American Westward Movement

American Westward Movement

I

INTRODUCTION

American Westward Movement, movement of people from the settled regions of the United States to lands farther west. Between the early 17th and late 19th centuries, Anglo-American peoples and their societies expanded from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific Coast. This westward movement, across what was often called the American frontier, was of enormous significance. By expanding the nation’s borders to include more than three million square miles, the United States became one of the most powerful nations of the 20th century. However, this expansion also resulted in great suffering, destruction, and cultural loss for the Native Americans of North America.

This expansion also meant that much of North America was dominated by English institutions and ways of life, instead of Spanish or French ones. The Spanish and French were also exploring and settling North America in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. For good or ill, the westward movement of these Anglo-American settlers was one of the most influential forces to shape North American history.

II

EARLY SETTLEMENT AND GROWTH

A

Contest of Empires

Before Anglo-American westward expansion, North America had been shaped by many other forces and cultures. There were hundreds of Native American tribes who had been living on the continent for thousands of years before any Europeans arrived. Many of these tribes disappeared because of the assault of European exploration and settlement.

The Spanish, who explored the Southwest and Southeast beginning in the 1540s, founded the earliest European settlements. They planted their first colonies at Saint Augustine in Florida in 1565 and in the upper Río Grande Valley of New Mexico between 1598 and 1610. By the time of the American Revolution (1775-1783), the Spanish had established settlements from the south Atlantic and Gulf coasts, through Texas and the Southwest, and up the Pacific coast as far north as San Francisco, which was founded in 1776.

The French also explored North America—first settling in Nova Scotia, Canada, at Port Royal in 1604, and then moving along the St. Lawrence River valley where they founded Québec in 1608. With the help of an inviting system of rivers and lakes, the French expanded rapidly into the interior. In little more than a century, they had established outposts along the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, including Montréal, Fort Frontenac, Detroit, and Fort Mackinac. The French also built posts along the Mississippi River at Kaskaskia, Natchez, and New Orleans, and along the Gulf coast at Mobile and Biloxi. Deeply involved in the fur trade, the French also reached as far west as the Great Plains and central Canada to bring manufactured goods to Native Americans in exchange for the skins of deer, fox, and especially beavers.

Other nations were drawn to the continent as well. Russians came in search of furs, first along the Alaskan coast and eventually as far south as California, where they operated a post less than 100 miles north of San Francisco. The Dutch established the Atlantic colony of New Netherlands, later renamed New York by the English. Swedes and Finns lived in small settlements in what would become Pennsylvania. By the mid-19th century, large numbers of Chinese emigrated to western North America. North America has always held a dazzling diversity of peoples and cultures, and the United States today continues to be shaped by their traditions and influences.

B

British Settlement

England established its first Atlantic colonies in Virginia at Jamestown in 1607 and in Massachusetts at Plymouth, Boston, and other towns between 1620 and 1630. These first English frontiers illustrate two of the most common motivations for people moving westward. The first motivation was the hope of finding great wealth quickly through developing and trading the colonies’ resources. Jamestown was settled for this reason. The earliest dreams of mining for gold and producing wine and silk came to nothing, but in time Virginians found prosperity in the rich soil, especially by raising and exporting tobacco. Over the next 400 years, the economic motive, in particular the desire for good, cheap farmland, would be the most powerful attraction for people moving west.

The second common motivation was the hope of practicing their religion without government intervention. The Puritan settlers of Massachusetts wanted to build a community based on religious ideas that were opposed by the British government. The frontier was home to dozens of colonies looking for freedom, religious and otherwise. One of these colonies in present-day Utah grew to become the home of one of the world’s largest and most rapidly growing religions, the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, whose members are known as Mormons.

