The Lewis and Clark Expedition has been intensely studied and written about over the past 220 years, but what they encountered right here in our neighborhood when there was no real settlement is worth modern-day exploring.
Before the Expedition
There would be no Western Expansion without Lewis and Clark. In 1801, the United States stopped at the Mississippi River when President Thomas Jefferson looked westward at the land then owned by France.
Jefferson wanted the port of New Orleans for trade and commerce, and he was able to secure it as part of the United States through the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The French sold New Orleans for $10 million and threw in the rest of the area – over 823,000 square miles of land – for an additional $5 million.
This transaction at approximately three cents per acre nearly doubled the size of the United States…