Lewis and Clark Expedition
The Lewis and Clark Expedition, also known as the Corps of Discovery Expedition, was the United States expedition to cross the newly acquired western portion of the country after the Louisiana Purchase. The Corps of Discovery was a select group of U.S. Army and civilian volunteers under the command of Captain Meriwether Lewis and his close friend Second Lieutenant William Clark. Clark, along with 30 others, set out from Camp Dubois, Illinois, on May 14, 1804, met Lewis and ten other members of the group in St. Charles, Missouri, then went up the Missouri River. The expedition crossed the Continental Divide of the Americas near the Lemhi Pass, eventually coming to the Columbia River, and the Pacific Ocean in 1805. The return voyage began on March 23, 1806, at Fort Clatsop, Oregon, ending six months later on September 23 of that year.
Portraits of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
Camp Dubois (Camp Wood) reconstruction, where the Corps of Discovery mustered on the east side of the Mississippi River, through the winter of 1803–1804, to await the transfer of the Louisiana Purchase to the United States
Corps of Discovery meet Chinooks on the Lower Columbia, October 1805 (Lewis and Clark on the Lower Columbia painted by Charles Marion Russel, c. 1905)
Reconstruction of Fort Mandan, Lewis and Clark Memorial Park, North Dakota
The Louisiana Purchase was the acquisition of the territory of Louisiana by the United States from the French First Republic in 1803. This consisted of most of the land in the Mississippi River's drainage basin west of the river. In return for fifteen million dollars, or approximately eighteen dollars per square mile, the United States nominally acquired a total of 828,000 sq mi in Middle America. However, France only controlled a small fraction of this area, most of which was inhabited by Native Americans; effectively, for the majority of the area, the United States bought the preemptive right to obtain Indian lands by treaty or by conquest, to the exclusion of other colonial powers.
The future president James Monroe as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to France helped Robert R. Livingston in negotiating the Louisiana Purchase
The original treaty of the Louisiana Purchase
Transfer of Louisiana by Ford P. Kaiser for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (1904)
Flag raising in the Place d'Armes of New Orleans, marking the transfer of sovereignty over French Louisiana to the United States, December 20, 1803, as depicted by Thure de Thulstrup