The 1803 deal in which the United States bought roughly 828,000 square miles of the continent's heart from Napoleon for about fifteen million dollars, doubling the nation at a stroke — a bargain made possible only because the formerly enslaved people of Saint-Domingue had destroyed Napoleon's army, and one that opened a century of westward expansion across lands home to dozens of Native nations who had no part in the sale.
The United States doubled in size in a single sale, and among the people who made it possible were never paid or credited. In 1803, Thomas Jefferson sent envoys to Paris to buy one port, New Orleans. Napoleon offered them an entire continent's heartland instead, because his army had just been devastated in the Caribbean by the formerly enslaved people of Saint-Domingue and by yellow fever, who shattered his dream of a French empire in the Americas. So a slave revolt the United States refused to recognize handed the young republic its western half. And the land that changed hands on paper was not empty. It was home to the Osage, the Sioux, the Pawnee, and dozens of other Native nations who were not in the room, did not sign, and whose dispossession the sale set in motion.