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The notion that the United States government should give free land titles to settlers to encourage westward expansion became popular in the 1850s. During that time the U.S. House of Representatives passed numerous homestead bills but southern opposition in the Senate prevented enactment. In 1860, during the 36th Congress, the Senate narrowly passed a homestead act but President James Buchanan vetoed it and the Senate failed its override attempt.

When the 37th Congress convened for its brief summer session in 1861, now without members from seceded states, it was preoccupied with Civil War-related legislation. The House took up briefly the homestead issue in December but postponed further consideration of it until the following February. The House finally passed the Homestead Act on February 28, 1862 by the large margin of 107 to 16. The act worked its way through the Senate until May 6, 1862 when it passed easily by a vote of 33 to 7. After a few minor changes in conference committee-which both houses agreed to without controversy-Congress sent the final legislation to President Abraham Lincoln who signed the act into law on May 20, 1862.

The Homestead Act encouraged western migration by providing settlers with 160 acres of land in exchange for a nominal filing fee. Among its provisions was a five-year requirement of continuous residence before receiving the title to the land and the settlers had to be, or in the process of becoming, U.S. citizens. Through 1986, when the last claim was made in Alaska, the Homestead Act distributed 270 million acres of land in the United States making it arguably one of the most far-reaching pieces of legislation in American history.
See the final version or read a transcript of the Homestead Act as signed by President Abraham Lincoln
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The notion that the United States government should give free land titles to settlers to encourage westward expansion became popular in the 1850s. During that time the U.S. House of Representatives passed numerous homestead bills but southern opposition in the Senate prevented enactment.

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The Transcontinental Railroad | The West | PBS LearningMedia

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The Transcontinental Railroad | The West | PBS LearningMedia

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The Transcontinental Railroad | The West | PBS LearningMedia

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After the Civil War ended in 1865, reuniting the North and South, Americans were determined to unify the United States from East to West by rail. With government investment, two corporations, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, engaged in a race to build the most track the fastest, one going…

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Moving west took daring and courage. People risked their lives to open the West to commerce and settlement, braving harsh climatic and geologic conditions to cross the country and secure the land. Technology helped ease some of the strain and, in some cases, ensured success. Canals, stagecoaches, and railroads made it possible for thousands of people to settle the West. Securing the land often meant defending the chosen spot against Indian attack; advances in gun design swayed the battles in favor of the white settlers. New technologies aided farmers and cattlemen in places where standard fencing materials were scarce. Once settled, people wanted to correspond with the loved ones they had left behind or keep abreast of news in other parts of the country. Technological advances increased the speed of correspondence from months to weeks and then to minutes. Each technological advance further opened the West and helped bind the growing country together.

Canals

Traveling around America used to be quite difficult. During the colonial period, roads were primitive and rivers did not connect people to all the places they wanted to travel. By the Revolutionary War (1776-83), some had considered the benefits of creating man-made rivers called canals to connect natural waterways. As early as 1790, there were thirty canal companies working in the newly formed nation. The first canal made in America stretched 27 miles and connected the Merrimack River with Boston Harbor. Hundreds of canals were dug throughout America from the end of the Revolutionary War to the beginning of the Civil War in 1861. French statesman and historian Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) noted that Americans had "changed the whole order of nature to their advantage," according to Russell Bourne in Floating West.

One of the most important canals was the 363-mile-long Erie Canal, which linked Rome, New York, to Buffalo, New York. Interest in building a canal across New York started when the new state was still a British colony, but work did not begin until 1817. Part of the appeal of such a canal was the ease and speed of travel it would offer to people eager to reach the frontier lands of western New York and Pennsylvania.

Building canals was slow, difficult work. Surveyors first laid out the path of the canal and planned locks along the route to "level out" the distance. Much of the digging was done by Irish immigrants who had left their homeland because of the potato famine (widespread starvation brought on by a disease that destroyed potato crops). The Erie Canal used about three thousand Irish "bogtrotters" to dig the forty-foot-wide and four-foot-deep ditch. Spending their days shoveling, sometimes through swamps and bogs, the workers were paid between 37.5 and 50 cents per day if they had a set wage, or work crews of three men earned about 12.5 cents for each cubic yard of earth they moved. As work progressed, many native New Yorkers joined the crews, and innovations in digging soon helped the work go faster. Horses and oxen pulled plows to break up the dirt before workers began to dig. The animals were also used to pull dirt off the work area. Cables were strung over tall trees and attached to tree stumps so that a single canal worker could pull out a stump by turning an endless screw. Crews called "blowers" that cleared away rock, could use Dupont's Blasting Powder, a substance that ignited when and how it was supposed to, instead of the more unpredictable black powder.

The Erie Canal was completed in 1825, and within a year it had collected $750,000 in tolls. Much of the canal's success came from the speed it gave travelers. When people walked or rode wagons or stagecoaches, it took them a few weeks to get from New York City to Buffalo. But the journey took only eight days on the Erie Canal. The canal became the most-used route west in the 1830s and 1840s. By 1830, about one thousand people arrived in Buffalo daily, ready to head west to settle in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois. Not only was canal travel faster, but it was a cheaper method of shipping for merchants as well. Farmers in Buffalo who once paid one hundred dollars for a ton of freight to reach New York City in three weeks could now send the same material for ten dollars and it would reach its destination in eight days. The Erie Canal made Buffalo the busiest port on the Great Lakes.

The success of the Erie Canal started America's great canal-building era. Along the Atlantic Ocean, more than 800 miles of canals were completed during the 1820s. By the 1830s, 1,300 miles of canals were under construction, including the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the Pennsylvania and Maryland systems. By 1840, more than 4,000 miles of canals linked American towns.

Despite the popular enthusiasm for canal travel, which offered unheard-of leisure and speed, America's attention soon turned to railroads. Like canals, trains could take people where rivers could not. But trains offered travelers more speed and luxury, and railroads were quicker to construct. Though revenues on the Erie Canal topped five million dollars annually in 1862, by 1869 railroads were carrying more freight than canals were. The competition from railroads forced many canals to close, and the construction of some canals was abandoned altogether.

The stagecoach

Stagecoaches had carried travelers throughout the East from the time roads were wide enough to accommodate four wheels. By 1820 regular stagecoach service reached St. Louis, Missouri. But the dirt trails farther west had only been tackled by several two-wheeled wagons traveling west from Missouri in the 1820s and by one four-wheeled wagon, which made it to Fort Boise, Idaho, before falling apart in 1836. The first wagon train of emigrants left Missouri for California in 1836, beginning a large migration of people to the Oregon Country in the 1840s. Demand for overland passenger service soon became great enough to establish stagecoach service to the West.

Before the opening of transcontinental stagecoach lines, regional lines offered service in many areas throughout the West. By the mid-1800s stagecoach service was offered from Independence, Missouri, to Santa Fe, New Mexico; throughout the Willamette Valley in Oregon; and throughout the states of Texas and California. The routes offered people without livestock or the ability to travel on foot a way to get from place to place. The stagecoach lines of California, however, had a special purpose: they opened in response to the demands of gold rush miners, who would pay handsomely to transport gold and mail from the mines. James E. Birch, who had traveled to California from Rhode Island to seek his fortune in the mines, soon discovered he could make more money running a stagecoach line. He did very well carrying the miners' goods from mines near San Francisco to the city and newcomers to the mines. In the late 1840s and 1850s California was served by more than seven stagecoach lines.

The Overland Mail Company

In 1857 Congress, which was interested in establishing regular mail service between the Mississippi River and California, passed a post office measure. As the operator and owner of stage lines, steamships, and express companies in the East, John Butterfield knew the delivery industry well, and he won the contract to establish regular mail service in the West. Butterfield and his investors spent more than one million dollars to establish and grade roads, dig wells, and build stations every nineteen miles along the route. Under his efficient management, Butterfield's Overland Mail Company opened for service on September 16, 1858. The mail traveled from St. Louis to Tipton, Missouri, by train and was then transferred to stagecoach for the trip to San Francisco. Butterfield's line complied with the government's demand that service be "performed in good four-horse coaches and spring wagons, suitable for the conveyance of passengers, as well as the safety and security of the mails." But the twenty-four-day trip took a toll on passengers. In Throw Down the Box! George A. Thompson quotes Waterman Ormsby, a New York Herald reporter who was the first to ride the stagecoach line. Ormsby said of his trip, "I know what Hell is like, for I've just had twenty-four days of it!" Butterfield operated the Overland Mail Company for two and a half years until he retired.

"Dreary weariness"

Stagecoaches were not known for comfort. In Getting There: Frontier Travel without Power, Suzanne Hilton quoted one man's opinion about his stagecoach journey: "Dreary weariness comes over the coach-crowding passengers. The air gets cold. The road grows dusty and chokes you. The legs become stiff and numb. The temper edges. Everybody is overcome with sleep but can't stay asleep. Everybody flounders and knocks about against everybody else in helpless despair."

In addition to being uncomfortable, stagecoaches were vulnerable to attack. Robbers, called "road agents," stopped coaches, stole all the valuables, and sometimes killed passengers or drivers. Stagecoaches carrying bullion (bars of gold) from the mines were especially targeted. The most famous road agents were Black Bart (see box on p. 212), who terrorized stage lines in California, and Henry Plummer in Montana. But history has shown that the road agents' high jinks did not pay; thieves were generally either jailed or hanged for their efforts. Indians were another threat to stagecoach travel. Enraged by the further encroachment of settlers on their lands, the Sioux, Apache, and other tribes along the stagecoach lines attacked way stations and ran off horses.

The stagecoach kings

In 1861, Benjamin F. Holladay became one of the

Black Bart

Though many bandits and gangs robbed stagecoaches, Black Bart earned special recognition as a highwayman because he robbed so many people, never fired a shot, and proved so elusive to the law. Black Bart robbed twenty-eight California stagecoaches between 1875 and 1883. Always masked in a flour sack with eyeholes and carrying a shotgun, Black Bart would demand that the drivers "Throw down the box!" After he collected the treasure from the express box, Bart would leave on foot. Twice he left behind a message in verse. According to Jay Monaghan's The Book of the American West, the poem Black Bart left at his fourth robbery read as follows:

I've labored long and hard for bread,
For honor and for riches,
But on my corns too long you've tred
You fine-haired sons of bitches.
Black Bart,
The Po 8

(Po 8 meant PoEight or Poet)

Soon Wells Fargo, California governor William Irwin, and the postal authorities collectively posted eight hundred dollars as a reward for Black Bart's capture and conviction. In 1883, detectives found a handkerchief with a laundry mark (a tag identifying a commercial laundry or cleaners), F.X.O.7, at the scene of a Black Bart robbery. This tag would prove to be the criminal's undoing. Wells Fargo detective J. B. Hume had long been on the lookout for evidence that would lead him to Black Bart. He ordered that San Francisco's ninety-one laundries be searched for the matching laundry mark. The search led him to C. E. Bolton. Thought to be the owner of a mine who lived in a nearby hotel, Bolton was a well-dressed man with a gray mustache and goatee. Detectives searched his room and found clothing with an identical laundry mark and poems in the same handwriting as those left at Black Bart's robberies. Bolton was soon convicted and was imprisoned at San Quentin on November 21, 1883.

