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In November 1803, President Thomas Jefferson presented to the United States Congress a report on the newly acquired Louisiana Territory. The report offered a wide-ranging description of the territory, including geographic boundaries, accounts of the various inhabitants, and the natural resources contained within the region. While the published account ran more than sixty pages and covered a variety of topics, the description of the geography and wildlife seemed to have the greatest hold on the imagination of its readers. The most fantastic of these was a description of an "extraordinary . . . Salt Mountain/" The mountain, according to the report, "exists about 1000 miles up the Missouri, and not far from that river" and was "180 miles long, and 45 in width, composed of solid rock salt, without any trees, or even shrubs on it." For Jefferson and his supporters the news of the salt mountain and the other natural wonders contained within the Louisiana Territory provided cause for celebration. For some members of the Federalist opposition, however, these natural wonders offered grist for the political mill. The Gazette of the United States declared "some of the democrats carry their complaisance to Mr. Jefferson to such lengths as seriously to pretend that they believe in the existence of a vast mountain of solid, rock salt." Another piece employed a bit of wit calling on "Mr. Jefferson to depute a committee of wise ones to enquire and report whether the Mountain of Salt. . . may not be Lot's wife, magnified by the process of time."1
Federalists did not limit their scorn for the contents of the newly acquired territory to accounts of the salt mountain. As reports of the "Louisiana Curiosities," including news of horned frogs and "the wild dog of the prairie," continued to be publicized, members of the Federalist minority continued to satirized them, printing "news" of "a considerable lake of pure whiskey" and vast rivers of "golden eagles ready coined." While this back and forth is colorful, historians often treat it as little more than an interesting aside in studies of the Federalist response to the Louisiana Purchase, focusing instead on larger issues of constitutional authority, the extension of slavery, and even northern secession.2
Yet to relegate these "curiosities" to a...