Eclectic currents of a historic deed: a number of cities in the United States will be celebrating the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the nation and secured its control of a mighty watershed.

Look at a map of the Mississippi River's heartland, from St. Louis south to Louisiana. For almost every town with a French name there is one nearby with a Spanish--in the state of Missouri alone there is Bolivar and St. Genevieve, De Soto and Bonne Terre, New Madrid and Cape Girardeau. In Arkansas, El Dorado is just two counties east of Lafayette. In Louisiana, they have gone one better, with towns like New Iberia, Lunita, and Gonzales in the only American state named for a French king.

The amalgamation of all things French and Spanish--family names and place names, personal ties as well as patriotic allegiances--in the lower Mississippi Valley was the hallmark of that region's early modern history. This year, these and other cultural artifacts will be celebrated during the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase, by which with the stroke of a pen France sold to the United States its greatest North American territory--all land west of the Mississippi River drained by its tributaries--over which the Spanish flag had flown for the previous forty years.

The region's cultural heritage is today largely French and much of the proper Spanish has been lost--the malagueno family name of "Villatorre," once the patricians of New Iberia, has for instance been corrupted to "Viator," and the town of New Madrid is pronounced--to the horror of madrilenos!--with the accent on the first syllable.

There is hope, however, that the many bicentennial events, conferences, and exhibitions to be held throughout this coming year might now help give Spain its due. Festivities and commemorations are planned in many of the fifteen states carved entirely or in part from the historic purchase, from Arkansas, where the first survey of the new lands was begun, and culminating in a reenactment of the signing of the Louisiana Purchase itself, scheduled for December 2003 in New Orleans' Cabildo (see page 21).

According to Professor Paul Hoffman at Louisiana State University, many vestiges of Spanish culture and society hide in plain sight. The legal code pertaining to his swampy state's all-important river rights dates from Spanish times, as did until the early twentieth century, many laws affecting marriage and property. But Hoffman admits that Louisiana's Spanish inheritance is often overlooked. "I had a good friend named Oubre Ortego, a Cajun French through and through," he says, accenting the surname's first syllable in the local manner. "But I had a heck of a time convincing him that his last name was Spanish and not French."

However, Iberville Parish, named for Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville, a French Canadian and the first man known to have sailed "up" the Mississippi River, is of French and--contrary to appearances--not Spanish origin. With his crew of forty voyageurs in two sailboats towing birchbark canoes, on March 2, 1699, he entered the river from the Gulf of Mexico. The sea was rough that day and many mud flats (called "rocks" by Iberville) threatened his boats. In a monument of understatement, he wrote of' discovering the mouth of the mighty Mississippi, "when drawing near the rocks to take shelter, I became aware of a river."

That it took one hundred and eighty years after the delta's discovery, in 1519 by the Spaniard Alonso Alvarez de Pineda as he sailed along the Gulf shore, for European explorers to penetrate up the Mississippi, shows just how tricky its navigation was then and still is today. Protruding some ninety miles to the east like a sharp hangnail stuck on the boot-shaped state of Louisiana's big toe, the river ends as a tangle--in whatever language--of desembocaduras, debouchures, and mouths to the sea.

Hernando de Soto had been the first European to see the Mississippi River itself, when he crossed it in May 1541 along the present-day Arkansas-Tennessee border, and Rene Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle, had been the first to descend its length, arriving at its mouth on April 6, 1682. Enroute, La Salle waved his staff to the east and the west, claiming all the lands drained from both directions to be the possession of France, calling it La Louisiane to honor his king, Louis XIV.

Jump forward one hundred and five years, from Iberville's feat to Three Flags Day in St. Louis Missouri. One year before, on April 30, 1803, the "deal of the century" had been finalized, whereby the new American Republic bought from France nearly one million square miles, a tract known then as La Louisiane, for fifteen million dollars--$11,250,000 payable to France and $3,750,000 payable to American creditors of France.

It was, however, a land sale camouflaged as a treaty, even if Napoleon called it facetiously the "Louisianacide." In any case, it was a mere real estate transaction, with little cultural impact on the territory's sole city of stature, New Orleans, which remained a free port to French and Spanish goods, or its riparian backwoods, where for many years thence English was rarely heard and hardly understood.

St. Louis was by comparison to New Orleans a rough-hewn frontier town. Buckskin vests were more common than silk waistcoats, and the French spoken was more a fur-trapper's thorny patois than a creole's purred affectation of the Academie Francaise. But St. Louis was something New Orleans was not--the jumping-off point to the upper reaches of the territory, 600 million acres of terra incognita. And on March 9, 1804, Meriwether Lewis, co-leader of the Corps of Discovery, better known as the Lewis and Clark Expedition, was in town to attend the ceremony that put the final stamp on the deal of the century.