Those first Atlantic colonies also illustrated the contradictory roles that government played in westward expansion. The Puritans settled in Massachusetts with the permission, and sometimes the protection, of the same government whose policies they were trying to escape. Governments, first England and then the United States, always encouraged movement westward in a variety of ways. These governments bought or seized land from others and gave it away or sold it cheaply to emigrants. The governments used their military to protect settlers and financed developments, such as transportation, that made settlement easier.

People heading west came to expect the government’s aid and support. At the same time, settlers often resisted efforts by distant authorities to regulate how they used and lived on their new lands. From the first colonies to the final farming and ranching frontiers of the 20th century, this conflicting relationship between pioneers and government was a large part of the frontier story.

C

Across the Appalachians

The first Anglo-American frontier—made up of the original 13 colonies—spread westward slowly. The colonists wanted to remain closely connected to their mother country across the Atlantic, and they were hemmed in to the west by the rugged Appalachian region, a series of thickly timbered ridges, valleys, and plateaus with few openings for migration. By 1750, however, parts of this first frontier were expanding rapidly. A variety of economic motives drew them westward. Fur traders in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania bartered with Native Americans in the Ohio River valley and the Great Lakes for beaver pelts, which were in high demand in Europe for the making of beaver hats. Southerners reached to the Mississippi River and beyond to trade with Native Americans for deerskins.

Some hunters and traders soon considered settling beyond the Appalachians to establish farms in country with rich soil and forests full of game. The most famous of these, Daniel Boone, worked closely with another familiar frontier figure—the land speculator. Land speculators wanted to make profits from buying land, selling it to settlers, and organizing settlements. Boone worked for Richard Henderson, a land speculator who dreamed of selling land in Kentucky, Tennessee, and western Pennsylvania.

The English government, however, had mixed feelings about the westward movement. After Great Britain defeated France in the French and Indian War (1754-1763), it gained title to eastern Canada, Florida, the Gulf coast, and all land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. These new lands opened the way for British expansion. However, Native Americans of the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley lashed out against the English in an attempt to preserve their independence, their land, and their way of life. With the Ottawa chief Pontiac as their most visible leader, the tribes waged a bloody and costly war. As a result, the British government decided to keep the white settlers apart from the Native Americans. It issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, banning all white settlement beyond the Appalachians and stating that only licensed government agents could trade with the Native Americans. Predictably, many colonists were furious. The proclamation proved to be one of the first of many conflicts between Britain and the colonists that eventually led to the American Revolution.

Regulations, such as the proclamation, were nearly impossible to enforce because of the distance between the British government and the colonies. In the early 1770s land speculator Richard Henderson, in violation of British law, negotiated with the Cherokees for permission to settle in Kentucky. He then hired Daniel Boone to lead a community of families out of North Carolina, through the Cumberland Gap, and up the Wilderness Road, an old Native American path that Boone had explored earlier. They founded the town of Boonesboro in the central Kentucky basin.

Other people sponsored similar efforts immediately west of the Appalachians, establishing settlements in Tennessee and at the headwaters of the Ohio River in western Pennsylvania, where the village of Pittsburgh grew up around the outpost of Fort Pitt. At the opening of the American Revolution, the Anglo-American frontier had breached this first mountain barrier, despite the British government’s efforts to stop it. Within one long lifetime, it would sweep westward to the Pacific Ocean.

III

THE FRONTIER TO THE MISSISSSIPPI

A

The Old Northwest

After the United States defeated Britain in the American Revolution, the government of the new nation encouraged expansion even more than the British had. This encouragement can be seen in two of its earliest laws, the Ordinances of 1785 and 1787. The Ordinance of 1785 provided for the survey and sale of land in what became known as the Old Northwest—the region north of the Ohio River, west of the Appalachians, east of the Mississippi River, and south of Canada. This area encompassed the present-day states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota.

The Ordinance of 1787, called the Northwest Ordinance, forbade slavery in the Old Northwest, guaranteed English common law there, and set up a system of government that outlined how the territories could become states. The new United States government also paid revolutionary war veterans by giving them the right to take land for free in the Old Northwest. Some took up the offer. Many more sold their right to land speculators, who in turn did all they could to encourage westward migration.

