Imagining the West

America was in the way. It was not made up of islands, as the 16^th-century cosmographer Sebastian Münster would have had us believe, nor was there a clear sailing passageway to Asia. America, with its mysterious Western shore, was a continent to be reckoned with. Still, Europeans of the 16^th and 17^th centuries wanted easy access to Asia. Might there be a passage across the pesky new continent? If such a passage was drawn on the maps, perhaps it could eventually be found. The fantasy of an easy passage from Europe to Asia, by going west and bypassing Dutch-, Spanish-, and Portuguese-controlled areas and the Ottoman East, lasted into the 19^th century, becoming somewhat of a reality as the railroads crossed the American continent.

Maps in this section display both an imaginary West that never was, and, bit by bit, an increasingly sure awareness of the actual width and solidity of the continent, portions of which were under the control at different times, and sometimes even at the same time, of France, England, Spain, Russia, and the Netherlands. As power shifted across the continent of Europe, tremors were felt in North America: Napoleon acquired the Louisiana Territory from Spain, and the French threatened to chokehold the United States from New Orleans to Hudson's Bay. The Louisiana Purchase by Thomas Jefferson ended that threat in 1803, and expanded U.S. options westward into unknown lands.