Though Black Bart claimed while in jail that his name was Bolton and that he had been a captain in the Civil War, a Bible in his room in San Francisco was inscribed "Charles E. Boles, First Sergeant, Company B. 116th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, by his wife as a New Year's gift." Whether his name was Bolton or Boles will never be known. He was released from prison on January 21, 1888. Shortly thereafter some stage lines were held up, and rumors circulated that Black Bart was operating again. But soon the holdups and the rumors disappeared-as did any trace of Black Bart.

most powerful stagecoach kings in the country when he purchased the entire Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express and changed the name to the Overland Mail Company (the company contained portions of John Butterfield's now dismantled Overland Mail Company). Holladay intimidated his competition and consolidated other stagecoach lines into the Overland Mail Company. In 1866, Holladay sold his company to Wells, Fargo and Company for more than two and a half million dollars. Wells Fargo now owned every stage line of importance west of the Missouri River. By 1865, travelers could buy a $250 ticket on a stagecoach that left the Missouri River on Monday through Saturday to make the six-day trip to the Rocky Mountains. Stagecoaches suffered from competition with the Transcontinental Railroad when it was built in 1869. The stagecoach lines couldn't match the speed or the relative safety offered by the trains. Wells Fargo sold its stagecoach lines to another stagecoach company, Gilmer and Salisbury, in 1869. The latter company continued operation of the profitable lines, which offered service between outlying areas and the railroads, into the 1900s.

Railroads

Railroads were an efficient and quick method of transportation in the East long before a transcontinental railroadwas possible. By 1860, more than 30,000 miles of track connected the major cities of the East. Construction of a transcontinental railway was not delayed for lack of vision, however. As early as the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804 (see Chapter 2), eastern entrepreneurs longed for a shortcut to Asian markets. In 1844 New York City merchant Asa Whitney even proposed that Congress sell him a strip of land running west from Wisconsin to the Pacific Ocean so that he could construct a railway to provide easy access to the riches of Asia. While Whitney's idea was met with interest, it ultimately failed because Congress could not decide which city should be the starting point for the railroad. For nearly two more decades interest in a transcontinental railroad remained high, but political lobbying between the North and the South over where to begin the line kept the project from being started.

Mary Fields

Mary Fields was the first black woman to deliver mail in the United States. Born a slave in Hickman County, Tennessee, Fields was granted her freedom when the Civil War ended in 1865. A letter from her old master's daughter and her best friend, Dolly Dunn, encouraged her to move near Cascade, Montana, where Dolly was a nun at the mission. A strong, capable woman who was good with horses and quick with a gun, Fields bested forty others for a job as the stagecoach driver on the difficult mountain trail between the St. Peter's Mission and Cascade, Montana. She was sixty years old when she got the job. Fields delivered the mail on time for eight years, battling bandits and once packing the mail on her back when the winter snow stopped her horses. After her retirement as Stagecoach Mary Fields, she opened her own laundry business. She was eighty-two when she was laid to rest.

When the Southern states seceded and the Civil War began in 1861, Congress was finally able to pass a bill that provided private corporations with federal land and government money to build the railway. Congress launched the construction of the transcontinental railroad with the passage of the Pacific Railroad Act on July 1, 1862. President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) signed the legislation and decided where the line would start. The railroad would stretch from Sacramento, California, to Omaha on the Missouri River in the Nebraska Territory. With government aid, the California-chartered Central Pacific company would lay the track from the west and the federally chartered Union Pacific company would construct the line from the east. In 1864 a second act was passed to provide more loans and land grants to the railroad effort.

A difficult journey

Over the years construction continued haltingly. During the Civil War, workers and materials were hard to secure. In 1863 work began in California. Charles Crocker led the laborers and hired ten thousand Chinese workers to help blast a passage through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Chinese laborers made up four-fifths of the workforce and were paid two-thirds what white laborers were. By 1865 only forty miles of track had been laid westward from Omaha. In Nebraska, General Grenville M. Dodge added ten thousand men, mostly ex-soldiers and recent Irish immigrants. The laborers on both sides of the country suffered miserable conditions while working, sometimes in gale-force winds and snowstorms or hanging in baskets over rock faces. Hundreds died in the effort.

Even with the thousands of workers and hundreds of wagons continuously carrying materials to job sites, Indian attacks frequently delayed production. Indians viewed the railroads as a disaster. As the land was cleared, hunters slaughtered the buffalo on which the Indians depended. The transcontinental railroad split the buffalo country into two "herds" when it reached Cheyenne, Wyoming; the construction of the Kansas Pacific Railroad in 1868, the Santa Fe Railroad through Kansas in 1871, and the Northern Pacific Railroad through the Dakotas in 1880 threatened the Indians' way of life and dependence on the buffalo even further. Of the millions of buffalo found in the West in the previous decade, only 1,091 remained in 1887. Indians were displaced all along the route as land was claimed for the railroads.

The Central Pacific and Union Pacific fiercely competed with each other. By 1868, the Central Pacific was forging across the Nevada desert and the Union Pacific tackled South Pass, laying 5 to 10 miles of track a day. The crews were working so quickly that the graders actually passed each other. Congress finally ruled that the two roads would join at Promontory, Utah. On May 10, 1869, a ceremony celebrated the completion of the project. Officials from both companies and other guests assembled to watch the last spikes driven into the railroad ties: one silver spike from Nevada; one of gold, silver, and iron from Arizona; and two gold ones from California. When the two companies' engines met nose to nose, the telegraph carried the news across the nation, starting a series of celebrations from the East to the West.

The railroad mania

Passenger service began on the railroad five days after the golden spike was driven. From Omaha, the trip cost $111 for first-class tickets, which included private toilets and sleeping coaches called "Pullmans" and "Silver Palace Cars"; $80 for second-class seats, which were unreserved coach accommodations; and $40 for emigrant-class tickets that bought passengers seats in a car that had hard seats, bunks with straw-filled mattresses, a toilet, and a coal-burning stove. The dining cars were open to all. The scheduled trip took four days, four hours, and forty minutes, unless washouts, buffalo, train robberies, or Indians delayed the train.

The transcontinental railroad started what became a railroad mania that would only begin to lag after four other railroads reached the Pacific coast and the "Great Empire Builder" James J. Hill completed, without federal subsidy, his Great Northern Railroad, the fifth transcontinental railroad, in 1893. At the end of the Civil War in 1865, 3,272 miles of track had been laid west of the Mississippi River, and by 1890, 72,473 miles of track connected major areas of the West.

The railroads dramatically changed the economic viability of the West. The "iron horses" led to the development and economic prosperity of new towns, helping support the success of many farms and industries. Carrying passengers more quickly and in greater comfort than other forms of transportation could, the railroads brought another economic bonus as well: tourism.

Guns

Aside from the devastating effects of disease on Native Americans when whites advanced across the continent, guns proved to be the biggest threat to the native tribes. Nearly a century before the first white settlers arrived in the West, the Spanish matchlock or hand cannon gave the Spanish invaders an advantage over the original North American inhabitants. Jay Monaghan's The Book of the American West noted that, "these early firearms not only paved the way for the winning of the West but became our first sporting weapons, bringing down game as well as humans."

When Lewis and Clark made their famous expedition west in 1804, they would fire their cannon or shoot a flying duck if they needed to impress or scare the Indians they encountered. But guns were not altogether new to Native Americans. Traders had supplied Indians with older versions of guns since about the seventeenth century. Cheaply constructed muskets and more expensive and well-made rifles, known as "trade guns," were manufactured especially for sale to Indians in the early 1800s. Native Americans also acquired other weapons as gifts or stole them. Over the years Indians became known for their ability to handle a gun on horseback, firing and reloading at full gallop. The Indian victory at Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876 (see Chapter 7), is often held up as the greatest display of Indians' ability with guns. By 1890 and the battle at Wounded Knee (see Chapter 7), Americans' possession of more advanced weaponry-in this case, the Hotchkiss guns that fired two-pound explosive shells-would end the days of Indians freely roaming the Plains.

The Texas pistol

Long before Wounded Knee, advancements in gun manufacturing gave Americans the advantage over Indian tribes in the West. One of the most revolutionary guns was the Colt revolver; inventor Samuel Colt (1814-1862) received a patent for a revolving pistol and revolving rifle in 1836. Unlike earlier muskets or rifles, revolvers could hold six shots. So many of Samuel Colt's guns were in Texas by 1839 that they became known as the "Texas pistol" or "Texas arm." In the early 1840s, Colt learned about machinery and the possibilities of mass production.

Colt made a deal with Eli Whitney, Jr. (son of the eighteenth-century inventor), to build machines that could produce weapons for a U.S. government contract Colt won in 1846. Though Colt lost money on his contract with the government to manufacture one thousand six-shooters, he retained Whitney's machines. Colt soon added more machines with the help of Elisha K. Root, an excellent mechanic who designed nearly four hundred machines to mass-produce Colt's guns. A visitor to their factory was fascinated by the new machines, as quoted by David Freeman Hawke in Nuts and Bolts of the Past: "Each portion of the firearm has its particular section. As we enter ... the first group of machines appears to be exclusively employed in chambering the cylinders; here another is boring barrels; another group is milling the lock frames; still another is drilling them; beyond are a score of machines boring and screwing the nipples.... Here are the rifling machines ... now we come to the jigging machines that mortice out the lock frames." These machines were faster than people, but they were not precise. Though Colt bragged about the uniformity of his gun parts, historian David Hounshell reported that the parts "did not come close to being interchangeable," according to Hawke.

Though Colt's guns were among the most popular in the West, he was not the first to mass-produce guns. Since the early 1800s at Harpers Ferry Armory, John Hall had been mass-producing guns with such precision that "if a thousand guns were taken apart and limbs thrown promiscuously [casually] together in one heap they may be taken promiscuously from the heap and will all come out right," according to Hawke in Nuts and Bolts of the Past. Historian Merritt Roe Smith pronounced Hall's advances in precision manufacturing to be "one of the great technological achievements of the modern era," according to Hawke. By the 1840s, many small manufacturers were producing muskets and rifles with inter-changeable parts.

Colt revolvers' ability to hold more than one shot was more important than interchangeability was in winning the West. Samuel Colt's 1849 .31-caliber pocket pistol became one of the most popular and longest-selling of his models. But the 1851 Navy Model and the 1860 Army Model, called "Navys" and "Armys," were to become the "standard sidearm out West till the advent of cartridge revolvers after the Civil War," according to Monaghan. Renowned explorer John C. Frémont (1813-1890) reportedly slept with two Colts near his head and a Colt rifle under his blanket. Famous scout Wild Bill Hickok (1837-1876) used a "Navy" Colt. The outcome of an Indian attack in 1841 confirmed the superiority of the revolvers. Frontiersman Kit Carson (1809-1868) and a small party used Colt Paterson eight-shot cylinder rifles and five- and six-shot Paterson revolvers to kill or wound about one hundred attacking Kiowa and Comanche warriors; Carson and his party lost only one man. In 1844 Colonel John Hays and fifteen Texas Rangers used Colt revolvers against an attack of eighty Comanche, killing forty-two of them. These and similar stories bolstered Colt's position in the marketplace.