At the same time, the U.S. government assured Native Americans living in the Old Northwest and in the land south of the Ohio River, called the Old Southwest, that their rights and interests would be protected. The two policies—encouraging expansion while protecting Native Americans—proved hopelessly contradictory. Several Native American tribes, including the Shawnee, Delaware, and Miami, united in a confederation to protect their lands against white settlement. They scored some stunning military victories against the United States. However, the confederation was defeated by General Anthony Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. The Treaty of Greenville, signed in 1795, ceded much of the present-day state of Ohio to the United States. Other treaties opened a majority of the Ohio Valley to white settlement by 1809, and pioneers flooded into it.

The Old Northwest contained rich farmland, thick forests, and game for food and trade. Hundreds, and then thousands of flatboats floated down the broad Ohio River every year, bringing settlers and goods to southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Most who settled this region came westward from Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and the New England states, although a large number, like the family of Abraham Lincoln, moved northward out of Kentucky. Most were Anglo-Americans and German Americans. They carried their cultures with them—languages, values, customs, traditions, and ways of making a living—which they adapted to the demands of their new environment. Towns appeared with marketplaces, seats of government, and manufacturing centers for iron, glass, leather goods, barrels, and other items too expensive to import. The huge majority of the population, however, lived in the countryside. Most were independent landowners who worked modest-sized farms.

Native Americans had long farmed this region, but white pioneers brought a new kind of agriculture. While Native Americans had cultivated several crops on a single plot of land, the new immigrants dedicated one piece of land to a single crop, usually corn and later wheat and other grains. Pioneers also tried to produce as much as possible, since eventually they hoped both to provide for themselves and to sell their crops in faraway eastern markets. This approach to crop cultivation exhausted the soil much more quickly than Native American farming, and it created a demand for more and more land where settlers could grow crops. The pioneers’ use and abuse of their environment pushed the frontier westward.

B

The Old Southwest

Most white pioneers moving into the Old Southwest came from Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia. The rich soil and long growing seasons offered agricultural opportunity, so the vast majority of settlers were farmers. In the Old Southwest, immigrants brought two institutions from the South, which were not found in the North: the plantation system of large landholdings owned by one family, and black slavery. Most immigrants were independent farmers without slaves, just as in the Old Northwest, but the planter elite often dominated political and social life. The two distinctive characteristics of the Old Southwest eventually led to the sectional crisis that culminated in the American Civil War (1861-1865).

Southern pioneer farmers, like those to the north, began by producing mostly for themselves, but they also hoped eventually to export their products to outside markets. At first their main export was tobacco. Then in 1793 the New Englander Eli Whitney visited Georgia and devised a machine that revolutionized Southern agriculture. The cotton gin removed easily and quickly the seeds embedded in the fibers of short-staple cotton—a process that had previously been done very slowly by hand. The cotton gin would allow Southerners to expand cotton production at a time when textile mills in England and the American Northeast were in need of huge amounts of cotton. The Southern frontier would soon become the largest cotton-producing region in the world. Especially after the War of 1812, when peaceful commerce was reopened with Britain, the lure of new land for cotton drew settlers rapidly toward the Mississippi River and beyond. As in the Old Northwest, cotton and especially tobacco farming rapidly exhausted the soil, damaging the environment and encouraging further movement westward in search of new land.

C

Clash and Mingling of Cultures

The rapid expansion in both the Old Northwest and the Old Southwest strained the interaction between Native Americans and whites, and by 1809 they were moving toward confrontation. The most significant resistance to white settlement came from a remarkable Shawnee warrior and diplomat, Tecumseh, and his brother Tensketawah, also called The Prophet. The brothers called for all Native American peoples to join together and refuse to cede any more land to whites. They also urged Native Americans to reject Euro-American trade and culture and to embrace a new religion based on a vision of Tensketawah. Although Tecumseh enlisted the support of some groups, a clash between white militia and his followers at their village, Prophetstown, in 1811 precipitated a confrontation before Native American unity could be achieved.

