War and western expansion went hand in hand. That expansion, a form of continental imperialism, not only created modern cultural icons such as the frontiersman, the cowboy, and the homestead family, but also reinforced American identity. Western expansion reinforced the view that American society was superior to all others and that it was the nation's "Manifest Destiny" to spread its institutions across the continent.
The First Great Journey
Thomas Jefferson managed the greatest land bargain in U.S. history when, acting as president, he purchased 828,000 square miles of territory from France in 1803. The boundaries of the purchase were vague; it covered land west of the Mississippi River, comprising what became all or parts of the states of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Utah. It doubled the size of the United States.
The purchase was real, but no one knew precisely what the United States had bought. So, in 1804, Jefferson sent explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on the first overland expedition to the Northwest. On the twenty-eight month journey from St. Louis, Missouri, to the Pacific Ocean and back, Lewis and Clark kept detailed records of the people, plants, and terrain they encountered.
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