Reliving Lewis and Clark: Louisiana Purchase Ceremony

Anthony Brandt
for National Geographic News

March 23, 2004

This article is second in a series. Author Anthony Brandt is
following the trail of the Lewis and Clark expedition across the
North American West. Along the way, he's reporting on
200th-anniversary events at pivotal locations—and on what
happened all those years ago.

The Three Flags Ceremony marking the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase—the acquisition that inspired the Lewis and Clark expedition—was held on March 14 in St. Louis, overlooking the Mississippi River under the Gateway Arch.

The heads of state of France, Spain, and the United States, the three countries involved, had been invited, but they could not attend. Instead the Spanish ambassador to the United States, Francisco Viqueira, came to represent Spain, Jean-David Levitte, the French ambassador, was there for France, and United States Assistant Secretary of the Interior Craig Manson was there for the U.S. Representing American Indian tribes was Tex G. Hall (otherwise known as Red Tipped Arrow), president of the National Congress of American Indians.

It was a sad occasion in some respects. Only days before, ten terrorist bombs had exploded in Spanish commuter trains, killing more than 200 people. The crowd observed a moment of silence to commemorate the Madrid dead.

The original Three Flags Ceremony must have been a much more casual affair. We know that most of St. Louis came to watch flags raised and lowered and volleys of gunshot by U.S. soldiers, but the population of St. Louis in 1803 stood at about a thousand people, and that's fewer than attend a lot of high school football games.

Most of those 1803 inhabitants were French in origin and spoke French. The three flags were, of course, the Spanish, French, and U.S. flags. The French owned the Louisiana Territory at the time, but they had only owned it for three years. Napoleon had acquired it from the Spanish in 1800 in the Second Treaty of San Ildefonso. He exchanged the North American land for land in northern Italy—the so-called kingdom of Etruria, which was to become the realm of the Queen of Spain's nephew.

Napoleon's Right to Dispose of Italy

Napoleon had conquered Italy, and he considered it his right to dispose of it as he wished. The Spanish agreed to the deal partly because Napoleon promised never to sell the Louisiana Territory to any other nation—particularly the Americans.

The Spanish had no interest in settling the vast lands west of the Mississippi, but they wanted to keep them as a buffer zone between Spain's holdings in western North America and the United States.

At the time U.S. citizens were pouring across the Appalachian Mountains into Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, and the Illinois Territory. Some had already crossed the Mississippi River to settle.

Spain was concerned about the security of its silver mines in northern Mexico, which supplied half of Spain's total wealth in trade. They did not want Americans constantly moving west toward those mines.

Napoleon did have plans to settle the Louisiana Territory, which comprised all the lands drained by the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers—an enormous tract, as big as the United States itself at the time. He intended to revive the French overseas empire in North America, lost at the time of the French and Indian War.

But it never happened. The army Napoleon was going to send to New Orleans and on up the Mississippi to occupy the Louisiana Territory was held up in a Dutch port by ice in the winter of 1802-03.

The British didn't like the idea at all; they were making plans to go to war with France in any case. Napoleon needed money to fight this second war with the British. In the spring of 1803 he suddenly decided to sell the whole thing—all of Louisiana, nearly a million square miles (2,600,000 square kilometers) of land, to the United States.

The Americans were looking to make a deal at the time, but only to acquire New Orleans so that U.S. boats coming down the Mississippi could trade freely from that port.

Seized the Opportunity

When the chance came to buy the whole tract, the U.S. seized it. Congress approved the purchase, which cost the country 15 million dollars, in the fall of 1803. In January, 1804, a ceremony was held in New Orleans transferring power. The final ceremony, the Three Flags Ceremony, was held on March 9, 1804, in St. Louis.

Why three flags? Because the French had never shown up to take over the territory they acquired in 1800. For the intervening years the Spanish still governed it.

When Capt. Amos Stoddard, a U. S. Army officer, came to officiate at the ceremony, protocol required that the Spanish flag be lowered and the French raised; then the French flag would come down and the American go up.

According to some sources, the French flag was only supposed to fly for an hour. But the French residents of St. Louis begged Stoddard to let it fly overnight. It went up the flagpole on March 9. On March 10 it came down.

Meriwether Lewis witnessed all this. In fact, his name appears as a witness on the document that transferred the government of the territory from Spain to the United States.

William Clark may also have been present. Lewis had spent much of the winter in St. Louis making arrangements for the trip up the Missouri. One of his first acts upon arriving the previous December had been to meet with the Spanish governor of St. Louis, Carlos Dehault Delassus, and request permission to proceed upriver.

Permission was denied. Delassus knew he could not indefinitely detain the so-called Corps of Discovery from proceeding upriver, and Lewis did not press the point. He was planning to leave in the spring in any case, and by that time St. Louis would be in United States hands.

But the Spanish were alarmed. They never forgave the French for selling Louisiana, which Napoleon had promised not to do. The Spanish disputed the boundaries of the territory for years. And over the course of the next year they sent four small expeditions of their own from New Mexico across the Great Plains toward the Missouri River, trying to intercept Lewis and Clark and stop them from crossing the continent.

The Spanish saw Lewis and Clark's expedition as the first step in the loss of "the rich possessions of the Kingdom of New Spain," as one Spanish official put it. They were right; it was the first step in that loss. One Spanish force came within 100 miles (160 kilometers) of the Corps of Discovery before turning back.

But it's doubtful that the Spanish or French or anyone else could have stopped the locomotive of U.S. expansion in its tracks. Americans were moving west, come what may.

In 1775 the white population of Kentucky totaled 150 people. By 1800 it was more than 220,000.

A number of observers had noticed that honeybees preceded settlement in the West by about 100 miles. When Lewis and Clark left in May, 1804, they noticed honeybees halfway across what would become the state of Missouri. When they came back down the river to St. Louis 28 months later there were already honeybees in far western Missouri. That's how fast Americans were settling the West.

The Louisiana Purchase legitimized U.S. settlement, but it probably would have happened anyway. Americans wanted the continent. In less than 50 years they would have it. As the Spanish well understood, Lewis and Clark were only the first step.

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