The War of 1812 ended significant Native American military resistance to white settlement in both the Old Northwest and the Old Southwest. Tecumseh, who had formed an alliance with Britain against the United States, was killed in 1813 when the British were defeated at the Battle of the Thames. Meanwhile, in 1814 the militia leader Andrew Jackson destroyed a large force of Creeks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in Alabama. However, the final removal of Native American peoples from these areas was yet to come. In the 1830s the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles would be taken, most of them by force, into Indian Territory, which was west of the Mississippi River in present-day Oklahoma.

By then the occupation of the region from the Appalachians to the Mississippi was virtually complete. Beginning with the 13 colonies—New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia—the country continued to grow. From 1790 to 1803 Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio became states. Louisiana was admitted in 1812. Between 1816 and 1819 one state a year was admitted to the union—Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, and Alabama—and in 1820 Missouri petitioned for statehood. Florida was acquired from Spain in 1821, and Michigan and Wisconsin were organized into territories.

The frontier story was not, however, entirely one of conflict. The different peoples of the frontier sometimes mingled peacefully and changed one another. Native Americans adapted horses, firearms, iron pots, blankets, fishhooks, hatchets, and many other European goods to their own purposes. Some wore woolen shirts, drank tea with sugar, and lived in log cabins introduced by Swedes and Finns. Similarly, white pioneers began growing corn, squash, beans, and pumpkins, crops that were introduced to them by Native Americans. They also began using many of the Native American folk medicines. From their hairstyles to their moccasins, the first settlers often resembled Native Americans more than they resembled whites living in the east.

The English language also expanded as frontier peoples exchanged vocabularies. Pecan, muskrat, opossum, hickory, and many other words came from Native American languages; prairie and cookie from the Dutch; and cockroach and alligator from the Spanish. Old words took on new meanings. In England corn meant any grain, but on the frontier it came to mean maize, or Native American corn. The many uses of maize were reflected in the more than 150 word combinations that were developed using the word corn. Because the skin of an adult male deer was often traded on the southern frontier for the main Spanish coin in that area, a buck and a dollar came to mean the same thing.

The people were as mixed as the languages they spoke. From the Atlantic coastal islands to the Mississippi and beyond, many cultures met and produced generations that blended different races and ethnic groups—English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, African Americans, and scores of Native American tribes. The resulting ethnic stew was one of the most enduring legacies of westward expansion.

IV

BEYOND THE MISSISSIPPI

As the frontier expanded beyond the Mississippi, it was moved by many of the same patterns and themes that had been important east of the river. Once again pioneers were drawn westward by economic opportunity and the chance to escape or purify an earlier way of life. Again the United States found itself in bloody conflict with rivals, such as Mexico and Native American tribes. The mix of people and exchange of cultures continued, now with an even richer mix of influences. The U.S. government played an even greater role in shaping the course of expansion west of the Mississippi.

Forces other than the search for farmland also propelled the frontier westward. The Far West was a vast storehouse of resources—gold, silver, coal, iron, copper, timber, rich soil, and immense grazing lands. The rise of industry created an almost limitless market for many of the West’s riches. That, and an expanding overseas market, gave immigrants additional reasons to move west. Rapid advances in transportation such as the building of the railroads made it easier for immigrants to move west.

However, the frontier did not uniformly expand westward from the Mississippi River. By the 1840s, the line of settlement had moved only a few hundred miles past the river. By 1850 Arkansas, Michigan, Texas, Iowa, and Wisconsin had been admitted as states. Then the frontier jumped across the middle of the country to Oregon and California on the Pacific Coast. California became the first state on the Pacific in 1850.

