CHAPTER I THE SPANISH DISCOVERERS What the Louisiana Purchase was. Early Spanish explorers. Discovery of the Mississippi. Pineda, Cabeza de Vaca, Coronado, De Soto, and Docampo. The Spaniards first in the field. Their weakness in colonization. At the opening of the year 1803 the territory of the United States was bounded on the west by the Mississippi River.1 In April of that year a treaty was signed in Paris by which nearly a million square miles west of the Mississippi, stretching from the mouth of the river to British America, was purchased from France for $15,000,000, and the total area of our country was more than doubled. This great event is known in history as the 1 On the south the boundary was the thirty-first parallel of latitude from the Mississippi to the Apalachicola, down the middle of that river to the Flint, thence to the head of St. Marys River, and down the latter to the sea. Louisiana Purchase. By this treaty, which was signed by Robert R. Livingston and James Monroe representing the United States, and Barbé-Marbois representing the Republic of France, Napoleon Bonaparte - then the First Consul of France and afterward Emperorceded to the United States the territory which now contains Louisiana, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Indian Territory, and parts of Colorado and Oklahoma.1 1 Much attention has been given by historians to the question whether or not Texas was or should have been included in the Louisiana Purchase. Henry Adams and Professor Edward Channing are among the more conspicuous advocates of Texas as a part of Louisiana, and Professor A. C. McLaughlin declares that France "had good ground for claiming the Texas country perhaps even to the Rio Grande." Schouler and H. H. Bancroft take a contrary view, and the thesis that Texas was not a part of the Louisiana Purchase is ably maintained in an interesting monograph by Professor John R. Ficklen. This discussion is not essential to the present narrative, since the United States, after claiming the territory as far west not only as the Rio Bravo but even to the Rio Grande, yielded the point in 1819, when by treaty with Spain the Floridas were acquired and Texas abandoned. |