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How the West Was Bought

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 Here's the NYT book review to A Wilderness So Immense:

Jon Kukla's exuberant book, A Wilderness So Immense, is not about the wilderness that extended west of the Mississippi to the Rockies and only briefly about the Louisiana Purchase. Instead, Kukla, the director of the Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation, recounts the colorful story of the long and complicated struggles in the 1780's and 90's for unimpeded use of the river and its southernmost port. The Louisiana Purchase itself was merely the unexpected coda to two decades of painstaking -- and fascinating -- negotiations.

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  1. TripplerFebruary 22, 2010 at 4:44 PM

    http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/cp/vol-04/no-01/reviews/lewis.shtml

    http://www.amazon.com/Wilderness-So-Immense-Louisiana-Expedition/dp/0375408126


    A couple of reviews to add to the interest in the book: sounds like a good read.

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  2. James FergusonFebruary 22, 2010 at 4:53 PM

    It was a good read. As the NYT review noted, he takes the Purchase within the context of its time. Quite a bit on Citizen Genet as I remember as well as Wilkinson and other interesting characters of that period.

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