Louisiana Territory

• 1. Introduction

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  The Louisiana Territory came into being on the 4th of July, 1805, a date that was no accident. Congress chose Independence Day to mark the formal birth of a new organized territory, one stretching across roughly 828,000 square miles of the North American interior. That expanse was almost unimaginably large. It reached from the Mississippi River westward into land whose northern and western edges no one had yet firmly drawn on a map.

  What made this territory so unusual was precisely that vagueness. Its eastern boundary was clear: the Mississippi. But its northern border with British Rupert's Land and its western border with Spanish New Spain remained officially undefined throughout the entire life of the territory. How does a government actually govern a place when no one agrees where it ends? And who were the people asked to do it? The answers involve a sitting U.S. Army general, the explorer Meriwether Lewis, and a man named William Clark, whose name would eventually outlast the territory itself.

• 2. The Act That Started It

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  On the 26th of March, 1804, the Eighth Congress passed a law with an unusually direct title: "An act erecting Louisiana into two territories, and providing for the temporary government thereof." That single piece of legislation split the vast Louisiana Purchase into two pieces. South of the 33rd parallel, which today marks the Arkansas-Louisiana state line, became the Territory of Orleans. Everything north of that line became the District of Louisiana.

  The district was not yet a full territory. Congress gave the governor and judges of the neighboring Indiana Territory authority to provide temporary civil jurisdiction over the region. That arrangement went into effect on the 1st of October, 1804. It was a stopgap, and everyone knew it. Within five months, Congress was already moving to give the region its own proper structure. On the 3rd of March, 1805, legislation passed converting the District of Louisiana into the Territory of Louisiana, effective that coming Independence Day.

• 3. Borders Without Lines

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  Before the United States ever controlled this land, a secret document had already determined its fate. On the 1st of October, 1800, Spain and the French Republic signed the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso, by which Spain agreed in principle to hand its North American colony of Louisiana to France in exchange for territories in Tuscany. Those terms were later confirmed by the Treaty of Aranjuez in March of 1801. France then sold the land to the United States, setting in motion the creation of the territory.

  The purchase gave the United States all land from the Mississippi northward, but the agreements left the outer edges conspicuously vague. The northern boundary with British Rupert's Land would not be formally settled until the Treaty of 1818. The western border with the Spanish viceroyalty of New Spain waited even longer: the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 finally drew that line, seven years after the Louisiana Territory itself had ceased to exist under that name.

• 4. The Men Who Governed

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  President Thomas Jefferson made his first appointment to lead the territory on the 11th of March, 1805, choosing General James Wilkinson. The selection was striking for one specific reason: Wilkinson simultaneously held the position of Senior Officer of the United States Army. The man running the Louisiana Territory was also, at the same moment, the highest-ranking soldier in the country.

  Meriwether Lewis followed as the second governor, serving from 1807 to 1809. Lewis had recently returned from his expedition across the continent, making him perhaps the single person most familiar with the western reaches of the very territory he was now asked to administer. William Clark, his co-explorer, came later as the fourth and final territorial governor, serving from 1813 to 1820. Clark's tenure extended well beyond the territory's renaming, as he carried on administering what had by then become Missouri Territory.

• 5. People and Subdivisions

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  The territorial government divided its jurisdiction into five original districts: St. Louis, St. Charles, Ste. Genevieve, Cape Girardeau, and New Madrid. In 1806, the legislature added a sixth when it carved the District of Arkansas from lands ceded by the Osage Nation.

  The 1810 United States census captured a snapshot of who actually lived in this enormous space. Six counties were counted, and together they recorded a total population of 20,845 people. St. Louis was the most populous, with 5,667 residents. Ste. Genevieve followed with 4,620, and Cape Girardeau counted 3,888. The smallest was Arkansas County, with just 1,062 people. Five of those six counties lay in what is now Missouri; the sixth, Arkansas, sat in what is now the state of the same name. The territorial capital throughout was St. Louis.

• 6. A Renaming and an Ending

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  By 1812, a new problem had appeared. The United States had just admitted the State of Louisiana, carved from the Territory of Orleans to the south. Having both a State of Louisiana and a Territory of Louisiana on the map at the same time was a recipe for confusion. The Twelfth U.S. Congress resolved this on the 4th of June, 1812, by passing legislation renaming the Louisiana Territory as the Missouri Territory. The territory had lasted almost exactly seven years, from one Independence Day in 1805 to early summer in 1812.

  The land did not disappear, of course. It eventually became the foundation for multiple U.S. states stretching from the Gulf of Mexico all the way to the Canadian border, as well as portions of what are now Canadian provinces. William Clark continued governing the renamed territory for nearly another decade, a span that suggests just how long this corner of the continent remained in an unfinished state between frontier and statehood.