Describe the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-1806), including Sacagawea's crucial role.
In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory from France for about $15 million, roughly doubling the size of the United States overnight with land stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. France's ruler, Napoleon Bonaparte, agreed to sell partly because a costly, failed effort to hold onto its Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, after an enslaved people's revolution there won independence as Haiti, had drained French resources and ambitions in the Americas, and Napoleon needed money for wars closer to home in Europe.
Jefferson commissioned the Corps of Discovery, led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, to explore this vast new territory, search for a water route to the Pacific, and record the plants, animals, and Native nations they encountered along the way, from 1804 to 1806. A young Shoshone woman named Sacagawea joined the expedition as a guide and interpreter, carrying her infant son the entire journey; her knowledge, and, at one crucial point, her reunion with her own Shoshone people to trade for horses needed to cross the Rocky Mountains, proved essential to the expedition's success. The Corps reached the Pacific Ocean in November 1805 and returned with detailed maps and records, though the easy all-water route to the Pacific Jefferson had hoped for turned out not to exist.
Mastery looks like: They can state the year, price, and rough size change of the Louisiana Purchase, and describe Sacagawea's role in the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
Common stumbles: Describing Lewis and Clark as discovering empty land instead of exploring land many Native nations already called home; confusing the purchase's date with the expedition's dates.