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OCTOBER 18, 1802, DOES NOT LIVE in our memory in the same way as April 19, 1775, the day the shot heard 'round the world was fired, or December 7, 1941, the day that lives in infamy, or September 11, 2001, the day "the world stopped turning," to quote a popular song. But even so, October 18, 1802 is a momentous day in American history. On that day, Juan Morales, Spanish intendant of Louisiana, closed the port of New Orleans to Americans shipping goods down the Mississippi River. Trans-Appalachian Americans had enjoyed this right of deposit at the Crescent City since the Pinckney Treaty of 1795. Without it, farmers in the river's eastern watershed would be forced to transport their products overland to Atlantic Coast markets-a time-consuming, expensive undertaking which made such shipments impractical, if not impossible.
Morales's action triggered an emergency response in Washington, D.C. While Federalist members of the U.S. Congress talked of war to reopen trade, key members of President Thomas Jefferson's administration anxiously worked diplomatic channels to reestablish the deposit principle so crucial to western farmers. Ultimately, the problem was solved when the United States bought the city-and not just the city but the Mississippi River's entire western watershed. This region, indeed the watersheds on both sides of the river, had been claimed and named Louisiana by Robert La Salle some one hundred twenty years before being bought by the Americans. There is a crucial distinction, though, between the Louisiana Purchase and the Louisiana territory claimed by La Salle. La Salle's claim was finite, while the territory of the purchase had no fixed limits.
As La Salle so boldly proclaimed on April 9, 1682:
I ... do now take . . . possession of this country of Louisiana, the seas, harbors, ports, bays, adjacent straits, and all the nations, people, provinces, cities, towns, villages, mines, minerals, fisheries, streams and rivers, comprised in the extent of the said Louisiana . . . along the River Colbert, or Mississippi, and the rivers which discharge themselves thereinto.1
The operative words in this claim were "the rivers which discharge themselves thereinto." While the western watershed was an unknown entity in 1682, sources for the three main rivers in that portion of Louisiana under French control...