LOUISIANA, the Western Province extending from the gulf coast through the country of the Purchase towards the mountains. Its name must be distinguished from the larger historical employment of Louisiana in the treaty and the subsequent account of continental development. The Purchase of Louisiana (q.v.) in 1804 acquired the French claim west of the Mississippi; the present province is an administrative division within the country opened by that transaction, not a convenient new name for every consequence of it.
The original mercantile object was passage upon the river and access to its mouth. The bargain exceeded the instructions of the commissioners and made a question of navigation into a question of continental administration. For the negotiators' part in that enlargement the reader is referred to the treaty article. The provincial account begins with what the signature did not supply: connected surveys, established communications, and the means of making a distant title effective in local business.
The Mississippi (q.v.) and its tributaries provide the principal lines of carriage. Their apparent advantage requires qualification. Downstream movement is not the same undertaking as the return journey; a landing suitable in one state of water may be useless in another; and a produce price at the gulf cannot be applied to an inland holding without deducting more than the boatman's charge. Handling, storage, loss, delay, and credit for the interval all enter the account. Ambrose Merrion's (q.v.) travel books are useful precisely because his cargo so often fails to move when a general description of the river would have led the reader to expect it.
Settlement has consequently been unequal. The gulf and the principal watercourses sustain connexions very different from those of the more thinly occupied interior towards the mountains. Provincial government extends farther than the close cultivation visible from a road or landing-place. The distinction matters in estimating both revenue and expense: an extensive territorial charge is not necessarily an extensive body of solvent ratepayers. Nor is an estate's purchase price a measure of the capital required to work it.
The southern boundary was settled by the Treaty of the Rio Bravo (q.v.) in 1848 after the war with Mexico (q.v.). The settlement confirmed the disputed line; it did not add a further great territory to the Commonwealth. The ease with which the Purchase is described as an opening to the Pacific must likewise not be allowed to enlarge the French conveyance upon paper. Oregon (q.v.) and the Californias (q.v.) belong to the subsequent extension of settlement, communications, and provincial administration associated with that opening. They are separately treated.
The interior administration also received the consequences of the Removals (q.v.) from the older settled provinces. Land reserved or assigned for that purpose could not prudently be counted twice in an estimate of land available for sale. The distinction between a Treasury receipt and the full cost of administration remains as necessary here as in the older West. Louisiana was cheaply bought in comparison with its extent; the expense of making that extent serviceable has been a different calculation. (M. S. W.)