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Pick a museum from this list and Google Earth search it to find the address

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Dalton Brothers, four train and bank robbers famous in U.S. Western history: Grattan ("Grat"; 1861-92), William ("Bill"; 1863-94), Robert ("Bob"; 1870-92), and Emmett (1871-1937). Their older cousins were the outlaw Younger brothers.

Their father, Lewis Dalton, a rambler and saloonkeeper, abandoned his wife Adeline ( née Younger), who was forced on her own to rear their 15 children during the difficult period of the American Civil War and Reconstruction. The Daltons resided first in Cass county, Mo., then Coffeyville, Kan., then back in Missouri, and finally in the wild Oklahoma Indian Territory. The four future outlaws first worked as cowboys, but, in 1887, their older brother Frank, a federal deputy marshal, was killed by whiskey runners; in deference, Grat, Bob, and Emmett pinned on lawmen's badges. By 1889, however, they had drifted into horse stealing, while still wearing badges, and a year later were discredited and forced out of policing altogether and took up horse thievery full-time, gathering together a gang. In 1890-91 they took to robbing gambling houses, trains, and banks and were joined by their brother Bill, until then a married, respectable citizen, whose career had been wrecked by his being linked to his brothers.

On the morning of Oct. 5, 1892, Bob, Grat, and Emmett, together with Dick Broadwell and Bill Powers, rode into Coffeyville, Kan., intent upon robbing the town's two banks. They were recognized and, coming out of one bank, were met by wild gunfire from vigilante citizens. All in the band were killed except Emmett, who was wounded and spent 14 years in Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing. (He was pardoned in 1907, reformed, and led a respectable businessman's life in Los Angeles until his death on July 13, 1937.) Before the Coffeyville raid, Bill Dalton had returned to Oklahoma, later joining Bill Doolin's gang and then forming his own gang. On June 8, 1894, while he was playing with his daughter on the front porch of his farm home in Ardmore, Okla., lawmen crept up on him from behind and shot him dead.

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Dalton Brothers | Wild West, Oklahoma Territory & Train Robbery | Britannica

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Dalton Brothers, four train and bank robbers famous in U.S. Western history: Grattan ("Grat"; 1861-92), William ("Bill"; 1863-94), Robert ("Bob"; 1870-92), and Emmett (1871-1937). Their older cousins were the outlaw Younger brothers. Their father, Lewis Dalton, a rambler and saloonkeeper, abandoned

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Oregon Trail - Oregon Trail - The journey: Estimates of how many emigrants made the trek westward on the Oregon Trail vary. Perhaps some 300,000 to 400,000 people used it during its heyday from the mid-1840s to the late 1860s, and possibly a half million traversed it overall, covering an average of…

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Such exploits provided choice material not only for newspaper reporters but also for dime novelists, who transformed the hard-riding, fast-shooting Cody into a Western folk hero. Among these early authors were Ned Buntline (pen name of E.Z.C. Judson) and Prentiss Ingraham. Recognizing the financial possibilities inherent in dramatizing the West, Cody was easily persuaded in 1872 to star in Buntline's drama The Scouts of the Prairie. Though his acting was far from polished, he became a superb showman, and his audiences greeted him with overwhelming enthusiasm during his 45-year career as an entertainer.

For many years Cody performed during the winter and continued scouting for the army in the summer or escorting hunting parties to the West. In the process, the line began to blur even further between the scout William F. Cody and the legend and entertainer Buffalo Bill. Indeed, as early as his scalping of Yellow Hair in 1876, Cody had consciously worn his flamboyant theatrical clothes into battle, later donning the same outfit to re-create his attack onstage. In 1883 Cody, with the help of producer and partner Nate Salsbury, organized his own Wild West show-a spectacular outdoor entertainment with a cast of hundreds, featuring fancy-shooting, hard-riding cowboys and yelling Indians, along with re-creations of a buffalo hunt, the capture of the Deadwood (South Dakota) stagecoach, and a Pony Express ride. Its stars included Annie Oakley, the famous rifle shot, and, in 1885, Chief Sitting Bull. The show played at Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887 and was staged throughout Europe. In 1893 three million people attended the show (by this point known as Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, which included Cossacks and vaqueros) during its tenure on the Midway adjacent to the official grounds of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. By the end of the 19th century, Buffalo Bill was one of the most-recognized persons in the world.