The frontier then began moving both westward and eastward, as white settlers gradually pushed into the huge interior area of the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Great Basin, and the far Southwest. Oregon, Minnesota, Kansas, Nevada, Nebraska, and Colorado were admitted to the Union between 1850 and 1876, but parts of the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains were settled slowly. Then in 1889 and 1890, six states were added: North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming. This left only Utah, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona in the contiguous United States, all of which had joined the Union by 1912.

The order in which states were admitted to the Union reflects the frontier’s movement across the American West. The many resources of the West were taken and developed at different times and for different purposes by pioneers from the East. Land in the Far West was developed for farming; gold and silver were mined from the mountains; and water was diverted to help make the Great Plains more hospitable for agriculture. Instead of a steady advance of new settlement, the frontier moved as a series of explosive changes.

A

Explorations

The United States began exploration of the Far West much later than some other nations. In 1540 the Spanish conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado led an ambitious expedition in search of gold into New Mexico and the southern plains. Later, during the 1770s, Juan Bautista de Anza and Francisco de Escalante explored the southern Rocky Mountains and much of the Southwest, while Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed along the Pacific coast as far as northern California. French explorers and traders explored the Missouri River valley and the northern plains in the 18th century. The Englishman Alexander Mackenzie, who traveled through western Canada to the Pacific in the 1790s, was the first Euro-American known to have crossed the northern part of the continent by land, while the English navigator George Vancouver explored and mapped the north Pacific coast.

Geographic knowledge had economic and strategic value, and for this reason nations did not share this information. The United States knew little of the Far West at the time of the Louisiana Purchase when the United States acquired what was roughly the western watershed of the Mississippi River from France in 1803. President Thomas Jefferson, who already had a deep curiosity about the West, selected Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the northern reaches of the new acquisition and then to proceed to the Pacific Ocean. With the help of a Shoshone woman guide, Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark ascended the Missouri River from Saint Louis, crossed the Rocky Mountains and descended the Columbia River. After a winter on the Pacific, they retraced their route and returned. Besides being one of the great adventures of American history, the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-1806) gathered a vast amount of geographic and scientific information, established diplomatic and trade relations with some Native American tribes, and helped establish the claim of the United States to the far Northwest.

Lewis and Clark led only one of several government-sponsored expeditions. Zebulon M. Pike (1805-1806) and Stephen H. Long (1820) explored the central Great Plains and the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. While John C. Frémont covered little new ground during the 1840s, his published accounts (mostly written by his wife Jesse) taught the public about the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, Sierra Nevada, and California. Maritime expeditions under Robert Gray mapped more of the Pacific coast. In 1792 Gray explored the mouth of the Columbia River, which strengthened the claim of the United States to the Northwest.

Besides these government agents, thousands of trappers, the mountain men, traveled through the Far West after 1820 in search of furs, especially beaver pelts. During the 1820s and 1830s these men’s travels did at least as much as government expeditions to fill in what were, to the United States, blank spaces on the Western map. One leading trapper, Jedediah Smith, covered more than 16,000 miles in his explorations and provided the government with information and maps of the region.

B

Overland to Oregon

This geographic knowledge opened the way for ordinary citizens to move across the country to the Far West. The area immediately west of the farming frontier, the Great Plains, offered little to farmers who were used to working on land with plentiful rainfall and having trees to build houses. Settlers traveled across the Great Plains to get to the Pacific Northwest, then called the Oregon country, which by the 1840s had a reputation as an agrarian paradise, where soil and climate would nearly guarantee a settler’s health and prosperity. The central valleys of California were pictured in the same way. Oregon and California, however, were more than 2000 miles from Missouri, on the other side of plains, deserts, and the nation’s two tallest mountain chains.

