the Louisiana Purchase
an area of US land bought from France in 1803 for $15 million, or less than 3 cents an acre. The area was about 828000 square miles (more than 2 million square kilometres), and extended from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada. It made the US more than twice as large as it had been, and encouraged Americans to move west. The French named the area after King Louis XIV.
