Jon Kukla - A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America

The Mississippi will be one of the principal channels of future commerce for the country westward of the Alleghaney. From the mouth of this river to where it receives the Ohio, is 1,000 miles by water, but only 500 by land. The Mississippi, below the mouth of the Missouri, is always muddy.

The Missouri is, in fact, the principal river, contributing more to the common stream than does the Mississippi, even after its junction with the Illinois. It is remarkably cold, muddy, and rapid.

The Ohio is the most beautiful river on earth. Its current gentle, waters clear, and bosom smooth and unbroken by rocks and rapids, a single instance only excepted three or four miles below Louisville.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785

I N THE PINE WOODS of northern Minnesota, about one hundred eighty miles inland from Lake Superior and the port of Duluth, the Mississippi River begins its winding journey of 2,552 miles from Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico. As it flows out of the lake to begin a pilgrimage through the heartland of North America, the shallow brook is about a dozen yards wide. Passing tamarack bogs and the burial mounds of the Anishinabe, the river gains width and depth. Fed by scores of glacial ponds and lakes, the Mississippi tumbles over the Falls of St. Anthony, between Minneapolis and St. Paul. Navigable from there to the Gulf, the mighty river swells with the water of tributary creeks and streams that drain more than a million square miles of farmland and forest. As lesser rivers converge into the larger tributaries that join the Mississippithe St. Croix River at Point Douglas, Minnesota, the Wisconsin at Prairie du

The power and destiny of the Lower Mississippi is scarcely imaginable along the north shore of Lake Itasca, where picnic tables sheltered by tall pines dwarf the tiny stream. Here, fifty years ago, a tow-headed and dimpled midwestern child splashed from rock to rock across the shallow brook, cheerfully ignorant that he was ankle deep in the first tide of a turbulent force of nature and history. Everything impressive about the Mississippi River lay far downstream in his distant future. In time the child who splashed over stepping-stones at Lake Itasca swam against the lazy summer current at Wyalusing State Park. He heard calls for volunteers to pack sandbags against the angry flood near Prairie du Chien. And he stood on the levee at Jackson Square, far below the tributary streams of his childhood, watching the all-powerful and unforgiving river send enormous oceangoing ships skidding through the treacherous bends at New Orleans. As age, distance, and experience revealed the connections between that tiny crystal brook at Lake Itasca and the mighty muddy flood of the Lower Mississippi, the man who long ago played in the clear waters of the Upper Mississippi came to realize that the story of the Louisiana Purchase had its tributaries, too.

At the end of the American Revolution, the Louisiana Purchase lay hidden far beyond the horizon, twenty years downstream into the future. The background stories that comprise its tributaries were as distant from one another as are the easternmost headwaters of the Ohio Riveron the Allegheny near Coudersport, Pennsylvaniafrom the mountain creek near Dillon, Montana, that eventually becomes the Missouri. Like gravity pulling water through a great river system toward the sea, time brought together the stories from Paris, Madrid, New Orleans, New York, Kentucky, and Haiti that finally converged in the monumental events of 1803.