Excerpt from Economic Beginnings of the Far West, How We Won the Land, Beyond the Mississippi, Vol. 2 The acquisition of Louisiana Territory got rid of some long-standing difficulties and opened to American enterprise vast possibilities of extension. Both banks of the Mississippi were now controlled by the United States, and the free navigation of that great waterway was assured for all time. Not only the Father of Waters, but his western tribu taries, the Missouri, the Platte, the A kansas and Red rivers, were brought within reach our restless frontiersmen, and they made haste to avail them selves of this outlet for their energy. In the Account of Louisiana, compiled at the suggestion of President Jefferson in 1803 and widely distributed throughout the country, there was gathered for the information of the curious all that was then known of the popu lation and resources of the new acquisition. Ao cording to the Spanish census of 1799, there were in the settlements along the Mississippi and Red rivers forty-two thousand three hundred and seventy-five souls, of whom two-thirds were whites and one-third slaves or freedmen. New Orleans was a town of ten thousand inhabitants, where four-fifths of the whites were French creoles and the remainder English and. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.