Colt died in 1862. Root became president of the company but died three years later. By that time, the power of the gun had been firmly established in the West. Since then, technological advancements in weaponry have continued to influence territorial disputes around the world.

The Pony Express

When the United States was consolidated east of the Mississippi, communications between the states were fairly swift. But after the California gold rush drew many thousands of Americans westward, helping California become a state in 1850, it became extremely difficult to exchange mail and information with business associates, friends, and relatives who lived on the other side of the continent. There was simply no efficient way to get mail from one side of the country to the other. The railroads reached no farther than the Missouri River, and the telegraph lines stretched only to St. Joseph, Missouri. Ships that traveled around the tip of South America took six months to reach their destinations, though travelers who took the shortcut across the Isthmus of Panama might shorten the journey by a month. Overland travelers took nearly as long. Most people entrusted their mail to strangers, who promised that they would pass the mail on when they reached the other coast. By 1857, the Butterfield Overland Mail Company won a contract to carry U.S. mail on its stagecoaches traveling the overland trails, but the trip still took about twenty-five days. A better solution was needed.

By 1860, the country bubbled with the turmoil of the coming civil war. To keep the growing population of California abreast of the news, the country needed an express mail service. After a conversation with California senator William M. Gwin, William Russell persuaded his partners, Alexander Majors and William Waddell, to start a delivery service they called the Pony Express. Russell's ambitious plan was to deliver mail between Sacramento, California, and St. Joseph, Missouri, in ten days. Russell's partners were reluctant because they could see no way to make a profit from such an enterprise. Nevertheless, they agreed and quickly established a plan for the service to succeed.

In order for the Pony Express to deliver mail in ten days, it needed the fastest horses and the most committed riders. To beat the clock, riders would have to run their horses at top speed. But the horses tired quickly and had to be changed frequently. To supply fresh horses, the company built relay stations every 10 to 20 miles along the nearly 2,000-mile route. The riders would spend about two minutes at a station, just long enough to throw the mochila (the leather saddlebag that held the mail) over the back of a fresh horse and ride off again.

"Willing to risk death daily"

The route was difficult and dangerous. The riders spent long hours in the saddle and were sometimes threatened by hostile Indians, horse thieves, or unbearable heat or cold. Russell, Majors, and Waddell knew the kind of men they needed. Their help-wanted announcements read: "Wanted-young, skinny, wiry fellows not over eighteen. Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. Wages $25 per week." From the hundreds who applied, eighty were hired. William F. Cody (1846-1917) was the most famous of the riders. Cody joined the Pony Express when he was fourteen and holds the record for the longest ride without a break for sleep (384 miles). Cody later became famous as Buffalo Bill Cody, the leader of a traveling Wild West show.

Pony Express riders were admired for their skill and bravery. Many became local heroes when they reached towns. But even those who never saw a Pony Express rider were enthralled by the idea of men who would risk everything to speed the mail across the country. Writer Mark Twain (1835-1910) captured the public's fascination with the riders in Roughing It, which he wrote while traveling west by stagecoach:

We had a consuming desire from the beginning, to see a pony rider; but somehow or other all that passed us, and all that met us managed to streak by in the night and so we heard only a whiz and a hail, and the swift phantom of the desert was gone before we could get our heads out of the windows. But now we were expecting one along any moment, and would see him in broad daylight. Presently the driver exclaims:

"Here he comes!"

... [T]he flutter of hoofs comes faintly to the ear-another instant and a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck, a wave of the rider's hands but no reply and man and horse burst past our excited faces and winging away like the belated fragment of a storm!

So sudden is it all, and so like a flash of unreal fancy, that but for a flake of white foam left quivering and perishing on a mail sack after the vision had flashed by and disappeared, we might have doubted whether we had seen any actual horse and man at all, maybe.

The end of the Express

After just eighteen months of faithful service, the Pony Express became obsolete. With the transcontinental telegraph line completed on October 24, 1861, messages could reach the West Coast in minutes. But the Pony Express had captured the hearts of Americans and lives on today in the legends of the men who would brave any perils to deliver the mail. Through harsh conditions, the Pony Express completed 308 runs and delivered 34,753 letters, losing one rider and one mochila along the way. An article at the time in the Sacramento Daily Bee summed up the public sentiment toward the orders to discontinue the service:

Farewell and forever, thou staunch, wilderness-overcoming, swift-footed messenger. For the good thou hast done we praise thee; and, having run thy race, and accomplished all that was hoped for and expected, we can part with thy services without regret, because, and only because, in the progress of thy age, in the advance of science and by the enterprise of capital, thou hast been superseded by a more subtle, active, but no more faithful, public servant.

The telegraph

Also known as the "talking" or "singing" wire, the telegraph came to the United States in 1843, when Congress passed a bill enabling Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1872) to construct the first telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore. Morse had conceived of the telegraph much earlier, in 1832, and the first telegraph message was sent in 1838 after Morse coordinated his efforts with business associates Alfred Vail and Leonard Gale. The instant communication offered by Morse's system of wire taps (later called Morse code) inspired many entrepreneurs, who hastily built small local and regional telegraph systems. By 1851, fifty telegraph companies were operating in the United States. But by 1856, Hiram Sibley had begun consolidating the independent telegraph lines into his newly formed company, Western Union Telegraph Company. Between 1857 and 1861 other companies consolidated until the U.S. telegraph interests were held by only six systems.

By the beginning of the Civil War, commercial interests were keen to build a transcontinental telegraph line. To connect the eastern telegraph systems with the West, Congress passed the Telegraph Act of 1860, which granted the lowest bidder public lands and a yearly contract to operate a telegraph line connecting the East to San Francisco, California. Sibley won the contract and formed the Pacific Telegraph Company to start construction westward from Omaha, Nebraska, to Salt Lake City, Utah. Sibley sent his associate Jeptha H. Wade west to form the Overland Telegraph Company, which would handle construction eastward from Fort Churchill in the Nevada Territory (on the border of California) and extend the existing California lines to Salt Lake City. In July 1861, the Pacific Telegraph Company and the Overland Telegraph Company raised the first poles for the transcontinental telegraph line.

As the companies advanced, they set up new telegraph stations daily to keep in touch with Sacramento and Omaha. To bridge the distance not yet linked by wire, Western Union had made a special arrangement for Pony Express riders to carry messages between the two companies as they slowly worked toward each other.

By October 24, 1861, telegraphers sent the first message from San Francisco to Washington. The message from Chief Justice Stephen Field of California assured the recipient, President Abraham Lincoln, of California's loyalty to the Union. The New York Times is quoted in Seven Trails West as remarking that "the work of carrying westward the transcontinental telegraph line has progressed with so little blazonment [publicity], that it is with almost an electric thrill one reads the words of greeting yesterday flashed instantaneously over the wires from California." The coasts of the country, the article continued, are now "united by this noblest symbol of our modern civilization." Two days after that first message, the other U.S. express message service, the Pony Express, ended-a financial failure, but secure as a legendary part of conquering the West.

The stringing of telegraph wire across the country did not inspire the hero worship that the Pony Express riders did, but the telegraph was one of the most transforming technologies to influence the development of the West. The telegraph was the first American industry based on electricity and the first monopoly, and it turned a profit from the beginning. The telegraph's ability to send news from one coast to the other in a matter of minutes fostered the growth of news agencies and other commercial enterprises, and it revolutionized railroad operations. The telegraph remained one of the most important technologies in the development of social and commercial life in America until the emergence of the telephone and the radio in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Barbed wire

Barbed-wire fencing revolutionized the practice of raising cattle in the West. Fencing was not new to cattlemen; fencing in other parts of the country had typically been constructed from stones, tree trunks, or any surplus material left after clearing the land. But the western prairies, stretching from Texas north to Canada, didn't have surplus building material. The western prairies were the ultimate grazing ground for livestock, a natural rangeland with few trees or rocks. Since the government owned the prairies, the rangeland and water for the cattle were free. Thinking that traditional methods of fencing their herds would be too expensive and too difficult to maintain, cattlemen instead hired cowboys to help herd their animals across the prairies from the lush natural grasslands to water. A culture of long, cooperative cattle drives came to characterize the prairies as cowboys drove herds to market. But cheap, easy-to-install barbed wire would soon change ranching forever.

At the De Kalb County Fair of 1873, three men saw a piece of wood with bits of wire sticking out of it that Henry M. Rose had made to control a "breachy" cow (a cow that tries to escape): lumberman Jacob Haish; hardware merchant Isaac Leonard Ellwood; and farmer Joseph Farwell Glidden, a man worried about raising his crops without the security of good, strong fencing. Ellwood remembered the day in A History of De Kalb County, Illinois, noting that "all three of us stood looking at this invention of Mr. Rose's and I think that each one of us at that hour conceived the idea that barbs could be placed on the wire in some way instead of being driven into the strip of wood." With Glidden's wire stretcher and barbedwire design, which he patented in November 1874, farming on the prairie would soon change dramatically. Glidden and Ellwood became partners in The Barb Fence Company, and Haish became their first competitor with his own barbed-wire design. Their products were met with enthusiasm in the marketplace, and the barbed-wire industry grew rapidly.

The Barbed-Wire Industry

Figures from 1874 to 1880 show the growth of the barbed-wire industry.

The Homestead Act of 1862 and the railroads that came later moved many people onto the prairies. The cattle that had freely roamed the vast prairies were soon impeded by homesteaders (people who were granted ownership of land by living and working on it) who strung barbed fences around their newly acquired property. Sensing that their way of life was threatened, ranchers, who had up to this point worked out informal range rights among themselves, began to homestead as much property as they could. What they could not homestead they bought or leased. If they could not acquire the land, they sometimes fenced it anyway.

By the 1880s, cattlemen had realized that ringing their herds with barbed-wire fences allowed them to reduce their labor costs by employing fewer cowboys. It also gave them more control over their herds, keeping their prized bulls from wandering and impregnating competitors' cattle and allowing ranchers to rotate herds from pasture to pasture to prevent overgrazing. Barbed wire ended the old methods of ranching. Gone were the long trail drives that characterized the prairies from 1866 to 1880 (see Chapter 9). Cowboys no longer lived the rough-and-tumble life that fostered so many romantic visions. Instead of herding their boss's cattle over vast public prairie lands, they now worked more as traditional farmhands, drilling wells to provide water to pastures that did not border on streams and tending the fenced herds. The longhorn cattle, a hybrid of Spanish and British cattle, were soon bred out of existence as fencing was used to separate breeds and improve a cattleman's stock.

The Fence-Cutters War

As barbed wire changed the practice of ranching, conflicts erupted over its impact. Controversy over the improper and unfair use of barbed fencing provoked arguments over who had the right to use public lands. After erecting miles of fencing around public lands, the largest cattle-raising companies tried to secure leases to graze their animals on federal lands. By 1883, those opposed to fencing the open range had begun cutting barbed fences in a protest since labeled the fence-cutting wars (see Chapter 9). Texas ranchers were so evenly divided over the issue and so violent in their opinions that civil war seemed a real possibility. Texas governor John Ireland called out the Texas Rangers to protect the peace and held a special legislative session to solve the problem. Legislation regulating how and where fences could be erected on or near public lands curbed the fence cutting in Texas in 1884, and similar legislation soon eased tensions in other states. The impact of the laws was impressive: they ended the fence-cutting wars less than a year after the conflicts started and reinforced the patterns of ranching introduced by barbed-wire fencing. Nevertheless, the pain of the struggle was so great that fence cutting remained a felony in Texas at the end of the twentieth century.

