Louisiana Purchase Land Bought

Via the Louisiana Purchase the United States acquired more than 529,911,680 acres (2,144,476 Square Kilometers) of territory. It paid $15 million for that land which if adjusted for inflation, would equal about $190 million dollars 200 years later.

The land included in the Purchase more than doubled the size of the United States and it comprises over one-quarter of the entire territory of the modern continental United States.

The lands purchased included what is present day Louisiana on both sides of the Mississippi River including the city of New Orleans. It contained parts or all of present-day Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and New Mexico. It included Minnesota west of the Mississippi River, northern Texas and the portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado east of the Rocky Mountains. It also included the portions of southern Manitoba, southern Saskatchewan and southern Alberta (now part of Canada) that drain into the Missouri River.

The boundaries of the land purchased were not defined, and the land itself was generally unknown. France actually refused to specify what were the southern and western boundaries of the territory as this was disputed with Spain.

What was known was that the eastern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase ran from the source of the Mississippi to the 31st parallel. The northern reaches of the territory extended up to British possessions in the north. The northern boundary was only defined in the Anglo-American Convention of 1818 that split Canada and the US at the 49th parallel.

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