Nonetheless, beginning in the 1840s some people were willing to make the trek to their imagined promised land. Between 1841 and the late 1860s, more than a third of a million persons moved from the Missouri valley to the Pacific Coast. Most followed overland trails, including the Oregon and California trails. These two routes left Missouri and followed the Platte River through southwestern Wyoming, and then split. The Oregon Trail went northwest over the Blue and Cascade mountains to Oregon, and the California Trail went southwest over the Sierra Nevada to California. At first, most of those who traveled these trails were farming families who settled in what is now central California and along Oregon’s Willamette valley. The former was part of Mexico, and the latter was claimed by both the United States and Britain. This migration extended the influence of the United States, which was soon to wrestle with Mexico and Britain for control of the land all the way to the Pacific.

C

Addition of Territory

Between 1845 and 1848 the United States rapidly pushed the national border to the Pacific Ocean, increasing its territory by more than 1.2 million square miles, more land than was added by the Louisiana Purchase. It acquired these lands in three great chunks, through annexation, diplomacy, and a war. This acquisition of land was probably the most important step taken by the U.S. government in encouraging westward expansion.

In 1845 the United States annexed Texas, which had been an independent republic since winning its independence from Mexico in 1836 (see Texas Revolution). The next year President James K. Polk negotiated a treaty with Britain that gave the United States land that would become the states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. Also in 1846 the nation went to war with Mexico. After almost two years of fighting, Mexico surrendered nearly half of its territory. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico relinquished its claims to Texas, and the United States acquired land that would become the states of California, Nevada, and Utah, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming.

D

The Mining Frontier

In January 1848 only a month before the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, some employees of John Sutter, an early promoter of California settlement, found traces of gold in the American River, where they were building a mill. Their discovery sparked the gold rush of 1849. Thousands of people flooded along the overland trails, and at least as many came by ship, some from Australia and Asia and others from the eastern United States and Europe. Over the next few years, hundreds of thousands of people crossed the continent for the gold fields. Few found the wealth they expected, and most returned home. Enough stayed, however, to establish California as a state just two years after the gold rush began. The rush overwhelmed the Hispanic and Native American peoples already living in California. White settlers took land claims from many Hispanics and killed many Native Americans.

More than $1 billion in gold was mined in California. There and elsewhere in the West two types of mining were practiced. In placer mining, individual prospectors took gold from streams that had eroded the gold from its first home somewhere further upstream. Lode mining took gold from its original source, usually in veins, or areas of mineral deposits, that ran through some Western mountains. To find this gold, prospectors had to dig and blast their way into the rock. Locating and extracting gold through this method was extremely expensive, and working deep in the earth was very dangerous. However, the rewards were usually much greater than those from placer mining. Most lode mining was done by large companies, and mines became an industrial enterprise with wage workers and corporate owners.

Once gold was found in California, prospectors scoured the West in search of other bonanzas. Although none proved as rewarding as California’s, many deposits of minerals were discovered. There were gold rushes in Colorado in 1859, Idaho and Montana in the 1860s, and Arizona and Nevada in the 1870s. In 1859 silver was discovered in far western Nevada in what became known as the Comstock Lode. Eventually this region produced more than $300 million in silver. Other silver strikes were made in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Arizona. The West proved to be one of the world’s great reservoirs of valuable metals.

E

Railroads

With such an explosive growth in population on the Pacific Coast, there was a need to connect these distant communities with the eastern states. The answer seemed to be a railroad linking the two parts of the continent. Building a transcontinental system, however, was enormously complex and expensive. In 1862 Congress agreed to loan hundreds of millions of dollars to two corporations to construct the railroad. These companies were also given millions of acres of Western land to sell in order to pay back the loan. In effect, Western land was being used to pay for the West’s own expansion. With the help of thousands of Irish immigrant laborers, the Union Pacific Railroad was built westward from Omaha, Nebraska. At the same time, the Central Pacific was built eastward from northern California, edging over the Sierra Nevada through the efforts of Chinese workers imported for the job. In 1869 the two railroads joined at Promontory Summit, Utah.