Conclusion

Westward expansion would still have proceeded without the technological achievements described in this chapter, but it would have happened more slowly and in a very different way. Inventions helped determine the very shape of the West. The telegraph instantly connected Americans across thousands of miles; railroads killed some towns and gave birth to others; the gun quickly established the settlers' dominance over the country; and barbed wire created vast ranching empires. In the end, technology was one of many factors that contributed to the making of the American West.

For More Information

Books

Clifton, Robert T. Barbs, Prongs, Points, Prickers, and Stickers: A Complete and Illustrated Catalogue of Antique Barbed Wire. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970.

Moody, Ralph. Stagecoach West. New York: Crowell, 1967.

Voight, Virginia. Stagecoach Days and Stagecoach Kings. Champaign, IL: Garrard Publishing, 1970.

Webb, Walter Prescott. Great Plains. Boston: Ginn & Company, 1931.

West, Tom. Heroes on Horseback: The Story of the Pony Express. New York: Four Winds Press, 1969.

Web sites

Adventures of Wells Fargo. [Online] http://wellsfargo.com/about/stories/ (accessed April 14, 2000).

Everett, George. "Ex-Slave Mary Fields at Home in Montana Whether Working in a Convent or Managing a Mail Route." [Online] http://www.thehistorynet.com/WildWest/articles/02963_text.htm (accessed April 14, 2000).

The History of the Erie Canal. [Online] http://www.history.rochester.edu/canal/index.htm (accessed April 14, 2000).

Riding on the Overland Stage: Mark Twain's Account. [Online] http://www.ibiscom.com/stage.htm (accessed April 14, 2000).

The West: The Grandest Enterprise Under God, 1868-1874. [Online] http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/wpages/wpgs100/w150_001.htm (accessed April 14, 2000).

When the Pony Express Was in Vogue. [Online] http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist1/pxpress.html (accessed April 14, 2000).

Sources

Boies, Henry L. A History of DeKalb County, Illinois. Evansville, IA: Whipporwill Publications, 1987.

Bourne, Russell. Floating West: The Erie and Other American Canals. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.

Coe, Lewis. The Telegraph: A History of Morse's Invention and Its Predecessors in the United States. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1993.

Dale, Rodney. Early Railways. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Dicerto, Joseph J. The Pony Express: Hoofbeats in the Wilderness. New York: Franklin Watts, 1989.

Ferris, Robert G., series ed. Prospector, Cowhand, and Sodbuster: Historic Places Associated with the Mining, Ranching, and Farming Frontiers in the Trans-Mississippi West. Vol. 11. Washington, DC: United States Department of the Interior National Parks Service, 1967.

Hawke, David Freeman. Nuts and Bolts of the Past: A History of American Technology, 1776-1860. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

Hilton, Suzanne. Getting There: Frontier Travel without Power. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980.

Lauber, Patricia. Cowboys and Cattle Ranching Yesterday and Today. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973.

Laughlin, Rosemary. The Great Iron Link: The Building of the Central Pacific Railroad. Greensboro, NC: Morgan Reynolds, 1996.

McCallum, Henry D., and Frances T. McCallum. The Wire That Fenced the West. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965.

McNeese, Tim. America's Early Canals. New York: Crestwood House, 1993.

McNeese, Tim. America's First Railroads. New York: Crestwood House, 1993.

Monaghan, Jay. The Book of the American West. New York: Messner, 1963.

Peters, Arthur King. Seven Trails West. New York: Abbeville Press, 1996.

Rennert, Vincent Paul. Western Outlaws. New York: Crowell-Collier Press, 1968.

Thompson, George A. Throw Down the Box! Treasure and Tales from Gilmer and Salisbury the Western Stagecoach King. Salt Lake City, UT: Dream Garden Press, 1989.

Van Der Linde, Laurel. The Pony Express. New York: Macmillan, New Discovery Books, 1993.

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technology and the making of the westmoving west took daring and courage. people risked their lives to open the west to commerce and settlement

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braving harsh climatic and geologic conditions to cross the country and secure the land. technology helped ease some of the strain and

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and railroads made it possible for thousands of people to settle the west. securing the land often meant defending the chosen spot against indian attack; advances in gun design swayed the battles in favor of the white settlers.

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Technology and the Making of the West | Encyclopedia.com

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Technology and the Making of the WestMoving west took daring and courage. People risked their lives to open the West to commerce and settlement, braving harsh climatic and geologic conditions to cross the country and secure the land. Technology helped ease some of the strain and, in some cases, ensu…

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Native American Indian and the Westward Expansion of the United States

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Native American Indian and the Westward Expansion of the United States

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Sutter's Mill

On January 24, 1848, James Wilson Marshall, a carpenter originally from New Jersey, found flakes of gold in the American River at the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Coloma, California.

At the time, Marshall was working to build a water-powered sawmill owned by John Sutter, a German-born Swiss citizen and founder of a colony of Nueva Helvetia (New Switzerland, which would later become the city of Sacramento). As Marshall later recalled of his historic discovery: "It made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold."

Did you know? Miners extracted more than 750,000 pounds of gold during the California Gold Rush.

Days after Marshall's discovery at Sutter's Mill, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, ending the Mexican-American War and leaving California in the hands of the United States-a remarkable twist of fate with important ramifications for an America eager for westward expansion.

At the time, the population of the territory consisted of 6,500 Californios (people of Spanish or Mexican descent); 700 foreigners (primarily Americans); and 150,000 Native Americans (barely half the number that had been there when Spanish settlers arrived in 1769).

Sutter, in fact, had enslaved hundreds of Native Americans and used them as a free source of labor and makeshift militia to defend his territory and expand his empire.

Gold Fever Strikes

Though Marshall and Sutter tried to keep news of the discovery under wraps, word got out, and by mid-March at least one newspaper was reporting that large quantities of gold were being turned up at Sutter's Mill. Though the initial reaction in San Francisco was disbelief, storekeeper Sam Brannan set off a frenzy when he paraded through town displaying a vial of gold obtained from Sutter's Creek.

By mid-June, shops and businesses stood empty, as some three-quarters of the male population of San Francisco had abandoned the city for the gold mines, and the number of miners in the area ballooned to some 4,000 by August.

As news reports-many wildly overblown-of the easy fortunes being made in California spread worldwide, some of the first migrants to arrive were those from lands accessible by boat, such as Oregon, the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii), Mexico, Chile, Peru and China.

Polk Spreads Gold Fever

When the news reached the East Coast, press reports were initially skeptical. Gold fever kicked off nationwide in earnest, however, after December 1848, when President James K. Polk announced the positive results of a report made by Colonel Richard Mason, California's military governor, in his inaugural address.

As Polk wrote, "The accounts of abundance of gold are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service."

The '49ers Come to California

Throughout 1849, people around the United States (mostly men) with gold fever borrowed money, mortgaged their property or spent their life savings to make the arduous journey to California. In pursuit of the kind of wealth they had never dreamed of, they left their families and hometowns. In turn, women left behind took on new responsibilities such as running farms or businesses and caring for their children alone.

Thousands of would-be gold miners, known as 49ers for the year they arrived, traveled overland across the mountains or by sea, sailing to Panama or even around Cape Horn, the southernmost point of South America.

By the end of the year, the non-native population of California was estimated at 100,000, (as compared with 20,000 at the end of 1848 and around 800 in March 1848). To accommodate the needs of the 49ers, gold mining towns had sprung up all over the region, complete with shops, saloons, brothels and other businesses seeking to make their own Gold Rush fortune.

The overcrowded chaos of the mining camps and towns grew ever more lawless, including rampant banditry, gambling, alcoholism, prostitution and violence. San Francisco, for its part, developed a bustling economy and became the central metropolis of the new frontier.

Gold Rush Politics

The Gold Rush undoubtedly sped up California's admission to the Union as the 31st state. In late 1849, California applied to enter the Union with a constitution that barred the Southern system of racial slavery, provoking a crisis in Congress between proponents of slavery and anti-slavery politicians.

According to the Compromise of 1850, proposed by Kentucky's Senator Henry Clay, California was allowed to enter as a free state, while the territories of Utah and New Mexico were left to decide the legal status of slavery for themselves.

California's Mines

After 1850, the surface gold in California largely disappeared, even as miners continued to arrive. Mining had always been difficult and dangerous labor, and striking it rich required good luck as much as skill and hard work. Moreover, the average daily take for an independent miner working with his pick and shovel had by then sharply decreased from what it had been in 1848.

As gold became more and more difficult to reach, the growing industrialization of mining drove more and more miners from independence into wage labor. The new technique of hydraulic mining, developed in 1853, brought enormous profits but destroyed much of the region's landscape.

Though gold mining continued throughout the 1850s, it had reached its peak by 1852, when some $81 million was pulled from the ground. After that year, the total take declined gradually, leveling off to around $45 million per year by 1857. Settlement in California continued, however, and by the end of the decade the state's population was 380,000.

Impact of the Gold Rush

New mining methods and the population boom in the wake of the California Gold Rush permanently altered the landscape of California. The technique of hydraulic mining brought enormous profits but destroyed much of the region's landscape.

Dams designed to supply water to mine sites in summer altered the course of rivers away from farmland, while sediment from mines clogged others. The logging industry in the area was born from the need to construct extensive canals and feed boilers at mines, further consuming natural resources.

In 1884, hydraulic mining was outlawed by court order, and soon agriculture became the dominant industry in California, and it remains so today. While a few mines and Gold Rush towns remain, much of the heritage of that era is preserved at places such as Bodie State Historic Park, a decaying ghost town, and at Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park, where Sutter's Mill once stood.

Sources

Environmental Impact of the Gold Rush. Calisphere.org.
After the Gold Rush. National Geographic.

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Gold Rush: California, Date & Sutter's Mill - HISTORY

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The Gold Rush in California started in 1848 after gold was found at Sutter's Mill. Within a year, hundreds of thousands of 49ers seeking fortune poured into the state.

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Spanish:

Guerra de 1847 or Guerra de Estados Unidos a Mexico ("War of the United States Against Mexico")

What was the Mexican-American War?

What did the Mexican-American War have to do with Manifest Destiny?

Was there opposition to the Mexican-American War within the United States?

What did the U.S. gain by winning the Mexican-American War?

How did the Mexican-American War increase sectionalism in the United States?

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Mexican-American War, war between the United States and Mexico (April 1846-February 1848) stemming from the United States' annexation of Texas in 1845 and from a dispute over whether Texas ended at the Nueces River (Mexican claim) or the Rio Grande (U.S. claim). The war-in which U.S. forces were consistently victorious-resulted in the United States' acquisition of more than 500,000 square miles (1,300,000 square km) of Mexican territory extending westward from the Rio Grande to the Pacific Ocean.

