“Window on the West,” a new painting by acclaimed artist Jenness Cortez, documents exactly 200 years of the American West’s history––from 1804 when President Thomas Jefferson dispatched the Lewis and Clark expedition, to 2004 and the passing of the first truly western U. S. president, Ronald Reagan. The Cortez painting will be sold at the annual Coeur d’Alene Art Auction, July 25, 2015 at the Peppermill Resort in Reno, Nevada. In 1801, when Thomas Jefferson became president of the United States, two out of every three Americans lived within fifty miles of the Atlantic Ocean. To the west, France owned the vast, largely unexplored Louisiana Territory where Napoleon hoped to establish an empire in the New World. In 1802 President Jefferson offered to buy the port of New Orleans from France, but Napoleon Bonaparte,

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