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pried Louisiana loose from Spain in 1801. Two
years later, in April 1803, Bonaparte sold the
820,000-square-mile Louisiana territory to the
United States for $15 million. Five years after
the Louisiana Purchase, Bonaparte overran
Spain itself in his ongoing war against Britain.
In 1800 Spain also faced problems in its
overseas colonies. Political instability, com-
bined with the dangers of pushing into unfa-
miliar Native American–dominated lands, left
Spain’s interest in expansion stalled at its neg-
lected colonial borders as the 19th century
began. Many of California’s 21 Franciscan mis-
sions were under construction or had yet to be
founded in 1800, but the religious fervor that
drove royal Spain’s initial support for new
exploration had disappeared long ago. Obedi-
ence to the Spanish Crown had been strictly
enforced during the first century of colonial
rule. By1800, however, many generations of
New World inhabitants of pure or mixed His-
panic ancestry considered themselves natives
of the Americas and wanted increasingly more
power to govern themselves. Over the next 20
years, revolutions would end Spanish control
of Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela. In 1820
Mexico seceded from Spain; similarly, the peo-
ple of Brazil declared their independence from
Portugal in 1822. Spain’s three centuries of
control in the Americas were ending in all but
a few places, such as Cuba and Puerto Rico.
NEW PARTICIPANTS
New North American exploration was also
poised to begin under the sponsorship of
another country created by colonial discon-
tent, New Spain’s recently established north-
ern neighbor, the United States of America.
On February 28, 1803, two months before the
Louisiana Purchase, President Thomas Jeffer-
son obtained congressional approval to send
Captain Meriwether Lewis on a journey across
the North American continent. Jefferson out-
lined the basic purpose of the expedition in a
June 20, 1803, letter to Lewis:The object of your mission is to explore the
Missouri River, and such principal streams
of it, as, by its course and communication
with the waters of the Pacific Ocean,
whether the Columbia, Oregan, Colorado,
or any other river, may offer the most
direct and practible water-communication
across the continent, for the purposes of
commerce.The four-year expedition led by Lewis and
his colleague William Clark would travel over-
land from St. Louis to the same bay fur trader
Robert Gray had entered in 1792, wherethe
Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean. The
expedition would be the first U.S. government
survey of natural resources in the American
West. It would also fulfill Jefferson’s order to
collect as much information as possible about
Native American nations.
Not all such exploration of the Americas
would take place in the United States. In the
time since Columbus’s voyages, Great Britain
had emerged as a world power. Naval expedi-
tions of exploration ordered by the British
admiralty, such as the 18th-century travels of
Cook and Vancouver, continued into the
1800s, particularly in the Arctic. Much smaller
efforts sponsored by fur trading companies
also succeeded in finding and surveying
routes across the Canadian Rocky Mountains
to the Pacific Northwest, including the expedi-
tions of Alexander Mackenzie (1789 and
1792–93) and David Thompson (1807–11).THE CHANGED FACE OF
THE AMERICAS
Between 1492 and 1800 the opening of the
Americas influenced—and was influenced
by—great changes: more accurate under-(^174) B Discovery of the Americas, 1492–1800
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