"American blood on American soil": Polk and the prelude to war

Mexico severed relations with the United States in March 1845, shortly after the U.S. annexation of Texas. In September U.S. Pres. James K. Polk sent John Slidell on a secret mission to Mexico City to negotiate the disputed Texas border, settle U.S. claims against Mexico, and purchase New Mexico and California for up to $30 million. Mexican Pres. José Joaquín Herrera, aware in advance of Slidell's intention of dismembering the country, refused to receive him. When Polk learned of the snub, he ordered troops under Gen. Zachary Taylor to occupy the disputed area between the Nueces and the Rio Grande (January 1846).

On May 9, 1846, Polk began to prepare a war message to Congress, justifying hostilities on the grounds of Mexican refusal to pay U.S. claims and refusal to negotiate with Slidell. That evening he received word that Mexican troops had crossed the Rio Grande on April 25 and attacked Taylor 's troops, killing or injuring 16 of them. In his quickly revised war message-delivered to Congress on May 11-Polk claimed that Mexico had "invaded our territory and shed American blood on American soil."

Spot Resolutions and Civil Disobedience: American opposition to the war

Congress overwhelmingly approved a declaration of war on May 13, but the United States entered the war divided. Democrats, especially those in the Southwest, strongly favoured the conflict. Most Whigs viewed Polk's motives as conscienceless land grabbing. Indeed, from the outset, Whigs in both the Senate and the House challenged the veracity of Polk's assertion that the initial conflict between U.S. and Mexican forces had taken place in U.S. territory. Further, legislators were at odds over whether Polk had the right to unilaterally declare that a state of war existed. Principally at issue was where the encounter had actually taken place and the willingness of Americans to acknowledge the Mexican contention that the Nueces River formed the border between the two countries. Active Whig opposition not only to the legitimacy of Polk's claim but also to the war itself continued well into the conflict. In December 1846 Polk accused his Whig doubters of treason. In January 1847 the by-then Whig-controlled House voted 85 to 81 to censure Polk for having "unnecessarily and unconstitutionally" initiated war with Mexico.

Among the most-aggressive challenges to the legitimacy of Polk's casus belli was that offered by future president Abraham Lincoln, then a first-term member of the House of Representatives from Illinois. In December 1847 Lincoln introduced eight " Spot Resolutions," which placed the analysis of Polk's claim in a carefully delineated historical context that sought to

obtain a full knowledge of all the facts which go to establish whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens was so shed was, or was not, our own soil at that time.

Ultimately, the House did not act on Lincoln's resolutions, and Polk remained steadfast in his claim that the conflict was a just war.

Abolitionists saw the war as an attempt by the slave states to extend slavery and enhance their power with the creation of additional slave states out of the soon-to-be-acquired Mexican lands. One abolitionist who agreed with that interpretation was author Henry David Thoreau, who was incarcerated in July 1846 when he refused to pay six years' worth of back poll taxes because he felt the U.S. government's prosecution of the war with Mexico was immoral. Although he spent only a single night in jail (his aunt, against his wishes, paid the taxes, thus securing his release), Thoreau documented his opposition to the government's actions in his famous book-length essay Civil Disobedience (1849), insisting that if an injustice of government is

of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.

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Mexican-American War | Significance, Battles, Results, Timeline, & Facts

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Mexican-American War, war between the U.S. and Mexico from 1846 to 1848. It was caused by a territorial dispute stemming from the United States' annexation of Texas in 1845 and from contention over whether Texas ended at the Nueces River or the Rio Grande.

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A look at Jefferson's role in the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the young American republic.

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About the Homestead Act - Homestead National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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About the Homestead Act - Homestead National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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A homesteader had to be the head of a household or at least 21 years of age to claim a 160 acre parcel of land. Settlers from all walks of life worked to meet the challenge of "proving up". They included immigrants, farmers without land of their own, single women, and formerly enslaved people.

A filing fee was the only money required, but sacrifice and hard work exacted a different price from the hopeful settlers. Each homesteader had to live on the land, build a home, make improvements and farm to get the land. The patent they received represented the culmination of hard work and determination. Nearly four million homesteaders settled land across 30 states over 123 years.

The Homestead Act of 1862 allowed anyone over 21 years of age or the head of a household to apply for free federal land with two simple stipulations:

1. Be a citizen of the United States or legally declare their intent to become one

2. Did not fight against the United States or aid enemies of the United States

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About the Homestead Act - Homestead National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

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A homesteader had to be the head of a household or at least 21 years of age to claim a 160 acre parcel of land. Settlers from all walks of life worked to meet the challenge of "proving up". They included immigrants, farmers without land of their own, single women, and formerly enslaved people.

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Transcontinental Railroad | Construction, Competition, and Impact

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Transcontinental Railroad | Construction, Competition, and Impact

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Transcontinental Railroad ‑ Construction, Competition & Impact

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In 1862, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific Railroad Companies began building a transcontinental railroad that would link the United States from east to west. Over the next seven years, the two companies raced toward each other from Sacramento, California on the one side to Omaha, Nebraska on the other, struggling against great risks before they met at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869.

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What factors, forces or reasons cause people to move from one geographic area to another? The first people to live in what we now call Iowa may have arrived some 8,000-10,000 years ago. They lived along the edges of the receding glaciers and hunted large game animals.

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California Gold Rush | Definition, History, & Facts

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California Gold Rush | Definition, History, & Facts

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California Gold Rush, rapid influx of fortune seekers in California that began after gold was found at Sutter's Mill in early 1848 and reached its peak in 1852. According to estimates, more than 300,000 people came to the territory during the Gold Rush.

In 1848 John Sutter was having a water-powered sawmill built along the American River in Coloma, California, approximately 50 miles (80 km) east of present-day Sacramento. On January 24 his carpenter, James W. Marshall, found flakes of gold in a streambed. Sutter and Marshall agreed to become partners and tried to keep their find a secret. News of the discovery, however, soon spread, and they were besieged by thousands of fortune seekers. (With his property overrun and his goods and livestock stolen or destroyed, Sutter was bankrupt by 1852.) From the East, prospectors sailed around Cape Horn or risked disease hiking across the Isthmus of Panama. The hardiest took the 2,000-mile (3,220-km) overland route, on which cholera proved a far greater killer than the Native Americans. By August 1848, 4,000 gold miners were in the area, and within a year about 80,000 "forty-niners" (as the fortune seekers of 1849 were called) had arrived at the California goldfields. By 1853 their numbers had grown to 250,000. Although it was estimated that some $2 billion in gold was extracted, few of the prospectors struck it rich. The work was hard, prices were high, and living conditions were primitive.

In what was a typical pattern, the Gold Rush slackened as the most-workable deposits were exhausted and organized capital and machinery replaced the efforts of individual miner-adventurers with more efficient and businesslike operations. Likewise, the lawless and violent mining camps gave way to permanent settlements with organized government and law enforcement. Those settlements that lacked other viable economic activities soon became ghost towns after the gold was exhausted. The California Gold Rush peaked in 1852, and by the end of the decade, it was over.

The Gold Rush had a profound impact on California, dramatically changing its demographics. Before the discovery of gold, the territory's population was approximately 160,000, the vast majority of whom were Native Americans. By about 1855, more than 300,000 people had arrived. Most were Americans, though a number of settlers also came from China, Europe, and South America. The massive influx gave rise to numerous cities and towns, with San Francisco gaining particular prominence. The Gold Rush was credited with hastening statehood for California in 1850.

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California Gold Rush | Definition, History, & Facts

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Overview of the California Gold Rush, the rapid influx of fortune seekers in California that began after gold was found at Sutter's Mill on the American River in early 1848. The Gold Rush reached its peak in 1852. According to estimates, more than 300,000 people came to the territory during the Gold Rush.

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Table of Contents

1. France in the New World

2. Louisiana Territory Changes Hands

3. Louisiana Purchase Negotiations

4. Legacy of the Louisiana Purchase

The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 brought into the United States about 828,000 square miles of territory from France, thereby doubling the size of the young republic. What was known at the time as the Louisiana Territory stretched from the Mississippi River in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west and from the Gulf of Mexico in the south to the Canadian border in the north. Part or all of 15 states were eventually created from the land deal, which is considered one of the most important achievements of Thomas Jefferson's presidency.

France in the New World

Beginning in the 17th century, France explored the Mississippi River valley and established scattered settlements in the region.

By the middle of the 18th century, France controlled more of the present-day United States than any other European power: from New Orleans northeast to the Great Lakes and northwest to modern-day Montana.

In 1762, during the French and Indian War, France ceded French Louisiana west of the Mississippi River to Spain and in 1763 transferred nearly all of its remaining North American holdings to Great Britain. Spain, no longer a dominant European power, did little to develop Louisiana during the next three decades.

Louisiana Territory Changes Hands

In 1796, Spain allied itself with France, leading Britain to use its powerful navy to cut off Spain from America. And in 1801, Spain signed a secret treaty with France to return the Louisiana Territory to France.

Reports of the retrocession caused considerable unease in the United States. Since the late 1780s, Americans had been moving westward into the Ohio River and Tennessee River valleys, and these settlers were highly dependent on free access to the Mississippi River and the strategic port of New Orleans.

U.S. officials feared that France, resurgent under the leadership of Napoleon Bonaparte, would soon seek to dominate the Mississippi River and access to the Gulf of Mexico. In a letter to U.S. minister to France Robert Livingston, President Thomas Jefferson stated, "The day that France takes possession of New Orleans...we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation."

Livingston was ordered to negotiate with French Finance Minister Barbé-Marbois for the purchase of New Orleans.

Louisiana Purchase Negotiations

France was slow in taking control of Louisiana, but in 1802 Spanish authorities, apparently acting under French orders, revoked a U.S.-Spanish treaty that granted Americans the right to store goods in New Orleans.

In response, Jefferson sent future U.S. president James Monroe to Paris to aid Livingston in the New Orleans purchase talks. In mid-April 1803, shortly before Monroe's arrival, the French asked a surprised Livingston if the United States was interested in purchasing all of Louisiana Territory.

It's believed that the failure of France to put down a slave revolution in Haiti, the impending war with Great Britain and probable British naval blockade of France - combined with French economic difficulties - may have prompted Napoleon to offer Louisiana for sale to the United States.

Negotiations moved swiftly, and at the end of April the U.S. envoys agreed to pay $11,250,000 and assume claims of American citizens against France in the amount of $3,750,000. In exchange, the United States acquired the vast domain of Louisiana Territory, some 828,000 square miles of land.

The treaty was dated April 30 and signed on May 2. In October, the U.S. Senate ratified the purchase, and in December 1803 France transferred authority over the region to the United States.

Legacy of the Louisiana Purchase

The acquisition of the Louisiana Territory for the bargain price of less than three cents an acre was among Jefferson's most notable achievements as president. American expansion westward into the new lands began immediately, and in 1804 a territorial government was established.

Jefferson soon commissioned the Lewis and Clark Expedition, led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, to explore the territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase.

On April 30, 1812, exactly nine years after the Louisiana Purchase agreement was made, the first state to be carved from the territory - Louisiana - was admitted into the Union as the 18th U.S. state.
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Louisiana Purchase - Definition, Facts & Importance | HISTORY

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The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 introduced about 828,000,000 square miles of territory from France into the United States, thereby doubling the size of the young republic. Explore the facts about this important acquisition and its lasting legacy on Thomas Jefferson's presidency.

