AI Tutor
Imagine buying an entire backyard the size of a soccer field for only three pennies.
In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson completed a real estate deal that doubled the land size of the United States overnight.
American farmers living west of the Appalachian Mountains relied on the Mississippi River and the busy port of New Orleans to ship their crops to world markets.
France needed money to fight wars in Europe, so Emperor Napoleon sold the entire Louisiana Territory—about 828,000 square miles—to the United States for 15 million dollars.
Under Utah U.S. I Standard 6.1, historians analyze three competing motivations behind this purchase: economic, geopolitical, and ideological.
It secured Mississippi River commerce and agricultural farmland, removed French imperial power from North America, and advanced Jefferson's agrarian vision of an "Empire of Liberty."
There was just one giant problem: nobody in the United States government actually had a map of what was out there.

The Corps of Discovery

Jefferson picked his trusted assistant Meriwether Lewis and army officer William Clark to lead an expedition called the Corps of Discovery.
Their primary mission was to find a direct water route across the continent to the Pacific Ocean, known as the Northwest Passage.
Could a small group of roughly forty soldiers and boatmen survive thousands of miles of unknown territory completely on their own?