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 326 Western exploration. [i803-6 Paris, the First Consul made a counter-proposition that the United States should buy all Louisiana as ceded to France by Spain. The offer was gladly accepted, and the price of 80,000,000 francs, or $15,000,000, agreed on. The treaty was signed in May, 1803, and ratified by the United States Senate in October; and the province was formally de- livered, with no little ceremony, at New Orleans in December, 1803. Concerning this splendid domain hardly anything was known. No boundaries were given it on the north, the west, or the south ; but it was understood that Louisiana stretched from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains on the west, and from the boundary of the British possessions on the north a boundary yet to be determined to the Gulf of Mexico, according to some, even to the Rio Grande. East of the Mississippi the United States claimed West Florida as far as the Perdido river. But Spain denied that any part of West Florida had been included in the Louisiana cession to France ; and during fifteen years this question remained unsettled. That the unknown West ought to be explored had been a favourite idea of Jefferson for twenty years ; and he had tried to persuade learned men and learned societies to organise an expedition to cross the continent. Failing in this, he turned to Congress, which, in 1803 (before the purchase of Louisiana), voted a sum of money for sending an exploring party from the mouth of the Missouri to the Pacific. The party was in charge of Meri- wether Lewis and William Clark. Early in May, 1804, they left St Louis, then a frontier-town of log-cabins, and worked their way up the Missouri river to a spot not far from the present city of Bismarck, North Dakota, where they passed the winter with the Indians. Resuming their journey in the spring of 1805, they followed the Missouri to its source in the mountains, after crossing which they came to the Clear Water river. Down this they went to the Columbia, and to a spot where, late in November, 1805, they " saw the waves like small mountains rolling out in the sea." They were on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. After spending the winter at the mouth of the Columbia, the party made its way back to St Louis in 1806. Lewis and Clark, however, were not the first citizens of the States to see the Columbia river. In 1792 a Boston ship-captain named Gray was trading with the Pacific coast Indians. He was collecting furs to take to China and exchange for tea to be earned to Boston, and, while so engaged, he discovered the mouth of a great river, which he entered and named the Columbia in honour of his ship. By right of Gray's discovery, the United States was entitled to all the country drained by the Columbia river. The exploration of this country by Lewis and Clark made the title stronger still ; and it was finally perfected a few years later, when trappers and settlers went over the Rocky Mountains and occupied the Oregon country. War broke out again between France and Great Britain in May, 1803 ; and the United States entered on that long struggle for " free trade and