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What Was the Homestead Act?

In a July 4, 1861, speech, Lincoln told the nation the purpose of America's government was "to elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial burdens from all shoulders and to give everyone an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life."

He followed through with the passage of the Homestead Act, which remained active for 124 years until it was repealed in 1976, and resulted in 10 percent of U.S. land-or 270 million acres-to be claimed and settled.

The incentive to move and settle on Western territory was open to all U.S. citizens, or intended citizens, and resulted in 4 million homestead claims, although 1.6 million deeds in 30 states were actually officially obtained. Montana, followed by North Dakota, Colorado and Nebraska had the most successful claims.

But to achieve this, thousands of Native Americans were forced from their lands and onto Indian reservations to make way for homesteaders.

During a speech made in Ohio in February 1861, Lincoln said the act was "worthy of consideration, and that the wild lands of the country should be distributed so that every man should have the means and opportunity of benefiting his condition."

After it passed Congress, Lincoln signed the Homestead Act into law on May 20, 1862.

Requirements of the Homestead Act

To make a claim, homesteaders paid a filing fee of $18: a $10 fee to make a temporary claim on the land, $2 for commission to the land agent and an additional $6 final payment to receive an official patent on the land. Land titles could also be purchased from the government for $1.25 per acre following six months of proven residency.

Additional requirements included five years of continuous residence on the land, building a home on it, farming the land and making improvements. Homesteaders, who had to be the head of a household or 21 years of age and had to certify they had never borne arms against the United States, also needed two neighbors or friends to attest to the government that they had fulfilled the requirements. Union soldiers could shave off time served in the Civil War from the five-year residency requirement.
WATCH: Matthew Pinsker on the Homestead Act
Land Speculators and the Homestead Act

Of course, there were those who took advantage of homesteading. According to the National Archives, a limited number of farmers and laborers could afford to build a farm, which included access to tools, crops, livestock and more.

"In the end, most of those who purchased land under the act came from areas quite close to their new homesteads (Iowans moved to Nebraska, Minnesotans to South Dakota, and so on)," the agency states. "Unfortunately, the act was framed so ambiguously that it seemed to invite fraud, and early modifications by Congress only compounded the problem. Most of the land went to speculators, cattlemen, miners, lumbermen, and railroads."

Other loopholes included building the required 12-by-14 dwelling in inches, rather than feet, since the exact measurement wasn't specified. A shortage of investigators also allowed false claims to be approved. And unpredictable weather, water shortages and remoteness led many homesteaders to abandon their claims well before the five-year mark.

But with improvements in rail lines and growing populations, new towns and states were created. "One hundred years ago the Congress passed the Homestead Act," President John F. Kennedy said in his message on conservation, sent to Congress in 1962, "probably the single greatest stimulus to national development ever enacted."

Repeal of the Homestead Act

Homesteading virtually came to a screeching halt with the enactment of the Taylor Grazing Act, signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934, which regulated grazing on federal public lands and authorized the U.S. Secretary of the Interior to apportion grazing districts.

In 1976, the Homestead Act was repealed with the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which stated "public lands be retained in Federal ownership." The act authorized the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to manage federal lands. Homesteading was still allowed for another decade in Alaska, until 1986.

In 1974, a Vietnam War veteran and native of California named Kenneth Deardorff filed a homestead claim on 80 acres of land on the Stony River in southwestern Alaska. After fulfilling all the requirements of the act and living and working on the land for over a decade, Deardorff received his patent in May 1988. He was the last person to receive the title to land claimed under the Civil War-era act.

Today, the Homestead National Historical Park outside Beatrice, Nebraska, commemorates the Homestead Act. Why the tiny midwest town? That's where Daniel Freeman, deemed the first homesteader to file a claim (on Jan. 1, 1863) by the Department of the Interior, established his homestead site.

Sources

Homestead Act (1862). National Archives.
Homestead Act: Primary Documents in American History. Library of Congress.
Landmark Legislation: The Homestead Act of 1862. United States Senate.
FREE LAND was the Cry! Homestead National Historical Park. National Park Service.

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Homestead Act: 1862 Date & Definition - HISTORY

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In a July 4, 1861, speech, Lincoln told the nation the purpose of America's government was "to elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial burdens from all shoulders and to give everyone an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life."

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10 Ways the Transcontinental Railroad Changed America

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10 Ways the Transcontinental Railroad Changed America

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There was a time when traveling from the East Coast to the West Coast meant riding for months in a horse-drawn wagon or stagecoach, or sailing southward to Panama and then crossing the Isthmus to board another ship for a journey up the other coast. But that all changed on May 10, 1869, when railroad baron Leland Stanford whacked in a ceremonial gold spike to mark the joining together of the tracks of the Central Pacific Railroad and the Union Pacific Railroad in Promontory, Utah, to form the transcontinental railroad. The new rail connection eventually made it possible to travel in a train car from New York to San Francisco in just a week's time.

Some 21,000 workers-from Irish-American Civil War veterans, freed slaves and Mormon pioneers to Chinese laborers-had been recruited to perform the hard and often dangerous work of laying the 1,776 miles of track. By one estimate, the project cost roughly $60 million, about $1.2 billion in today's money, though other sources put the amount even higher.

While the railroad's construction was a mammoth undertaking, its effects on the country were equally profound. Here are some of the ways that the first transcontinental railroad-and the many other transcontinental lines that followed it-changed America.

1. It made the Western U.S. more important.

"What the transcontinental railroad did was bring the West into the world, and the world into the West," explains James P. Ronda, a retired University of Tulsa history professor and co-author, with Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes, of The West the Railroads Made. In particular, it helped turn California from a once-isolated place to a major economic and political force and helped lead to the state's rapid growth.

2. It made commerce possible on a vast scale.

By 1880, the transcontinental railroad was transporting $50 million worth of freight each year. In addition to transporting western food crops and raw materials to East Coast markets and manufactured goods from East Coast cities to the West Coast, the railroad also facilitated international trade.

The first freight train to travel eastward from California carried a load of Japanese tea. "The Constitution provided the legal framework for a single national market for trade goods; the transcontinental railroad provided the physical framework," explains Henry W. Brands, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West. "Together they gave the United States the single largest market in the world, which provided the basis for the rapid expansion of American industry and agriculture to the point where the U.S. by the 1890s had the most powerful economy on the planet."

3. It made travel more affordable.

In the 1860s, a six-month stagecoach trip across the U.S. cost $1,000 (about $20,000 in today's dollars), according to the University of Houston's Digital History website. But once the railroad was built, the cost of a coast-to-coast trip became 85 percent less expensive. That made it possible for Americans to visit distant locales that previously they might only have heard about.

4. It changed where Americans lived.

During the railroad's construction, numerous temporary "hell on wheels" towns of tents and wooden shacks sprung up along the route to provide living quarters for workers. Most of them eventually disappeared, but others, such as Laramie, Wyoming, evolved into towns that provided rail terminals and repair facilities.

Approximately 7,000 cities and towns across the country began as Union Pacific depots and water stops. And, as Ronda notes, the first transcontinental railroad and the other lines that followed made it easy for immigrants to spread across the nation. "People come across the Atlantic on ships, get on trains, and end up in places such as western Nebraska," he says.

5. It altered Americans' concept of reality.

In an 1872 article, naturalist John Muir wrote that the transcontinental railroad "annihilated" time and space. As Ronda explains, it changed the way that people viewed distances. "When you're walking or riding a horse, you experience the world one way, but when you're sitting in a railroad car, you see it differently," he says. "In the West, where the distances are so great, the railroad brought near and far closer together." The railroad schedules also helped to push the United States into changing how it marked time, leading to the adoption of standard time zones in 1883.

6. It helped create the Victorian version of Amazon.

In 1872, just a few years after the transcontinental railroad's completion, Aaron Montgomery Ward started the first mail-order catalog business. As Ronda notes, the first transcontinental railroad-and other transcontinental lines that followed-made it possible to sell products far and wide without a physical storefront, and enabled people all over the country to furnish their homes and keep up with the latest fashion trends.

7. It took a heavy toll on the environment.

The massive amount of wood needed to build the railroad, including railroad ties, support beams for tunnels and bridges, and sheds, necessitated cutting down thousands of trees, which devastated western forests. Towns and cities that sprung up along the railroad further encroached upon what had been wild areas. And the railroad and other rail routes that followed made it easy for large numbers of hunters to travel westward and kill millions of buffalo. That slaughter impacted Native Americans, who had hunted buffalo in moderation, and weakened their resistance to settlement of the west.

8. It increased racial conflicts.

The completion of the transcontinental railroad led to heightened racial tensions in California, as white workers from the East Coast and Europe could more easily travel westward where immigrant laborers were prevalent, says Princeton University Assistant Professor of History Beth Lew-Williams, author of The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America.

Upon completion of the railroad, many Chinese workers returned to California in search of employment. "The flood of goods and laborers who arrived in the West, combined with the boom and bust economy of the late-19th century, put pressure on the labor market," she says. "The presence of Chinese immigrants did not create the economic uncertainties of the 1870s, but they were often blamed nonetheless."

Growing prejudice against and fear of the Chinese eventually manifested itself in Congress' passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first of several laws that blocked Chinese laborers from entering the United States until 1943.

9. It pioneered government-financed capitalism.

The Central Pacific's "Big Four"-Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker-figured out how to tap into government coffers to finance a business that otherwise wouldn't have been possible. As Richard White, author of Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, says, "They put little of their own money in it -they didn't have much. It was built on land grants, government loans, and government-guaranteed bonds. When their loans came due, they refused to pay and the government had to sue. In effect, they stumbled into a business model where the public takes the risk and those taking the subsidies reap the gain."

Other entrepreneurs and industries would follow the Big Four's lead in tapping government help to build their businesses.

10. It instilled national confidence.

The transcontinental railroad had a major effect on how Americans perceived their nation, and it became a symbol of America's growing industrial power and a source of confidence that led them to take on even more ambitious quests. As Ronda says, "It's one of the transformative moments in American history."

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10 Ways the Transcontinental Railroad Changed America | HISTORY

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The country, from its commerce to the environment to even its concept of time, was profoundly altered after the 1869 completion of the railroad's 1,776 miles of track.