Final years

Buffalo Bill continued to perform in his Wild West show until 1916, although at age 71 he often had to be helped onto his horse backstage. While Buffalo Bill's exhibition remained extremely popular in the United States and abroad, in the end-largely through poor investments, including his purchase of an unproductive gold mine-he lost the fortune he had made in show business. His last public appearance occurred just two months before his death.
Joseph J. Di Certo

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Such exploits provided choice material not only for newspaper reporters but also for dime novelists, who transformed the hard-riding, fast-shooting Cody into a Western folk hero. Among these early authors were Ned Buntline (pen name of E.Z.C. Judson) and Prentiss Ingraham.

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Table of Contents

1. Manifest Destiny

2. Westward Expansion and Slavery

3. Westward Expansion and the Mexican War

4. Westward Expansion and the Compromise of 1850

5. Bleeding Kansas

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson purchased the territory of Louisiana from the French government for $15 million. The Louisiana Purchase stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to New Orleans, and it doubled the size of the United States. To Jefferson, westward expansion was the key to the nation's health: He believed that a republic depended on an independent, virtuous citizenry for its survival, and that independence and virtue went hand in hand with land ownership, especially the ownership of small farms. ("Those who labor in the earth," he wrote, "are the chosen people of God.") In order to provide enough land to sustain this ideal population of virtuous yeomen, the United States would have to continue to expand. The westward expansion of the United States is one of the defining themes of 19th-century American history, but it is not just the story of Jefferson's expanding "empire of liberty." On the contrary, as one historian writes, in the six decades after the Louisiana Purchase, westward expansion "very nearly destroy[ed] the republic."

Manifest Destiny

By 1840, nearly 7 million Americans-40 percent of the nation's population-lived in the trans-Appalachian West. Following a trail blazed by Lewis and Clark, most of these people had left their homes in the East in search of economic opportunity. Like Thomas Jefferson, many of these pioneers associated westward migration, land ownership and farming with freedom. In Europe, large numbers of factory workers formed a dependent and seemingly permanent working class; by contrast, in the United States, the western frontier offered the possibility of independence and upward mobility for all. In 1843, one thousand pioneers took to the Oregon Trail as part of the " Great Emigration."

Did you know? In 1853, the Gadsden Purchase added about 30,000 square miles of Mexican territory to the United States and fixed the boundaries of the "lower 48" where they are today.

In 1845, a journalist named John O'Sullivan put a name to the idea that helped pull many pioneers toward the western frontier. Westward migration was an essential part of the republican project, he argued, and it was Americans' " manifest destiny " to carry the "great experiment of liberty" to the edge of the continent: to "overspread and to possess the whole of the [land] which Providence has given us," O'Sullivan wrote. The survival of American freedom depended on it.

Westward Expansion and Slavery

Meanwhile, the question of whether or not slavery would be allowed in the new western states shadowed every conversation about the frontier. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise had attempted to resolve this question: It had admitted Missouri to the union as a slave state and Maine as a free state, preserving the fragile balance in Congress. More important, it had stipulated that in the future, slavery would be prohibited north of the southern boundary of Missouri (the 36º30' parallel) in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase.

However, the Missouri Compromise did not apply to new territories that were not part of the Louisiana Purchase, and so the issue of slavery continued to fester as the nation expanded. The Southern economy grew increasingly dependent on "King Cotton" and the system of forced labor that sustained it. Meanwhile, more and more Northerners came to believed that the expansion of slavery impinged upon their own liberty, both as citizens-the pro-slavery majority in Congress did not seem to represent their interests-and as yeoman farmers. They did not necessarily object to slavery itself, but they resented the way its expansion seemed to interfere with their own economic opportunity.