American president Thomas Jefferson had sent Major Amos Stoddard to accept the handover from the Spanish governor, Don Carlos de Hault de Lassus. By one account, de Hault cried alone--so few compatriots were present--when he symbolically raised and lowered the Spanish flag. He then raised the French tricolor to the cheers of all assembled. Stoddard was so impressed by such francophile feelings that he permitted the flag to remain aloft another day. It was lowered on March 10 to the sound of a funeral roll, and when the American stars and stripes took its place, all eyes remained dry.

Also present at the flagpole that day was Manuel Lisa, founder of the Missouri Fur Company and an outfitter of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Known as the "Black Spaniard" (his father was from Murcia, Spain, and mother from St. Augustine, Florida), Lisa rivaled St. Louis's co-founder, Auguste Chouteau, as the new frontier town's top businessman, profiting even from rent money on the barracks for the Spanish troops who arrived just for the ceremony and then became stranded there for another eight months.

That Lisa's partner was named Pierre Menard, from Kaskaskia, Illinois--no relation, contrary to our literary delight, to the title character of Jorge Luis Borges's story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote"--only confirms the description of La Louisiane, in the words of one historian, as having an "Alice in Wonderland scheme of things." And this is not only because the Mississippi River was known at times to flow backwards, as it did after the earthquake of 1812, along the New Madrid fault.

Louisiana's cultures and sovereigns were overlapping and often quite as argumentative as the Queen of Hearts. Even its boundaries, as vague as the sweep of La Salle's arm in claiming them, were uncertain. Denis Decres, Napoleon's Ministre de la Marine, wrote that "the farther we go northward, the more undecided is the boundary. This part of America contains little more than uninhabited forests or Indian tribes, and the necessity of fixing a boundary has never yet been felt there. There also exists none between Louisiana and Canada."

The identity of Louisiana's true ruler was a guessing game. France ceded the territory to Spain in 1762 in the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau to compensate it for having lost land to England in the Seven Years War, which Spain fought as the unenthusiastic ally of France. The Spanish were in no hurry to impose their own administration, however, and French governors remained in place for several years. In 1800, with rapidly renewed French fortunes, Napoleon reclaimed the territory in a second secret pact, the Treaty of San Idelfonso, not made public until 1802, in which he horse-traded Louisiana to the Spanish in return for Tuscany.

If the Mississippi Valley lacked a clear boundary and flag, it did have an emerging culture all its own, albeit of a mongrelized sort. Amos Stoddard called it, menacingly, "an assemblage of characters, manners, and customs of greater variety than most other countries. Unless measures be taken to consolidate and assimilate them, the same variety will be apt to continue and be productive of disunion, litigation, and unfriendly feelings."

A scene from New Orleans, during the handover from Spanish to French to American rule in the last days of 1803, sets the stage for such cultural ups and downs. It mined heavily on the day the Spanish governor lowered his flag, flooding the city streets with sewage. Napoleon's prefect, Pierre Clement de Laussat, pulled down his tricolor on a sunnier day, but the pulley stuck as the American flag was hoisted, "as if ashamed to replace the French colors to which it owed its independence," he wrote in his memoirs.

De Laussat was unimpressed with the Americans assigned by the worldly Thomas Jefferson to run New Orleans' cosmopolitan government. "They have on all occasions, and without delicacy, shocked the habits, the prejudices, and the character of the population," he wrote, complaining they could speak a word of neither Spanish nor French.

A New Year's ball a few days later dissolved into chaos as the coup de grace for continental politesse in a town that was no longer French. At one moment during the evening, two rival quadrilles formed on the same part of the dance floor, one of the French style and the other of the English. An American, taking offense, raised his walking stick as if to strike a French fiddler. "Bedlam ensued," de Laussat wrote. "The Marquis de Casa continued to play cards, laughing up his sleeves. He had gumbo served to two or three women who came to him for protection and he maliciously played his hand."

The French flair for grace under fire had come to New Orleans downstream with La Salle and up from the creolized West Indies and, in the person of a few immigrants, straight from France. One early traveler, an Englishman with a grudging reason to exaggerate, called the native Frenchmen of New Orleans mostly "hairdressers, dancing masters, performers, musicians, and the like."

Stoddard was struck by the Louisianans' joie de vivre, "a vivacity peculiar to the French," he wrote in Sketches of Louisiana, published in 1812. "They are particularly attached to the exercise of dancing and carry it to an incredible excess. Neither the severity of cold nor the oppression of the heat ever restrains them from this amusement, which usually commences early in the evening and is seldom suspended until late the next morning."

Spanish customs pushed east into Louisiana from Texas and west from Florida, masking lightly over the entire region following the Treaty of Paris in 1763. Today, Spanish ghosts linger on among seekers of El Dorado and buried pirate treasure up the bayous. The state's fabulously rich off-shore oil fields are what de Soto may have been looking for all along.

