Eclectic currents of a historic deed: a number of cities in the United States will be celebrating the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the nation and secured its control of a mighty watershed.

• Author: Werner, Louis

Look at a map of the Mississippi River's heartland, from St. Louis south to Louisiana. For almost every town with a French name there is one nearby with a Spanish--in the state of Missouri alone there is Bolivar and St. Genevieve, De Soto and Bonne Terre, New Madrid and Cape Girardeau. In Arkansas, El Dorado is just two counties east of Lafayette. In Louisiana, they have gone one better, with towns like New Iberia, Lunita, and Gonzales in the only American state named for a French king.

The amalgamation of all things French and Spanish--family names and place names, personal ties as well as patriotic allegiances--in the lower Mississippi Valley was the hallmark of that region's early modern history. This year, these and other cultural artifacts will be celebrated during the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase, by which with the stroke of a pen France sold to the United States its greatest North American territory--all land west of the Mississippi River drained by its tributaries--over which the Spanish flag had flown for the previous forty years.

The region's cultural heritage is today largely French and much of the proper Spanish has been lost--the malagueno family name of "Villatorre," once the patricians of New Iberia, has for instance been corrupted to "Viator," and the town of New Madrid is pronounced--to the horror of madrilenos!--with the accent on the first syllable.

There is hope, however, that the many bicentennial events, conferences, and exhibitions to be held throughout this coming year might now help give Spain its due. Festivities and commemorations are planned in many of the fifteen states carved entirely or in part from the historic purchase, from Arkansas, where the first survey of the new lands was begun, and culminating in a reenactment of the signing of the Louisiana Purchase itself, scheduled for December 2003 in New Orleans' Cabildo (see page 21).

According to Professor Paul Hoffman at Louisiana State University, many vestiges of Spanish culture and society hide in plain sight. The legal code pertaining to his swampy state's all-important river rights dates from Spanish times, as did until the early twentieth century, many laws affecting marriage and property. But Hoffman admits that Louisiana's Spanish inheritance is often overlooked. "I had a good friend named Oubre Ortego, a Cajun French through and through," he says, accenting the surname's first syllable in the local manner. "But I had a heck of a time convincing him that his last name was Spanish and not French."

However, Iberville Parish, named for Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville, a French Canadian and the first man known to have sailed "up" the Mississippi River, is of French and--contrary to appearances--not Spanish origin. With his crew of forty voyageurs in two sailboats towing birchbark canoes, on March 2, 1699, he entered the river from the Gulf of Mexico. The sea was rough that day and many mud flats (called "rocks" by Iberville) threatened his boats. In a monument of understatement, he wrote of' discovering the mouth of the mighty Mississippi, "when drawing near the rocks to take shelter, I became aware of a river."

That it took one hundred and eighty years after the delta's discovery, in 1519 by the Spaniard Alonso Alvarez de Pineda as he sailed along the Gulf shore, for European explorers to penetrate up the Mississippi, shows just how tricky its navigation was then and still is today. Protruding some ninety miles to the east like a sharp hangnail stuck on the boot-shaped state of Louisiana's big toe, the river ends as a tangle--in whatever language--of desembocaduras, debouchures, and mouths to the sea.

Hernando de Soto had been the first European to see the Mississippi River itself, when he crossed it in May 1541 along the present-day Arkansas-Tennessee border, and Rene Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle, had been the first to descend its length, arriving at its mouth on April 6, 1682. Enroute, La Salle waved his staff to the east and the west, claiming all the lands drained from both directions to be the possession of France, calling it La Louisiane to honor his king, Louis XIV.

Jump forward one hundred and five years, from Iberville's feat to Three Flags Day in St. Louis Missouri. One year before, on April 30, 1803, the "deal of the century" had been finalized, whereby the new American Republic bought from France nearly one million square miles, a tract known then as La Louisiane, for fifteen million dollars--$11,250,000 payable to France and $3,750,000 payable to American creditors of France.

It was, however, a land sale camouflaged as a treaty, even if Napoleon called it facetiously the "Louisianacide." In any case, it was a mere real estate transaction, with little cultural impact on the...