Westward Expansion and the Mexican War

Despite this sectional conflict, Americans kept on migrating West in the years after the Missouri Compromise was adopted. Thousands of people crossed the Rockies to the Oregon Territory, which belonged to Great Britain, and thousands more moved into the Mexican territories of California, New Mexico and Texas. In 1837, American settlers in Texas joined with their Tejano neighbors (Texans of Spanish origin) and won independence from Mexico. They petitioned to join the United States as a slave state.

This promised to upset the careful balance that the Missouri Compromise had achieved, and the annexation of Texas and other Mexican territories did not become a political priority until the enthusiastically expansionist cotton planter James K. Polk was elected to the presidency in 1844. Thanks to the maneuvering of Polk and his allies, Texas joined the union as a slave state in February 1846; in June, after negotiations with Great Britain, Oregon joined as a free state.

That same month, Polk declared war against Mexico, claiming (falsely) that the Mexican army had "invaded our territory and shed American blood on American soil." The Mexican-American War proved to be relatively unpopular, in part because many Northerners objected to what they saw as a war to expand the "slaveocracy." In 1846, Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot attached a proviso to a war-appropriations bill declaring that slavery should not be permitted in any part of the Mexican territory that the U.S. might acquire. Wilmot's measure failed to pass, but it made explicit once again the sectional conflict that haunted the process of westward expansion.

Westward Expansion and the Compromise of 1850

In 1848, the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican War and added more than 1 million square miles, an area larger than the Louisiana Purchase, to the United States. The acquisition of this land re-opened the question that the Missouri Compromise had ostensibly settled: What would be the status of slavery in new American territories? After two years of increasingly volatile debate over the issue, Kentucky Senator Henry Clay proposed another compromise. It had four parts: first, California would enter the Union as a free state; second, the status of slavery in the rest of the Mexican territory would be decided by the people who lived there; third, the slave trade (but not slavery) would be abolished in Washington, D.C.; and fourth, a new Fugitive Slave Act would enable Southerners to reclaim runaway slaves who had escaped to Northern states where slavery was not allowed.

Bleeding Kansas

But the larger question remained unanswered. In 1854, Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas proposed that two new states, Kansas and Nebraska, be established in the Louisiana Purchase west of Iowa and Missouri. According to the terms of the Missouri Compromise, both new states would prohibit slavery because both were north of the 36º30' parallel. However, since no Southern legislator would approve a plan that would give more power to "free-soil" Northerners, Douglas came up with a middle ground that he called "popular sovereignty": letting the settlers of the territories decide for themselves whether their states would be slave or free.

Northerners were outraged: Douglas, in their view, had caved to the demands of the "slaveocracy" at their expense. The battle for Kansas and Nebraska became a battle for the soul of the nation. Emigrants from Northern and Southern states tried to influence the vote. For example, thousands of Missourians flooded into Kansas in 1854 and 1855 to vote (fraudulently) in favor of slavery. "Free-soil" settlers established a rival government, and soon Kansas spiraled into civil war. Hundreds of people died in the fighting that ensued, known as " Bleeding Kansas."

A decade later, the civil war in Kansas over the expansion of slavery was followed by a national civil war over the same issue. As Thomas Jefferson had predicted, it was the question of slavery in the West-a place that seemed to be the emblem of American freedom-that proved to be "the knell of the union."
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Westward Expansion - Timeline, Events & Facts | HISTORY

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Westward expansion, the 19th-century movement of settlers into the American West, began with the Louisiana Purchase and was fueled by the Gold Rush, the Oregon Trail and a belief in "manifest destiny."

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[Cattle, horses, and people at the fair with stables in the background]Popular Graphic Arts

The completion of the railroads to the West following the Civil War opened up vast areas of the region to settlement and economic development. White settlers from the East poured across the Mississippi to mine, farm, and ranch. African-American settlers also came West from the Deep South, convinced by promoters of all-black Western towns that prosperity could be found there. Chinese railroad workers further added to the diversity of the region's population.

Settlement from the East transformed the Great Plains. The huge herds of American bison that roamed the plains were almost wiped out, and farmers plowed the natural grasses to plant wheat and other crops. The cattle industry rose in importance as the railroad provided a practical means for getting the cattle to market.

