Wyoming and the Louisiana Purchase

The Louisiana Purchase was one of the most exceptional real estate deals in American history. The United States wanted to buy New Orleans and the delta area of the Mississippi. Napoleon had other ideas; he needed money, money for his army. He offered the entire Louisiana territory; the area later called the Louisiana Territory, for $15,000,000. What a bargain!

President Thomas Jefferson had a great interest in the area, although he had never been to the west. Jefferson’s longest journey west was fifty miles from his home at Monticello. After the purchase, he sent Lewis and Clark to see what he had bought. According to some historians, Jefferson had hopes that long-extinct animals, like the woolly mammoth, might still be alive and well in the unknown West. Indeed, part of the job of the Core of Discovery was to record flora and fauna as they traveled through the west.

They recorded everything from wildflowers to wolves

Not all, but a large part of Wyoming, was part of the newly gained area. Of course France, the United States, and the totality of the purchase, completely ignored the fact that dozens of tribes and tens of thousands of native people had a prior claim to the land. 

Many things to look at and record in the west

Big Lie becomes a National Park

From the time of John Colter, who left the Lewis and Clark expedition when they reached the Pacific, to wander back to what would become Yellowstone Park, to Jim Bridger and later the Washburn- Langford expedition of 1870, everyone who told stories of the Yellowstone area was branded a liar.

The wonders of the park were just too much for people to believe, so they didn’t. Finally in 1872, only a little more than a year after Langford was branded the last of the champion Yellowstone liars of the west, President Grant approved dedication of Yellowstone as a national park. And guess what? Langford was named the first park Superintendent, guess Grant believed his tales of the Yellowstone country.

Today only in Iceland and New Zealand can one see geysers on the tremendous scale of Yellowstone. But you won’t see bears, bison, elk and moose anywhere else in the world like you can in Yellowstone.

It is a must see, if you have not yet been there put it on your list.  And on your way stop here in Guernsey, Wyoming to see the Oregon Trail Ruts, Register Cliff and the magnificent Guernsey State Park.