A Spanish crown scheme in the 1770s to colonize swampland and establish an army with Canary Islanders never quite succeeded but did leave behind a still hearty "isleno" culture in St. Bernard (formerly San Bernardo, which had been Concepcion) Parish. Dorothy Benge, past president of the Los Islenos Heritage and Cultural Society, counts on a list of some thousand "isleno friends" to keep the Spanish spirit alive in eastern Louisiana. The town boasts an isleno museum and historical village, maintains strong sister city ties with Gran Canaria, and has successfully pushed her high school to teach Spanish.

"My mother grew up speaking Spanish before she did English, and many old-timers still use it at home. That's saying a lot in a state where French is really the lingua franca of the backwoods," she says. "We want our kids to keep it up. After all, our town phone book has more Romeros than Robillards," citing a typical Cajun French surname.

The Mississippi Valley also welcomed English customs following the French and Indian War, when the same Treaty of Paris awarded Britain all land east of the river. All the while, quietly yet persistently, new Americans moved from Virginia down the Ohio Valley, ever since Daniel Boone's first foray through Kentucky's Cumberland Gap in 1767.

Preceding all such claimants perhaps were ... the ancient Egyptians? Early visitors had remarked on the similarity of the Mississippi and the Nile, of their life-giving deltas, and even of the grandiosity of the manmade monuments on their shores--the eroded earthen mound at Cahokia, across from St. Louis, was once of greater volume than the Great Pyramid of Giza. The Ohio River's confluence with the Mississippi is still called Little Egypt, and towns such as Memphis, Thebes, Cairo, Karnak, and Alexandria dot its banks.

But La Louisiane was first and foremost French, and not only by virtue of La Salle having proclaimed it so. High-caste creole families, whom historian Henry Adams called France's "spoiled children ... petted, protected, fed, paid, flattered, and given every liberty," may have all but disappeared from the New Orleans phone book, yet French culture is still strong and well--as the many Breton-inflected crawdaddy etouffee and zydeco music festivals can attest--in the Cajun belt.

Cajuns first arrived in Louisiana under dire circumstances, as Acadian refugees from Nova Scotia burned and turned out by the British in 1755. After three decades of unwelcomed wanderings, some as far afield as the Falkland Islands, the West Indies, and back to the homeland, some three thousand of these displaced French Canadians settled west of New Orleans, where bayou country meets the prairie.

Their story was immortalized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's narrative poem Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847), a melodramatic fiction, memorized in its day by every American schoolchild, of the teenage bride Evangeline Bellefontaine, who searches the rest of her life up and down La Louisiane for her newlywed husband, Gabriel Lajeunesse, after they are separated by British soldiers.

The poem is a virtual gazetteer of Louisiana place names--Atchafalaya, Natchitoches, Opelousas, to name a few--in hexameter verse, starting with the Mississippi River ("The Father of Waters") delta, where lies stratum upon stratum of the mountains, prairies, and prehistory that has floated downstream from its farflung northern tributaries.

On the Bayou Teche, a Cajun stronghold still today, Evangeline finds Gabriel's father, Basil, newly assimilated to lower Louisiana's eclectic culture. Basil rides in a Spanish saddle and stirrups--"broad and brown was the face that from under the Spanish sombrero / Gazed on the peaceful scene" of cows at pasture, now more Texan vaquero than Acadian potato puller.

Evangeline learns that her husband has left for the town of "Adayes," formally called San Miguel de Linares de los Adaes, capital of Spanish Texas for much of the eighteenth century before being moved to San Antonio. Near present-day Robeline, Louisiana, between the Red and Sabine rivers, Adaes marked the boundary of French territory, as claimed by La Salle, and the Spanish-claimed lands contiguous with Mexico. Gabriel had gone there to buy Spanish mules and trade in the Ozark Mountains, also called the Spanish sierras.

Evangeline follows in his path, "Far in the West to a desert land, where the mountains / Lift, through perpetual snows, their lofty and luminous / summits." And from there, back again.

The last verses are an apt summary of how little was known of the Mississippi's western lands at the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Their task was to set distances and boundaries to the "height of land," or continental divide, which marked the Purchase's western limit. Previous thinking was that the Mississippi's western drainage was the twin of its eastern, but that was wrong by more than twice. Yet that is perhaps as it should be, for the Rocky Mountains of the west are more than twice the height of the Appalachians to the east.

The eastern watershed drains east-west (from the Allegheny River source in western Pennsylvania to Cairo, Illinois) and north-south (from New York State to the Tennessee River bend in northern Alabama), distances of some five hundred miles. Its principal tributary, the Ohio, winds about a thousand miles from its sources in a northern extension of the Appalachians near Niagara Falls.

