La Louisiane and Boulder

Now that the inevitable dust and din in the initial construction phase of One Boulder Plaza has subsided, we thought that you might like to read some of the backstory that preceded these great new buildings in downtown Boulder.

Without straying too far afield let’s start with an interesting event in the spring of 1682…

In that year, Rene Robert Cavalier, Sieur de la Salle, an emissary of Louis XIV of France made his way down the Mississippi River from the Great Lakes after the thaw of ice and snow. Nearing present-day New Orleans he brought his canoe to shore, planted a flag, and boldly claimed the river, all of its tributaries, and the lands therein for the Kingdom of France in the name of Louis Quattorze, the Sun King.

His proclamation held (among the courts of Europe) for some 111 years until the spring of 1803. In that spring, President Jefferson had sent Robert Livingstone to Paris to try and negotiate the sale of L’Ile d’Orleans and the lands around the delta of the Mississippi to the United States. These lands had been embargoed by Spain who happened to hold the right to them at that point. Jefferson was keen to acquire shipping rights to them. But to Livingstone’s surprise (and against the advice of Napoleon’s brothers) Bonaparte offered to sell not only the meager lands of the Mississippi Delta, but the entire 850,000 square miles of what the French called ‘La Louisiane’, the Louisiana Territory. Livingstone, knowing that the mails to and from Washington might take an impossible thirty days, immediately offered Napoleon fifteen million dollars for the vast tract. Napoleon accepted at once.

The purchase was ratified by Congress in October of 1803 and just weeks later the Lewis and Clark Expedition was launched to explore the territory, hoping to find a Northwest Passage to the Pacific.

The land was to be the breadbasket for Napoleon’s new empire. But at that point in his ambitions he needed ready cash to expand his sea power, his European territory, and his status in France. He signed the Louisiana Purchase treaty on April 30th 1803, made all Englishmen of ages 18 to 60 living in France immediate prisoners of war, and proclaimed himself Emperor the following year.

The area of the United States was instantly doubled. The smaller scale and more European framework of America that Jefferson had envisioned from the start was altered radically. A slower integration of the Native American cultures with the new European, African, and Asian Americans was a fond, lost aspiration and ‘westward’ was the byword.

Yet, despite the fine detail in data gathering and mapping that Lewis and Clark brought back to Washington, no one was quite sure exactly where the western boundary to this outrageous windfall lay.

It was decades later, after the expeditions of Pike and Stephen Long (of Pikes Peak and Longs Peak) that the boundary of La Louisiane became clear. Louis the Fourteenth’s explorer had claimed all of the territory between the Great Continental Divide of North America and the Mississippi.

The town that would later be known as Boulder, Colorado was just within this fantastic boundary by thirty miles. The area had been inhabited for thousands of years by the hunting and gathering tribes of the Ute and the Kiowa (among others) and later by the Arapaho and the Cheyenne (branches of the Algonquin tribes from the areas of modern-day Massachusetts and New York). These were generally peaceful people who warred among themselves for hunting lands and practiced a charming form of combat known as ‘counting coup’. This involved not actually killing each other but making a point of getting close enough to do so, which in their small wandering bands and tribes counted for more than the real thing in many ways.
James Michener, in his brilliant novel ‘Centennial’ (about this very region along the Front Range), is very clear to point out that the Cheyenne numbered among a mere 3,000 people, and that the other tribes were generally scattered bands on similar scales of their populations. These were, it must be said, primitive cultures that placed a high premium on regarding all life as sacred. And yet, in their seasonal migrations they had never developed the wheel nor any tools or weapons beyond baskets and tipis, bows, arrows, and stoneage flint arrowheads. They were and are ennobled cultures, to be sure. But the gold rush in California in the days of ’49 (1849), and the later gold rush in Colorado of ’59 (1859) sealed the Native Cultures’ fates. Their integration with the new citizens of the United States could have proceeded so very differently. But fortunes in their lands were there to be made, and among these gentle people there was no defense to match the firepower of the Americans and no obstacle stopping a nation that had staked its survival on the promise of the new frontier. Amid all of the exultation of westward expansion desperate tragedies were played out as well. The new Americans were building a nation from Atlantic to Pacific, a new sovereignty and there was no stopping it...

As it happened, The Louisiana Purchase price was, by 1900, completely matched in the gold from the Caribou Mine inBoulder County alone (plus $5 million dollars to boot).

Boulder was well established by 1859 just one year after a party of prospectors had stopped at Red Rocks at the mouth of Boulder Creek. And with a surveying stake driven at the intersection of Pearl and Broadway, the streets, new buildings, new families, an excellent irrigation system, rail lines, and a new university quickly unfolded as one of the finest little towns in Colorado.

That one of our buildings in the new One Boulder Plaza campus has cost as much as the entire Louisiana Purchase is simply a paradox of growth and progress. But the Plaza has been developing for many years as a part of our community and as an extension of our downtown mall.

Now two hundred years after the purchase of La Louisiane (‘best real estate deal ever’ it’s called, around 3 cents an acre) we expect that the care and planning of this new addition to Boulder will serve as community inspiration and prosperity through many decades of continued progress and peaceful cultural growth.

— Marshall Williamson, for One Boulder Plaza