Over the next 20 years, other transcontinental railroads were built: the Northern Pacific, Great Northern, Southern Pacific, Atlantic and Pacific, and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe. Most were also financed by massive gifts of public land to private corporations. Many other lines appeared, connecting the larger railroads and reaching into remote areas. By the 1890s a web of steel rails covered much of the West.

The growth of railroads encouraged westward expansion more than any other single development. Railroads made it easier for settlers to move west, and railroad corporations vigorously promoted settlement in order to sell the land given them by the government. Railroads also helped industry develop in the West. Many new industries—mining and lumbering, for instance—relied on railroads to carry in equipment and materials that could never have been brought in otherwise. Western companies used the railroads to export the rich resources they found there. The railroads also made it easier to transport troops and war materials, and thereby accelerated the end of Native American independence.

F

Ranching and Farming Frontiers

Railroads were also responsible for the growth of ranching. After the American Civil War, the Northeast and Ohio Valley had a growing demand for beef. At the same time, southern Texas had a huge supply of cattle, mostly descendants of Spanish stock called longhorns. The railroad provided the means of linking supply with demand—the Texas cattle with the Northern cities. Cattle were herded northward out of Texas along the Chisholm and Great Western trails to towns on the Great Plains. There they were loaded onto specially built rail cars and carried by the newly built railroads to slaughterhouses in Kansas City, Chicago, and other urban centers. Cowtowns like Abilene, Caldwell, and Dodge City in Kansas and Oglalla in Nebraska became famous as playgrounds for cowboys at the end of long, difficult cattle drives.

By the late 1880s cattle drives were no longer necessary. New railroads connected more of the West to eastern markets. In addition, as Native American tribes were defeated and confined to reservations, cattle ranching spread into the Great Plains states of Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, and Montana. Ranching also boomed in the Southwestern states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada. New breeds of cattle that could withstand the harsh conditions could now be fattened on plains grasses and shipped to eastern dinner tables.

Ranching became a big business. The largest ranches often were corporations funded by millions of dollars in stock sold in the East, Britain, and Europe. As in many expanding industries, however, problems soon developed. Rapid growth led to overstocking and overgrazing of pastures, and providing the cattle with water was difficult because of the arid climate. The grasslands could not support all the cattle, which became weakened from hunger and were unable to survive the severe winters. The brutal winter of 1886 to 1887 killed tens of thousands of cattle on plains ranches. In the aftermath many ranchers switched to sheep, which could survive with less water than cattle.

One of the original forces behind westward expansion—farmers looking for better land—was also important in the development of the plains states. Once again the railroads played a crucial role. Even the richest lands were useless without a way to transport harvested crops to markets. As more of the interior was reached by rail lines, farmers began moving in, often buying the land that the railroad corporations had received from the government.

The government encouraged agricultural expansion more directly with the Homestead Act, passed in 1862. The act offered 65 hectares (160 acres) virtually free to any citizen willing to develop the land. Lawmakers hoped that the Homestead Act would lead to agricultural development in the western states, but this goal was not achieved. Because of the lack of rainfall in much of the West, a successful farmer often needed more land than the Homestead Act offered. Furthermore, much of the best land had already been sold or given to railroads. Nonetheless, tens of thousands of farming families moved west under the law.

These farming families settled on millions of acres that had been shunned by farmers who had crossed over the region earlier to settle in more inviting places on the Pacific Coast. These families farmed the plains with new techniques and equipment developed after the Civil War. The government, in an effort to contribute to the development of these new methods, conducted research in the newly created Department of Agriculture and endowed agricultural colleges under the Morrill Act (1862). To produce crops with less rainfall, farmers on the Great Plains used new methods of dry farming and irrigated land close to streams. They learned to build sod houses cheaply out of bricks made of soil and held together by grassroots, but they also relied on many products from distant factories, such as barbed wire, which made cheap fencing in treeless areas. As in mining and ranching, corporations began buying land for large farms. The modern America of industry and big business was reaching into the farming frontier.

