The people of that day did not realize the importance of their purchase. For the most part the territory was a wild region, uninhabited except for scattered Indian tribes, and almost unexplored. The place most alive was New Orleans, which would have interested you keenly had you been a pioneer boy or girl. New Orleans has been called a Franco-Spanish-American city, for it has belonged to all three nations in turn and been under French control twice. You remember that the French settled it. Let us imagine ourselves pioneers of 1803, and that we have just brought a cargo down the river. [Illustration: House in New Orleans Where Louis Philippe Stopped in 1798.] We find New Orleans to be one of the chief seaports of America. We see shipping of all sorts about the town--barges and flatboats along the river bank, merchant vessels in the harbor, and farther down some war-ships. There are buildings still standing which are unchanged parts of the earlier French town--for instance, the government house, the barracks, the hospital, and the convent of the Ursulines. We notice that the walls and fortifications, built partly by the French and partly by the Spaniards, are but a mere ring of grass-grown ruins about the city. [Illustration: A Public Building in New Orleans Built in 1794.] But the city is very picturesque with its tropical vegetation, always green, and its quaint houses, many of them raised several feet above the ground on pillars. The more pretentious mansions are surrounded by broad verandas and fine gardens, and scattered here and there among the houses of the better class are those of the poor people. The streets are straight and fairly wide, but dirty and ill-kept. The sidewalks are of wood, and at night we need to take our steps carefully, for only a few dim lights break the darkness. Beyond the walls of the city we see suburbs already springing up. Three-fourths of the inhabitants are creoles--that is, natives of French and Spanish descent, who speak in the French tongue. We do not understand them any more than if we were in a really foreign city. They seem a handsome, well-knit race. But they are idle and lacking in ambition, and for that reason are being crowded out of business by the active, thrifty American merchants, to whom, we observe, they are not quite friendly. Such was the New Orleans of 1803, a human oasis in a waste of forest, which made up the greater part of the new territory. There were, to be sure, in this trackless wilderness a few French villages near the mouth of the Missouri River. Traders from the British camps in the north had found their way as far south as these villages, but the great prairies had not been explored, and the Rocky Mountains were yet unknown. LEWIS AND CLARK'S EXPEDITION