The loss of the bison and growth of white settlement drastically affected the lives of the Native Americans living in the West. In the conflicts that resulted, the American Indians, despite occasional victories, seemed doomed to defeat by the greater numbers of settlers and the military force of the U.S. government. By the 1880s, most American Indians had been confined to reservations, often in areas of the West that appeared least desirable to white settlers.

The cowboy became the symbol for the West of the late 19th century, often depicted in popular culture as a glamorous or heroic figure. The stereotype of the heroic white cowboy is far from true, however. The first cowboys were Spanish vaqueros, who had introduced cattle to Mexico centuries earlier. Black cowboys also rode the range. Furthermore, the life of the cowboy was far from glamorous, involving long, hard hours of labor, poor living conditions, and economic hardship.

The myth of the cowboy is only one of many myths that have shaped our views of the West in the late 19th century. Recently, some historians have turned away from the traditional view of the West as a frontier, a "meeting point between civilization and savagery" in the words of historian Frederick Jackson Turner. They have begun writing about the West as a crossroads of cultures, where various groups struggled for property, profit, and cultural dominance. Think about these differing views of the history of the West as you examine the documents in this collection.

To find additional documents in Loc.gov on topics related to the West, use such keywords as West, ranching, Native Americans, and pioneers, or search using the names of states or cities in the West.

Documents

The Architecture of the West

Denver, Colorado, 1898

Pueblo de Taos, New Mexico, 1891(?)

Old Mission Church, Los Angeles, California, between 1880 and 1899

Salt Lake City, Utah, 1896

The Old Carreta, Pueblo of Laguna, New Mexico, 1890

A Mexican Home (ranchita), between 1880 and 1897

As Some Things Appear on the Plains and Among the Rockies in Mid-Summer

Beef and Beans

The Extermination of the American Bison

I Will Go West

American Indian and Oklahoma Territories Maps

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The American West, 1865-1900 | Rise of Industrial America, 1876-1900 | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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The completion of the railroads to the West following the Civil War opened up vast areas of the region to settlement and economic development.

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Westward expansion began in earnest in 1803. Thomas Jefferson negotiated a treaty with France in which the United States paid France $15 million for the Louisiana Territory - 828,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River - effectively doubling the size of the young nation.

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Western Expansion

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Western frontier life in America describes one of the most exciting periods in the history of the United States. From 1850 to 1900, swift and widespread changes transformed the American West. At the beginning of that period, a great variety of Native American cultures dominated most parts of the region.

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The resources in this primary source set are intended for classroom use. If your use will be beyond a single classroom, please review the copyright and fair use guidelines.

Teacher's Guide

To help your students analyze these primary sources, get a graphic organizer and guides: Analysis Tool and Guides

In the nineteenth century, the United States expanded its territory westward at a dramatic pace, leading to conflict, national growth, and ongoing cultural exchange within a transformed continent.

Background

The expansion of the United States into the territory west of the Mississippi River began with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. President Thomas Jefferson nearly doubled the size of the nation by negotiating a price of $15 million to purchase 828,800 square miles from France, including all or part of 14 current states. In 1804, Jefferson sent an expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the area. The three-year expedition produced new understanding of the geography and resources of the western part of the continent. In the 1830s and 1840s, "manifest destiny", the idea that the United States was destined to expand across the entire continent, was used to promote further territorial expansion. And the nation expanded quickly:

In 1845 the United States annexed Texas;

In 1846 the Oregon Treaty ended British claims to Oregon Territory;

In 1848, following the Mexican-American War, Mexico ceded much of the Southwest to the United States;

In 1853 the United States bought an additional tract of land from Mexico.

States joined the Union at a relatively fast pace: California became a state in 1850 and Oregon in 1859, Nevada in 1864, Nebraska in 1867, Colorado in 1876, South and North Dakota, Montana, and Washington in 1889, Wyoming and Idaho in 1890, and Utah in 1896. As new towns like Denver and Phoenix sprang up in these new states, established towns and cities grew to accommodate the new industries and new populations that westward expansion brought with it.

A number of factors fueled migration west. Trappers, settlers, and miners headed West from the eastern United States prior to the Civil War. The Homestead Act, passed in 1862, allowed settlers to claim 160 acres of land for free. Another important factor was completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869; the railroad led to much more rapid western migration and also facilitated economic development.