G

Native Americans

Dozens of Native American tribes lived in the West, supporting themselves with many different economies. Tribes on the Great Plains, like the Arapaho and Sioux, were hunters and gatherers who depended on vast herds of bison. Most tribes in the Southwest, like the Pueblos, Hopis, and Navajos, were hunters and farmers. In the Pacific Northwest, tribes like the Nez Perce were traders and fishermen who relied on rivers rich with salmon. Westward expansion depleted resources and damaged the environment, thus destroying the Native Americans’ ability to support themselves. In addition, the pioneers carried diseases that killed thousands of Native Americans.

Some Native Americans resisted the influx of white settlers militarily. The most famous conflicts took place on the Great Plains, where the Sioux, Cheyennes, Comanches, Kiowas, and others fought the U.S. Army in several campaigns between 1855 and 1877. Native Americans won some dramatic victories, including the defeat of George Custer on Montana’s Little Bighorn River in 1876, but they were ultimately defeated and confined to reservations. In 1877 the Nez Perce fought a running campaign in an unsuccessful attempt to escape to Canada. Southwestern Apache peoples, with their most famous leader, Geronimo, resisted occupation of their country until 1886. Overall, however, military conflict was not the force that destroyed the Native American culture of independence; it was the volume of white settlers taking over Native American land and the ways in which these settlers transformed the West.

Under scores of treaties Native Americans were assigned to reservations and given government support that was rarely adequate. Government policy tried to assimilate the tribes into white society by suppressing native culture and trying to convert Native Americans to white customs. The Dawes Act of 1887 aimed to end reservations and diminish the importance of the tribe by allotting reservation lands to individual tribal members. Between 1887 and 1934, dozens of reservations were eliminated, and Native American lands were reduced from 150 million acres to 48 million acres. In 1934 the Wheeler-Howard Act preserved the remaining reservations and revived others. Although living conditions remain poor on many reservations, Native Americans have managed in many cases to preserve much of their culture and identity.

V

THE WEST IN POPULAR CULTURE

The westward movement has played a premier role in popular culture. Westerns, stories about life on the frontier, have been popular in the United States and throughout the world. The exploits and adversities of those who moved west, from mountain men and cowboys to women homesteaders and cavalrymen, have been the subject of countless novels, poems, paintings, films, and television programs. Frontier figures such as Daniel Boone, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Kit Carson, as well as Native Americans such as Tecumseh, Sitting Bull, and Geronimo, have become heroes in literature and art. Modern political leaders, from Theodore Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy, have evoked frontier images in reference to themselves and their ideas. Both as myth and reality, the westward movement continues to be a part of national life.

VI

CONCLUSION

The legacy of westward expansion is a mix of great accomplishments and grim tragedies, terrible errors and heroic persistence. It brought together under a single government and economy the land that makes up the United States today. The movement westward thereby contributed to the emergence of one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations of the 20th century. This was achieved, however, by conquering and dispossessing other people. Although the frontier witnessed a vigorous exchange among many cultures, the government often tried to suppress the ways of life of Native Americans and other ethnic groups, such as Hispanics and Asians, outside the national mainstream. The West has produced great wealth and has supplied enormous resources to others in the nation and the world. This production, however, has often resulted in enormous environmental damage. Mountainsides around mining towns have been stripped of trees, pastures overgrazed by cattle, and the topsoil of farmlands destroyed.

Many of the trends set in motion by westward expansion continue. Today the West is the most rapidly growing part of the United States. It is also one of the most ethnically diverse, as people from other cultures continue to be drawn to the West. Hispanic peoples have come from the south and many different Asian groups from the east. Residents of both the city and the countryside still wrestle with the land’s limitations, especially the lack of water, and government support remains extremely important. Millions consider the West the land of opportunity, even as Westerners try to cope with environmental problems produced by past and present efforts to develop resources as rapidly as possible.