Ohio History Journal

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THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE

THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE.

 

E. 0. RANDALL.

In that striking and stirring century known as the sixteenth,

began the voyages of discovery and the expeditions for occupancy,

by the Anglo Saxon and the Gaul,

of the North American continent.

The French were led by Jacques

Cartier, who in 1534 entered the

Gulf of St. Lawrence.   Other

chivalrous and adventurous

Frenchmen followed with various

experiences, until 1608, when Sam-

uel Champlain encamped upon

the Heights of Quebec, and estab-

lished a colony on that famous

Canadian site.

With equal energy and dar-

ing the Englishman, the inveter-

ate rival of the Frenchman, was

slowly but surely getting a firm

foothold on the American shore. In the year 1498, more than a

third of a century before Cartier's little vessel plowed her way up

the St. Lawrence, and before Columbus had made his last voy-

age, the Cabots, John and Sebastian, father and son, coasted

along the continent of North America and claimed it by dis-

covery. In 1607 the Jamestown (Virginia) colony became the

first permanent English settlement in America. In 1666 Rob-

ert Cavalier Sieur de La Salle sailed up the St. Lawrence, trav-

ersed the Great Lakes, and in 1682 descended the Mississippi

to its mouth and gave the name Louisiana, in honor of his sav-

creign Louis XIV., to the vast region comprising the basin of

the great "Father of Waters," and took possession of a great

undefined territory in the name of France.  Meanwhile the

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