“In the red schoolhouse of his head, Jefferson, great Tom, calculated the doubling of America westward. He knew that miles in chunks could be whittled into dreams, farms, nation, and out of that Jeffersonian box of mind came an orderly arithmetical survey system which put the pattern of mile-square sections on the land: came his 1803 bargain with France for the Lousiana Purchase, the frontier expanse all the way from the Mississippi Valley to the western side of what is now Montana; came his instructions to his enigmatic youg personal secretary, Merriweather Lewis to find a cohort — the steady William Clark, he turned out to be — and explore up the Missouri River into this new dreamscape.
In the presidency of Lincoln, Abe who had built farm fences, came the Homestead Act. That broadstroke of legislation in 1862 and its cousins have proclaimed: come west, come into the Jeffersonian vision, come gain yourself a piece of the earth by putting your labor —
your life
— into it for this little sum of years.”
p. 236, Ride with me, Mariah Montana / Ivan Doig. Penquin Books, 1990.