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Westward Expansion in U. S. History 2

The massive migration westward, spurred by the discovery of gold in California in 1849, increased after the Civil War with advances in transportation such as the Transcontinental Railroad, in technologies that enabled the settlement of the Great Plains, and new discoveries of gold and silver. While this created new opportunities for many, it also led to coflict, as settlers and Native Americans competed for territory and resources

Union Pacific Railroad Museum Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum Golden Spike National Historic Site California State Railroad Museum National Westward Expansion Museum at the Gateway PBS Webpage on the Ghost Dance and the Battle of Wounded Knee (this page contains the script for a segment from the PBS series The West we used to watch in class but is not longer available online During the nineteenth century, people's perceptions and use of the Great Plains changed. Technological advances allowed people to live in more challenging environments Physical features and climate of the Great Plains * Flatlands that rise gradually from east to west * Land eroded by wind and water * Low rainfall * Frequent dust storms Because of new technologies, people saw the Great Plains not as a "treeless wasteland" but as a vast area to be settled. Inventions * Barbed wire * Steel plows * Windmills * Railroads Adaptations * Dry farming * Sod houses * Beef cattle * Wheat farming Advances in transportation linked resources, products, and markets. Manufacturing areas were clustered near centers of population. Transportation resources * Moving natural resources to eastern factories (e.g., iron ore to steel mills) * Transporting finished products to national markets * Locating factories near rivers and railroads to move resources and finished goods to markets Examples of manufacturing areas * Textile industry: New England * Automobile industry: Detroit * Steel industry: Pittsburgh * Meatpacking industry: Chicago New opportunities and technological advances led to westward migration following the Civil War. Westward expansion had an impact on the lifestyle of American Indians. Reasons for increase in westward expansion * Opportunities for land ownership * Technological advances, including the Transcontinental Railroad * Possibility of obtaining wealth, created by the discovery of gold and silver * Desire for adventure * Desire for a new beginning for former enslaved African Americans Impact on American Indians * Opposition by American Indians to westward expansion (Battle of Little Bighorn, Geronimo) * Forced relocation from traditional lands to reservations (Chief Joseph, Nez Percé, Sitting Bull) * Reduced population through warfare (Battle of Wounded Knee), disease, and reduced buffalo population * Assimilation attempts and lifestyle changes (American Indian boarding schools, Dawes Act) * Reduced American Indian homelands through broken treaties

U.S. Mapping Games:

Looking for the physical regions of

North America from the Virgina

Standards of Learning for U. S.

History I?

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The massive migration westward, spurred by the discovery of gold in California in 1849, increased after the Civil War with advances in transportation such as the Transcontinental Railroad, in technologies that enabled the settlement of the Great Plains, and new discoveries of gold and silver.

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Courtesy of State Historical Society of Iowa, Catlin, George, Date Unknown

Description

The map shows American Indian tribe locations as of 1833. The map was created by George Catlin, an American painter who specialized in portraits of Native Americans in the Old West.

Source-Dependent Question

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Outline Map of Indian Localities of 1833, Date Unknown

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The map shows American Indian tribe locations as of 1833. The map was created by George Catlin, an American painter who specialized in portraits of Native Americans in the Old West. Source-Dependent Question

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The California Gold Rush | American Experience | PBS

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The California Gold Rush | American Experience | PBS

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The California Gold Rush | American Experience | PBS

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The discovery of gold in1848 unleashed the largest migration in United States history and drew people from a dozen countries to form a multi-ethnic society in California.

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What Was the Mexican-American War? | History

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What Was the Mexican-American War? | History

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What Was the Mexican-American War? | History

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How the Louisiana Purchase Changed the World

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How the Louisiana Purchase Changed the World

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UNDERSTANDABLY, Pierre Clément de Laussat was saddened by this unexpected turn of events. Having arrived in New Orleans from Paris with his wife and three daughters just nine months earlier, in March 1803, the cultivated, worldly French functionary had expected to reign for six or eight years as colonial prefect over the vast territory of Louisiana, which was to be France's North American empire. The prospect had been all the more pleasing because the territory's capital, New Orleans, he had noted with approval, was a city with "a great deal of social life, elegance and goodbreeding." He also had liked the fact that the city had "all sorts of masters-dancing, music, art, and fencing," and that even though there were "no book shops or libraries," books could be ordered from France.

But almost before Laussat had learned to appreciate a good gumbo and the relaxed Creole pace of life, Napoléon Bonaparte had abruptly decided to sell the territory to the United States. This left Laussat with little to do but officiate when, on a sunny December 20, 1803, the French tricolor was slowly lowered in New Orleans' main square, the Placed'Armes, and the American flag was raised. After William C.C. Claiborne and Gen. James Wilkinson, the new commissioners of the territory, officially took possession of it in the name of the United States, assuring all residents that their property, rights and religion would be respected, celebratory salvos boomed from the forts around the city. Americans cried "Huzzah!" and waved their hats, while French and Spanish residents sulked in glum silence. Laussat, standing on the balcony of the town hall, burst into tears.

The Louisiana Purchase, made 200 years ago this month, nearly doubled the size of the United States. By any measure, it was one of the most colossal land transactions in history, involving an area larger than today's France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, Holland, Switzerland and the British Isles combined. All or parts of 15 Western states would eventually be carved from its nearly 830,000 square miles, which stretched from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, and from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. And the price, $15 million, or about four cents an acre, was a breathtaking bargain. "Let the Land rejoice," Gen. Horatio Gates, a prominent New York state legislator, told President Thomas Jefferson when details of the deal reached Washington, D.C. "For you have bought Louisiana for a song."

Rich in gold, silver and other ores, as well as huge forests and endless lands for grazing and farming, the new acquisition would make America immensely wealthy. Or, as Jefferson put it in his usual understated way, "The fertility of thecountry, its climate and extent, promise in due season importantaids to our treasury, an ample provision for our posterity, and a wide-spread field for the blessings of freedom."

American historians today are more outspoken in their enthusiasm for the acquisition. "With the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, this is one of the threethings that created the modern United States," says Douglas Brinkley, director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies in New Orleans and coauthor with the late Stephen E. Ambrose of The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation. Charles A. Cerami, author of Jefferson's Great Gamble, agrees. "If we had not made this purchase, it would have pinched off the possibility of our becoming a continental power," he says. "That, in turn, would have meant our ideas on freedom and democracy would have carried less weight with the rest of the world. This was the key to our international influence."

The bicentennial is being celebrated with yearlong activities in many of the states fashioned from the territory. But the focal point of the celebrations is Louisiana itself. The most ambitious event opens this month at the New Orleans Museum of Art. "Jefferson's America & Napoléon's France" (April 12-August 31), an unprecedented exhibition of paintings, sculptures, decorative arts, memorabilia and rare documents, presents a dazzling look at the arts and leading figures of the two countries at this pivotal time in history. "What we wanted to do was enrich people's understanding of the significance of this moment," says Gail Feigenbaum, lead curator of the show. "It's about more than just a humdinger of a real estate deal. What kind of world were Jefferson and Napoléon living and working in? We also show that our political and cultural relationship with France was extraordinarily rich at the time, a spirited interchange that altered the shape of the modern world."

The "Louisiana territory" was born on April 9, 1682, when the French explorer Robert Cavelier, Sieur (Lord) de La Salle, erected a cross and column near the mouth of the Mississippi and solemnly read a declaration to a group of bemused Indians. He took possession of the whole Mississippi River basin, he avowed, in the name of "the most high, mighty, invincible and victorious Prince, Louis the Great, by Grace of God king of France and Navarre, 14th of that name." And it was in honor of Louis XIV that he named the land Louisiana.

In 1718, French explorer Jean-Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, founded a settlement near the site of La Salle's proclamation, and named it la Nouvelle Orléans for Philippe, Duke of Orléans and Regent of France. By the time of the Louisiana Purchase, its population of whites, slaves of African origin and "free persons of color" was about 8,000. A picturesque assemblage of French and Spanish colonial architecture and Creole cottages, New Orleans boasted a thriving economy based largely on agricultural exports.

For more than a century after La Salle took possession of it, the Louisiana Territory, with its scattered French, Spanish, Acadian and German settlements, along with those of Native Americans and American-born frontiersmen, was traded among European royalty at their whim. The French were fascinated by America-which they often symbolized in paintings and drawings as a befeathered Noble Savage standing beside an alligator-but they could not decide whether it was a new Eden or, as the naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon declared, a primitive place fit only for degenerate life-forms. But the official view was summed up by Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac, whom Louis XIV named governor of the territory in 1710: "The people are aheap of the dregs of Canada," he sniffed in a 42-page report to the king written soon after he arrived. The soldiers there were untrained and undisciplined, he lamented, and the whole colony was "not worth a straw at the present time." Concluding that the area was valueless, Louis XV gave the territory to his Bourbon cousin Charles III of Spain in 1763. But in 1800, the region again changed hands, when Napoléon negotiated the clandestine Treaty of San Ildefonso with Spain's Charles IV. The treaty called for the return of the vast territory to France in exchange for the small kingdom of Etruria in northern Italy, which Charles wanted for his daughter Louisetta.

When Jefferson heard rumors of Napoléon's secret deal, he immediately saw the threat to America's Western settlements and its vital outlet to the Gulf of Mexico. If the deal was allowed to stand, he declared, "it would be impossible that France and the United States can continue long as friends." Relations had been relaxed with Spain while it held New Orleans, but Jefferson suspected that Napoléon wanted to close the Mississippi to American use. This must have been a wrenching moment for Jefferson, who had long been a Francophile. Twelve years before, he had returned from a five-year stint as American minister to Paris, shipping home 86 cases of furnishings and books he had picked up there.

The crunch came for Jefferson in October 1802. Spain's King Charles IV finally got around to signing the royal decree officially transferring the territory to France, and on October 16, the Spanish administrator in New Orleans, Juan Ventura Morales, who had agreed to administer the colony until his French replacement, Laussat, could arrive, arbitrarily ended the American right to deposit cargo in the city duty-free. He argued that the three-year term of the 1795 treaty that had granted America this right and free passage through Spanish territory on the Mississippi had expired. Morales' proclamation meant that American merchandise could no longer be stored in New Orleans warehouses. As a result, trappers' pelts, agricultural produce and finished goods risked exposure and theft on open wharfs while awaiting shipment to the East Coast and beyond. The entire economy of America's Western territories was in jeopardy. "The difficulties and risks . . . are incalculable," warned the U.S. vice-consul in New Orleans, Williams E. Hulings, in a dispatch to Secretary of State James Madison.

As Jefferson had written in April 1802 to the U.S. minister in Paris, Robert R. Livingston, it was crucial that the port of New Orleans remain open and free for American commerce, particularly the goods coming down the Mississippi River. "There is on the globe one single spot," Jefferson wrote, "the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market." Jefferson's concern was more than commercial. "He had a vision of America as an empire of liberty," says Douglas Brinkley. "And he saw the Mississippi River not as the western edge of the country, but as the great spine that would hold the continent together."

As it was, frontiersmen, infuriated by the abrogation of the right of deposit of their goods, threatened to seize New Orleans by force. The idea was taken up by lawmakers such as Senator James Ross of Pennsylvania, who drafted a resolution calling on Jefferson to form a 50,000-man army to take the city. The press joined the fray. The United States had the right, thundered the New York Evening Post, "to regulate the future destiny of North America," while the Charleston Courier advocated "taking possession of the port . . . by force of arms." As Secretary of State James Madison explained, "The Mississippi is to them everything. It is the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable rivers of the Atlantic States, formed into one stream."

With Congress and a vociferous press calling for action, Jefferson faced the nation's most serious crisis since the American Revolution. "Peace is our passion," he declared, and expressed the concern that hotheaded members of the opposition Federalist Party might "force us into war." He had already instructed Livingston in early 1802 to approach Napoléon's foreign minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, to try to prevent the cession of the territory to France, if this had not already occurred, or, if the deal was done, to try to purchase New Orleans. In his initial meeting with Napoléon after taking up his Paris post in 1801, Livingston had been warned about Old World ways. "You have come to a very corrupt world," Napoléon told him frankly, adding roguishly that Talleyrand was the right man to explain what he meant by corruption.

