The Impact on the U.S. of the Louisiana Purchase

It’s interesting to think that $15M in 1803 is only $305M today, in terms of inflation. That was the price of the Louisiana Purchase. (There were some very negative periods for the U.S. economy over many decades since that time.) $305M or much more will buy you a hillside residence in Silicon Valley— maybe 2 acres of land. The Louisiana Purchase included 530M acres.

While the U.S. did not become a recognized world power until WWII, the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and, in 1848, the acquisition of Western regions in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo provided unimagined exploitable natural resources and enabled the further near-annihilation of Native Americans. These two conditions are strongly interconnected, even today. As witnessed over the past year, the disregard for Native Americans and their ways of life is still widely accepted.

In the 1800s, the Native American stewards of Turtle Island, in many cases, strongly resisted their own annihilation and the rape of the land that came with the exploitation of natural resources. I am not trying to paint an overly romantic picture of the wide variety of Native American nations and tribes, but their footprint on the land was minuscule compared with what occurred with the arrival of railroads, oil wells, farming homesteads, canals, and dams. The Louisiana Purchase made much of this possible.

The callousness of “Americans” reached new depths over the ensuing decades. Native American children were taken from their families to attend boarding schools that forbid the use of Native American languages and cultural ways. The Carlisle Indian School (about 1880 to 1920) was the premiere example. (I graduated from Dickinson College and felt the impact of the Carlisle Indian School in the local culture, just as the history of the U.S. Army War College in the same town continues to be part of the culture. The impact of the Carlisle Indian School, fortunately, has become-- at Dickinson College, at least-- a heightened sensitivity to what Native Americans have endured.)

The segregation of Native Americans, forced onto reservations and rancherias, extended all the way to California: separate hospitals where nationally-available antibiotic treatments were not available, forcible removal of children, the expansion of the domain of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (which still decides which tribes get “recognized” and still does not honor treaties)— These are some of the profound changes that came from the Louisiana Purchase (and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo).

The Louisiana Purchase was the follow-on to the beginning Western European colonization of Africa, Indonesia, India, and many other regions. It established the United States as a conquering empire.