have been doing a lot of travel of late. One of my trips was to the Antiques Roadshow taping done in Eugene, Oregon earlier this month. This was the first stop for the 2012 season (the new season begins in January and it shows the episodes filmed the summer before). It was great to see all my fellow appraisers and the crowd in Eugene was terrific. The Roadshow is still very popular (viewer numbers are continuing to go up) and the crowd in Eugene was as good as almost any city I’ve been to in the 15 years of doing the show. Everyone was very nice and I saw some great stuff.

One of the surprises was that there were not as many out-right reproductions brought to the prints and posters table as usual; there were some, but I would guess at least half of what we see in most cities are reproductions and there were considerably less in Eugene. There were also less of the tourist prints we usually see so many of (as I wrote about in a previous blog). I had hoped to see some good Oregon views, but nothing of any note in that line came in.

What came in with somewhat surprising regularity were really good maps. I am not sure why that is other than that I think the map appraisals that are shown on the Roadshow are of considerable interest to people, spiking interest in maps in general (at least I hope so!). It also might be that maps remain a bit of a mystery to many people. Most prints are fairly obvious in terms of what they are about (a local view, a portrait of a famous person, a bird print, etc.), but unless you are someone who is pretty up on history or cartography, most people know nothing about the maps they have other than the geographic area they show.

Whatever the case, I enjoy it when maps come in; most have an interesting history and I love to explain the historic context of the maps for their owners. Maps also can be quite attractive, as was the Blaeu world map that I saw. This was a map which a young lady had inherited from her father. She thought it was nice, but really didn’t know anything about it. This was a beautiful example of a Blaeu world, with original color, and when she learned both how early it was (early 17th century) and its value (over $20,000), she was flabbergasted. Fun to be able to pass on such good news rather than the usual, “Your print is very attractive, but its value is really simply as a decorative item and it would probably be priced at less than $10 in a shop…”

I also saw a number of other very good maps (one of which was taped and I hope will appear in next year’s season). One was a nice “saddle bag” version of Simeon De Witt’s important 1804 map of New York State. De Witt had been the Surveyor General for the American army during the Revolution and he later became the Surveyor General for New York State, a post he held for half a century. In 1802, De Witt produced a large map of the state, based on earlier maps along with new surveys commissioned by De Witt. Two years later, this seminal map was issued in the reduced version, a nice example of which was brought in to the Roadshow. A rare map that is one of the best American maps of the first decade of the nineteenth century.

This coming weekend I am heading off for El Paso, Texas, for the second stop on the Roadshow tour this summer. One tends to expect to see things of local interest, but then again most of the things I saw in Eugene had little to do with Oregon. There are, of course, lots of great items related to Texas history: prints and maps. As I discussed in my blog of relative values for maps of different states, anything related to Texas history tends to be worth more than things related to the history of other states, so if I see a good view, battle scene or map of Texas history, it is likely to be worth a fair bit.

This brings up an issue I’ll briefly mention to end this blog, that is the importance of price or value for items on Antiques Roadshow. Early on, it was the big prices of some of the items which were filmed ($20,000!) that caught viewer’s attention on the show. However, large prices are not enough to sustain fifteen seasons of interest. It is a good story about an item that the producers are looking for. Yes, the price is important (most regular viewers I know are always trying to guess the value of items as they watch), but the story of the items is more so. Good thing for me, as on the whole maps and prints are in the lower price range in the world of antiques, but most of them have really interesting stories (to me especially). Here’s hoping to a bunch of fascinating and valuable items in El Paso!

Shaping the Trans-Mississippi West: 1800-1810

The United States was born out of the British Colonies, which had been founded in North America beginning in 1607. These colonies were originally limited to the lands along the Atlantic Ocean, east of the Appalachians, but with their 1763 victory in the French & Indian War, the British gained control of almost all of North America east of the Mississippi River. When the United States was formed after the War of Independence, it consisted essentially of the territory in eastern North American between the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River in the north and Florida in the south.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the American western frontier consisted of the lands across the Appalachians, but east of the Mississippi. Citizens living in the area between the Appalachians and the Mississippi considered themselves westerners; for instance, Henry Clay from Kentucky was popularly known as “Harry of the West.” By the end of the century, however, the United States stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and it was the trans-Mississippi region which was then the American West.

In 1800, most of the trans-Mississippi region was either Spanish or French territory. French Louisiana consisted of those lands in the Mississippi drainage to the west of the river, so lying between the Mississippi and the continental divide. The lands to the west of the continental divide were primarily Spanish, being the northern part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, though the country north of the 42nd degree parallel was claimed also by the British.

So, in 1800, what would become the trans-Mississippi United States was divided into just three basic political entities, French Louisiana, northern New Spain, and (somewhat disputed) the British Columbia District in the Pacific Northwest. By the end of the century, this was all part of the United States and by then it was divided into 23 political units! The changing political configurations of the trans-Mississippi region between 1800 and 1900, as shown in contemporary maps, will be the subject of a series of blogs I will call “Shaping the Trans-Mississippi West.” Today I’ll look at the first decade of the 19th century.

French Louisiana originally consisted of most of the drainage basin of the Mississippi, on both sides of the river. In 1764, with her loss at the end of the Seven Year’s War (called the French & Indian War in North America), France relinquished the eastern half to the British and the western half to the Spanish. France regained control of Louisiana west of the Mississippi from the Spanish in 1800.

In the first few years of the nineteenth century, Napoleon Bonaparte was involved in much conflict and intrigue in Europe and the French dominions abroad, and he faced imminent war with the British and total financial collapse. Looking for a quick solution for the latter, in 1803 Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States for essentially 15 million dollars (about 220 million in today’s dollars), the equivalent of less than 3 cents per acre.

In this one transaction, the United States essentially doubled its size. The exact border between the Spanish lands in New Spain and Louisiana south of the continental divide were not clear, but that was settled by the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819. There was also still dispute about the ownership of the lands in the Pacific Northwest. Little was known of Louisiana, so President Jefferson almost immediately sent out an exploring expedition under Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Early maps were able to show a rough image of this newly acquired U.S. territory, but it wasn’t until the Lewis & Clark information and then later exploring expeditions that accurate details began to become available.

There are a number of common themes which we will see as we study the development of the trans-Mississippi West, one of which is that initially large territories were divided into smaller units as their population increased. Citizens would move into part of a large territory and would soon feel a desire for a more local government, which could take into account the particular needs and wants of that local population. These smaller units were usually also territories, but then over time they would usually become states (unless they were again subdivided).

Thus it was that in 1804, that part of the Louisiana Purchase south of the 33rd parallel became the Territory of Orleans. This was, of course, the area where there had been a large and sophisticated population of Spanish, French and now American citizens, who felt that they had little in common with the vast, undeveloped parts of Louisiana to the north. The remainder of the purchase, north of Orleans, became the unorganized District of Louisiana, which then became the Louisiana Territory in 1805.

Thus the political situation of the trans-Mississippi West in 1810 was very like that in 1800, though now divided into four parts instead of three: New Spain, the disputed Pacific Northwest, the American Louisiana Territory, and the Territory of Orleans. Before another ten years were up, another unit would be broken off, as we’ll see in the next blog in this series.