Only when Lewis and Clark returned in 1806 was it known that the Mississippi's western watershed drained some twelve hundred miles both west-to-east (from western Montana to St. Louis) and north-to-south (from the Canadian border to the Red River). Its principal inflow, the Missouri River, the expedition's highway to the "height of land," runs some twenty-five hundred miles from St. Louis to its source in the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho.

If the Mississippi-Missouri river system did not prove to have quite perfect east-west symmetry, it did have a north-south kind of mirror imagery. New Orleans, "the mart of all the wealth of the western world," in the words of Major Stoddard, anchors its mouth. Upstream, not far from where the Missouri reaches its northernmost bend, lie the villages of the Mandan, a sedentary tribe whose thousandfold settlements offered a semblance of urban life to fur trappers and mountain men coming in from the wilds.

Going downstream, voyageurs entered the Atlantic Ocean; going up, Lewis and Clark found their way to the Pacific. Summer heat and humidity on the lower Mississippi are the highest in the United States. Bismarck, North Dakota, on the banks of the upper Missouri, is one of its coldest state capitals. Immigrants to the northern Plains came largely from northern Europe. Between the Acadian French on the Bayou Teche and Canary Islander Spanish on the Bayou Terre aux Boeuf, little open land remained to attract these German and Slavic-speaking new Americans to Louisiana's southlands.

But binding them all, east to west and north to south, is the Mississippi drainage itself and the waters that run through it. This is the land of La Louisiane, Upper and Lower as it was designated by the Jeffersonians to distinguish the upland wilderness from the tamed lowlands. Stoddard praised this water, writing that, when filtered, "it is transparent, light, soft, pleasant and wholesome.... as it is precipitated from the cold regions, it tempers the fervid atmosphere on the lower Mississippi and renders it more healthful."

Stoddard may have been right here, that the Louisiana Purchase's lasting legacy was water, not land. Following 1803, the open plains filled quickly. The American frontier was said to have "closed" by the end of the nineteenth century. And even if the farm belt is itself now cinching tighter year by year, as small agricultural towns up and down the Mississippi and its tributaries shrink to nearly nothing, the pleasant water continues to flow. And every American city from Pittsburgh to Missoula, Montana, from Baton Rouge to Minneapolis, Minnesota, drinks from its wholesome and healthful stream.

RELATED ARTICLE: Marking a Melange 

The Louisiana Purchase has been called the most significant real estate transaction in history. The young United States purchased the rights to 800,000 square miles of territory (about four cents per acre), which would double its size and would eventually comprise--in whole or in part--fifteen of the forty-eight contiguous states of the United States: Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. All these states are planning a series of events that will take place throughout the years 2003 to 2006.

Most of the states will concentrate more on the bicentennial commemoration of the Corps of Discovery, better known as the Lewis and Clark Expedition. In 1804, President Thomas Jefferson, after purchasing the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon, sent Lewis and Clark on a two-year epic journey of exploration to document what had been purchased. For most of the fifteen states it is the expedition of Lewis and Clark, the second part of this major historical event, which is more significant because it was through this exploration that these territories become part of the history of the United States. Commemorative plans all include the participation of the Indian peoples who were the original inhabitants of this vast territory.

The state of Oregon, which was not part of the Louisiana Purchase, will also take part in the observance because it was there that Lewis and Clark reached the Pacific Ocean and terminated their journey west. As in the other states, and in cooperation with national and state park agencies, there are plans to mark the actual route of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the historic campsites along the trail. NASA, the national space agency, will help locate the sites of the Lewis and Clark camps.

Nevertheless, it is in the state of Louisiana where during 2003 the "purchase" itself will be most widely commemorated, with historic reenactments and exhibitions, international art shows, and musical productions and festivals, focusing on education and heritage tourism. On December 20, 2003, the grand finale of this year-long celebration will take place at the Cabildo in New Orleans, a reenactment of the transfer of the Louisiana Territory from France to the United States, to which the presidents of France and the United States and the king of Spain have been invited. The state of Louisiana will give particular emphasis to the role that both Spain and France played in the history of the territory. One major exhibition (Heart of Spain, at the Alexandria Museum of Art, from September 10 to November 30) will be a rare display of Spanish religious art and artifacts as well as Renaissance masterpieces by El Greco; another exhibition (at the University Art Museum in Lafayette) will showcase two hundred years of French art, including the works of Cezanne, Monet, Manet, Delacroix, Renoir, Degas, and Matisse.--James Patrick Kieman

For more information about events an Louisiana with links to commemorative events in other states, visit the official Louisiana Purchase website: www.louisianapurchase2003.com.

Louis Werner is a documentary filmmaker living in New York City and a frequent contributor to Americas.