In looking at the history of the American West, it is important to keep in mind the myths that arose around the settling of the West in the second half of the nineteenth century. The influential historian Frederick Jackson Turner described a uniquely American personality forged by the experience of taming the wilderness and critical to the success and growth of the United States. That view of the West as a frontier where heroic white settlers and cowboys struggled to bring civilization to a savage land framed popular and scholarly thinking for years to come.

More recently, however, historians have questioned the notion of the frontier. Instead, they have argued that the nineteenth-century West was a crossroads of cultures. The trans-Mississippi West was home to countless Native American communities. The lifeways of the Native American groups varied considerably. Some with nomadic lifestyles required large amounts of rangeland to maintain their families; other groups lived in settled communities, where they farmed and raised livestock brought to the West by the Spanish. The cultural diversity was heightened by the addition of tens of thousands of Native Americans forced west from the eastern areas of the United States.

Spain ruled what is today the southwestern United States between 1598 and 1821; it used land grants to promote settlement and protect this remote region of its empire. Spanish policy was to give settlers free land owned by the government. The Republic of Mexico followed many of the same policies when it governed the Southwest between 1821 and 1848.

Thus, when white settlers began pouring into the West, they were entering a region in which indigenous peoples and Spanish settlers had been living for hundreds of years. Nor was east the only direction from which settlers came into the American West.

African Americans came from the southeast, Spanish settlers came from Mexico in the south, and workers came from the west, across the Pacific from China.

The hope for economic advancement that brought white settlers to the West also brought workers from Asia. Chinese immigrants worked in mining, ran small businesses, and helped build railroads across the West; however, they were often met with hostility and violent attacks when they attempted to settle into communities.

Expansion in the American West continues today, as its population centers continue to expand into even the most remote areas of the region. Cultural encounters also continue to have an impact on everyday life in the United States, and may prove to be among the most important legacies of the great era of westward expansion.

Suggestions for Teachers

The documents in this set can be used to help students explore westward expansion of the United States and the resulting interactions among the West's many cultural groups.

Students could imagine that they are settlers from the East or Midwest, journeying to the West to start a new home. Using documents from this set to provide background information, they could write letters home, describing encounters with people or places described or depicted in the documents. What do they learn about the West from each encounter? Completing the Transcontinental Railroad was one of the most important events in connecting the West to other parts of United States. Challenge students to use a map to decide where they would build a railroad from the Midwest to California. Where would they start? Where would they end? What route would they follow? When they have drawn their route, ask to compare it with a Library of Congress map of one of the completed railways. How close was their route to the actual route? Perspectives on westward expansion varied dramatically when it was taking place. Challenge students to examine a positive representation of westward expansion and to speculate about the point of view of its creator. Then, they might find a document or image in the Library's online collections that represents a different point of view, and identify the ways in which the two items disagree. Documents in the Library of Congress online collections provide evidence of conflict among the cultural groups that met each other in the American West. Challenge students to find evidence of conflict and prejudice in the documents in this primary source set. Can they also find evidence of cooperation and acceptance? What factors might have led to conflict or cooperation in each instance?

Additional Resources

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Westward Expansion: Encounters at a Cultural Crossroads | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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In the nineteenth century, the United States expanded its territory westward at a dramatic pace, leading to conflict, national growth, and ongoing cultural exchange within a transformed continent.

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National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum

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The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City is America's premier institution of Western history, art and culture. Founded in 1955, the Museum collects, preserves and exhibits an internationally renowned collection of Western art and artifacts while sponsoring dynamic educational programs to promote interest in the enduring legacy of the American West.

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National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum - Oklahoma City, OK

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The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City is America's premier institution of Western history, art and culture. Founded in 1955, the Museum collects, preserves and exhibits an internationally renowned collection of Western art and artifacts while sponsoring dynamic educational programs to promote interest in the enduring legacy of the American West.

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Since 1897, Cheyenne has been home to one of the largest celebrations of the western frontier. It began as a one day rodeo, but has grown to become a two we…

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