The Louisiana Purchase and Territorial Arkansas

On December twentieth, eighteen-oh-three, the United States took formal possession of the Louisiana Territory in New Orleans, doubling the size of the republic in a single morning. The transaction cost roughly fifteen million dollars, about three cents per acre, and it transferred a vast, imperfectly mapped interior that Napoleon had briefly imagined as the breadbasket of a French Atlantic empire. Arkansas was part of that bargain, though it would be years before anyone in Washington had a clear sense of what they had bought.

President Thomas Jefferson dispatched explorers to map the new acquisition. In eighteen-oh-four and eighteen-oh-five, William Dunbar and George Hunter ascended the Ouachita River into what is now Arkansas. In eighteen-oh-six, Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis followed the Red River.

Their journals recorded hot springs, cypress swamps, herds of bison, and a land that seemed simultaneously empty and full. They were wrong about the empty part, the Caddo and Quapaw were still very much present, but the reports fed a hunger for land among settlers already crowding the eastern states. Arkansas was organized as part of Missouri Territory in eighteen twelve, and then as its own Arkansas Territory in eighteen nineteen, with its capital at Arkansas Post, the oldest permanent European settlement in the lower Mississippi Valley.

When the territorial capital moved inland to Little Rock in eighteen twenty-one, it signaled the direction of the future: west, up the river, into the interior. Eighteen years after the Louisiana Purchase, Arkansas was a territory with a land office, a court, and a newspaper. In fifteen more years it would be a state.