The United States bought about 828,000 square miles of land from France in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which is roughly 2.1 million square kilometers or 530 million acres , and it cost $15 million at the time.

What land are we talking about?

This purchase, known as the Louisiana Purchase , covered a huge stretch of central North America. It ran from the Mississippi River in the east to near the Rocky Mountains in the west, and from the Gulf of Mexico in the south up to what is now the Canadian border.

In modern terms, it included all or part of what are now:

  • Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska
  • Large parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and Minnesota
  • Northern Texas, much of Louisiana (west of the Mississippi), plus small pieces of Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada

How big was the “bargain”?

For that vast area, the U.S. agreed to pay $15 million , which worked out to about 3–4 cents per acre , making it one of the greatest land deals in U.S. history. The purchase nearly doubled the size of the United States at the time and set the stage for its westward expansion.