Review by Dave Skinner
History – October 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
A Wilderness So Immense – The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America
by Jon Kukla
Published in 2003 by Alfred Knopf/Borzoi Books
ISBN 0-375-40812-6
COLORADO CENTRAL readers are used to surprising history lessons, especially lessons about the Iberian/Spanish/Mexican/Hispanic history of everything south of the Arkansas River.
Well, I’ve only spent a few years on the south side, having grown up in Lewis and Clark country where I am now, and everyone in these parts knows that Jefferson bought Louisiana from our revolutionary French pals for two cents an acre. Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that, as historian Jon Kukla lays out in A Wilderness So Immense (cool title, eh?).
As it turns out, the impression that Louisiana was French before it was American is not correct. In 1759, the French were getting their butts kicked by England and Prussia on both sides of the Atlantic, so to maintain the precious balance of power in monarchist Europe, Spain’s King Carlos III took over Louisiana and New Orleans from fellow Bourbon king Louis XV of France.
Even though New Orleans was an administrative money pit, Carlos wanted a “buffer” to keep “Great Britain’s aggressive colonists far away from the silver mines of Mexico.”
After the Revolution, the aggressive colonists — now known as Americans — started seriously pushing into the Midwest. Canals hadn’t caught on yet, nor had steamboats and railroads been invented, so there was fear that western colonists wouldn’t act as colonies to the United States (i.e., the Northeast), but would split off to join Spanish New Orleans.
Northeastern sectional interests wanted to keep Kentucky and Ohio as captive shippers, and even floated the idea of secession as a means of doing so.
OLD MISTER GRAVITY basically rendered such concerns moot, though. Heavy commodities simply had to go down river, and it turned out that comparatively lightweight finished goods had to pass through Northeast merchants’ hands before going to the Midwest.
But the Mississippi and access to the ocean at New Orleans were vital, and that led to America negotiating with the Spaniards for landing rights at New Orleans, and eventually (after Napoleon pressured King Carlos IV to revoke those landing rights in 1802) to some seriously Machiavellian diplomacy with Napoleon’s warmongers.
As things went, the French only held New Orleans for three weeks before transferring possession to the Americans on December 20, 1803. After reading Kukla’s blow-by-blow account of how America really got Louisiana and therefore escaped much of the “foolishness so immense” of European power politics, I wonder if a better title for this book might have been A Nation So Lucky. It’s a good read.
— Dave Skinner