A wily political survivor who held high offices under the French Revolution, and later under Napoléon's empire and the restored Bourbon monarchy, Talleyrand had spent the years 1792 to 1794 in exile in America after being denounced by the revolutionary National Convention, and had conceived a virulent contempt for Americans. "Refinement," he declared, "does not exist" in the United States. As Napoléon's foreign minister, Talleyrand customarily demanded outrageous bribes for diplomatic results. Despite a clubfoot and what contemporaries called his "dead eyes," he could be charming and witty when he wanted-which helped camouflage his basic negotiating tactic of delay. "The lack of instructions and the necessity of consulting one's government are always legitimate excuses in order to obtain delays in political affairs," he once wrote. When Livingston tried to discuss the territory, Talleyrand simply denied that there was any treaty between France and Spain. "There never was a government in which less could be done by negotiation than here," a frustrated Livingston wrote to Madison on September 1, 1802. "There is no people, no legislature, no counselors. One man is everything."

But Livingston, although an inexperienced diplomat, tried to keep himself informed about the country to which he was ambassador. In March 1802, he warned Madison that France intended to "have a leading interest in the politics of our western country" and was preparing to send 5,000 to 7,000 troops from its Caribbean colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) to occupy New Orleans. But Napoléon's troops in Saint Domingue were being decimated by a revolution and an outbreak of yellow fever. In June, Napoléon ordered Gen. Claude Victor to set out for New Orleans from the French controlled Netherlands. But by the time Victor assembled enough men and ships in January 1803, ice blocked the Dutchport, making it impossible for him to set sail.

That same month Jefferson asked James Monroe, a former member of Congress and former governor of Virginia, to join Livingston in Paris as minister extraordinary with discretionary powers to spend $9,375,000 to secure New Orleans and parts of the Floridas (to consolidate the U.S. position in the southeastern part of the continent). In financial straits at the time, Monroe sold his china and furniture to raise travel funds, asked a neighbor to manage his properties, and sailed for France on March 8, 1803, with Jefferson's parting admonition ringing in his ears: "The future destinies of this republic" depended on his success.

By the time Monroe arrived in Paris on April 12, the situation had, unknown to him, radically altered: Napoléon had suddenly decided to sell the entire Louisiana Territory to the United States. He had always seen Saint Domingue, with a population of more than 500,000, producing enough sugar, coffee, indigo, cotton and cocoa to fill some 700 ships a year, as France's most important holding in the Western Hemisphere. The Louisiana Territory, in Napoléon's view, was useful mainly as a granary for Saint Domingue. With the colony in danger of being lost, the territory was less useful. Then, too, Napoléon was gearing up for another campaign against Britain and needed funds for that.

Napoléon's brothers Joseph and Lucien had gone to see him at the Tuileries Palace on April 7, determined to convince him not to sell the territory. For one thing, they considered it foolish to voluntarily give up an important French holding on the American continent. For another, Britain had unofficially offered Joseph a bribe of £100,000 to persuade Napoléon not to let the Americans have Louisiana. But Napoléon's mind was already made up. The First Consul happened to be sitting in his bath when his brothers arrived. "Gentlemen," he announced, "think what you please about it. I have decided to sell Louisiana to the Americans." To make his point to his astonished brothers, Napoléon abruptly stood up, then dropped back into the tub, drenching Joseph. A manservant slumped to the floor in a faint.

French historians point out that Napoléon had several reasons for this decision. "He probably concluded that, following American independence, France couldn't hope to maintain a colony on the American continent," says Jean Tulard, one of France's foremost Napoléon scholars. "French policy makers had felt for some time that France's possessions in the Antilles would inevitably be 'contaminated' by America's idea of freedom and would eventually take their own independence. By the sale, Napoléon hoped to create a huge country in the Western Hemisphere to serve as a counterweight to Britain and maybe make trouble for it."

On April 11, when Livingston called on Talleyrand for what he thought was yet another futile attempt to deal, the foreign minister, after the de rigueur small talk, suddenly asked whether the United States would perchance wish to buy the whole of the Louisiana Territory. In fact, Talleyrand was intruding on a deal that Napoléon had assigned to the French finance minister, François de Barbé-Marbois. The latter knew America well, having spent some years in Philadelphia in the late 1700s as French ambassador to the United States, where he got to know Washington, Jefferson, Livingston and Monroe. Barbé-Marbois received his orders on April 11, 1803, when Napoléon summoned him. "I renounce Louisiana," Napoléon told him. "It is not only New Orleans that I will cede, it is the whole colony without reservation. I renounce it with the greatest regret. . . . I require a great deal of money for this war [with Britain]."

Thierry Lentz, a Napoléon historian and director of the Fondation Napoléon in Paris, contends that, for Napoléon, "It was basically just a big real estate deal. He was in a hurry to get some money for the depleted French treasury, although the relatively modest price shows that he was had in that deal. But he did manage to sell something that he didn't really have any control over-there were few French settlers and no French administration over the territory-except on paper." As for Jefferson, notes historian Cerami, "he actually wasn't out to make this big a purchase. The whole thing came as a total surprise to him and his negotiating team in Paris, because it was, after all, Napoléon's idea, not his."

Showing up unexpectedly at the dinner party Livingston gave on April 12 for Monroe's arrival, Barbé-Marbois discreetly asked Livingston to meet him later that night at the treasury office. There he confirmed Napoléon's desire to sell the territory for $22,500,000. Livingston replied that he"would be ready to purchase provided the sum was reduced to reasonable limits." Then he rushed home and worked until 3 a.m. writing a memorandum to Secretary of State Madison, concluding: "We shall do all we can to cheapen the purchase; but my present sentiment is that we shall buy."

On April 15, Monroe and Livingston proposed $8 million.

At this, Barbé-Marbois pretended Napoléon had lost interest. But by April 27, he was saying that $15 million was as low as Napoléon would go. Though the Americans then countered with $12.7 million, the deal was struck for $15 million on April 29. The treaty was signed by Barbé-Marbois, Livingston and Monroe on May 2 and backdated to April 30. Although the purchase was undeniably a bargain, the price was still more than the young U.S. treasury could afford. But the resourceful Barbé-Marbois had an answer for that too. He had contacts at Britain's Baring & Co. Bank, which agreed, along with several other banks, to make the actual purchase and pay Napoléon cash. The bank then turned over ownership of the Louisiana Territory to the United States in return for bonds, which were repaid over 15 years at 6 percent interest, making the final purchase price around $27 million. Neither Livingston nor Monroe had been authorized to buy all of the territory, or to spend $15 million-transatlantic mail took weeks, sometimes months, each way, so they had no time to request and receive approval of the deal from Washington. But an elated Livingston was aware that nearly doubling the size of America would make it a major player on the world scene one day, and he permitted himself some verbal euphoria: "We have lived long, but this is the noblest work of our whole lives," he said. "From this day the United States take their place among the powers of the first rank."

It wasn't until July 3 that news of the purchase reached U.S. shores, just in time for Americans to celebrate it on Independence Day. A Washington newspaper, the National Intelligencer, reflecting how most citizens felt, referred to the "widespread joy of millions at an event which history will record among the most splendid in our annals." Though we have no historical evidence of how Jefferson felt about the purchase, notes Cerami, reports from those in his circle like Monroe refer to the president's "great pleasure," despite his fear that the deal had gone beyond his constitutional powers. Not all Americans agreed, however. The Boston Columbian Centinel editorialized, "We are to give money of which we have too little for land of which we already have too much." And Congressman Joseph Quincy of Massachusetts so opposed the deal that he favored secession by the Northeastern states, "amicably if they can; violently if they must."

The favorable majority, however, easily prevailed and New England remained in the Union. As for the ever-succinct Thomas Jefferson, he wasted little time on rhetoric. "The enlightened government of France saw, with just discernment," he told Congress, with typical tact, on October 17, 1803, "the importance to both nations of such liberal arrangements as might best and permanently promote the peace, friendship, and interests of both." But, excited by the commercial opportunities in the West, Jefferson, even before official notice of the treaty reached him, had already dispatched Meriwether Lewis to lead an expedition to explore the territory and the lands beyond. All the way to the Pacific.
JEFFERSON'S AMERICA, NAPOLEON'S FRANCE
"We have tried to capture the suspense and fascination of a story whose outcome is known, yet was not foreordained," says Gail Feigenbaum, curator of the Jefferson-Napoléon show on view in New Orleans April 12 to August 31, "and to tell it through a rich variety of objects." The variety includes three important documents: a copy of the treaty, which bears Jefferson's signature; a document covering payment of claims by American citizens against France, signed by Napoléon; and the official report of transfer of the Louisiana Territory signed by a bereaved prefect, Pierre de Laussat. The exhibition points up how intertwined the two nations were at the time. A seascape portrays the Marquis de Lafayette's ship La Victoire setting sail to carry him across the Atlantic in 1777 to fight in the American Revolution. (There is also a portrait of the marquis himself and a 1784 painting by French artist Jean Suau, Allegory of France Liberating America.) A mahogany and gilded bronze swan bed that belonged to the famous French beauty Juliette Récamier is also on display. Fashion-conscious American ladies reportedly imitated Récamier's attire, but not her custom of receiving visitors in her bedroom. And John Trumbull's huge painting The Signing of the Declaration of Independence documents the historic American event that so greatly impressed and influenced French revolutionary thinkers. It hangs not far from a color engraving of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which was composed in 1789 by Lafayette with the advice of his American friend Thomas Jefferson.

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How the Louisiana Purchase Changed the World

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When Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory from France, he altered the shape of a nation and the course of history

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Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

Identify the challenges that farmers faced as they settled west of the Mississippi River

Describe the unique experiences of women who participated in westward migration

Of the hundreds of thousands of settlers who moved west, the vast majority were homesteaders. These pioneers, like the Ingalls family of Little House on the Prairie book and television fame (see inset below), were seeking land and opportunity. Popularly known as "sodbusters," these men and women in the Midwest faced a difficult life on the frontier. They settled throughout the land that now makes up the Midwestern states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. The weather and environment were bleak, and settlers struggled to eke out a living. A few unseasonably rainy years had led would-be settlers to believe that the "great desert" was no more, but the region's typically low rainfall and harsh temperatures made crop cultivation hard. Irrigation was a requirement, but finding water and building adequate systems proved too difficult and expensive for many farmers. It was not until 1902 and the passage of the Newlands Reclamation Act that a system finally existed to set aside funds from the sale of public lands to build dams for subsequent irrigation efforts. Prior to that, farmers across the Great Plains relied primarily on dry-farming techniques to grow corn, wheat, and sorghum, a practice that many continued in later years. A few also began to employ windmill technology to draw water, although both the drilling and construction of windmills became an added expense that few farmers could afford.

The Enduring Appeal of Little House on the Prairie

The story of western migration and survival has remained a touchstone of American culture, even today. The television show Frontier Life on PBS is one example, as are countless other modern-day evocations of the settlers. Consider the enormous popularity of the Little House series. The books, originally published in the 1930s and 1940s, have been in print continuously. The television show, Little House on the Prairie, ran for over a decade and was hugely successful (and was said to be President Ronald Reagan's favorite show). The books, although fictional, were based on Laura Ingalls Wilder's own childhood, as she travelled west with her family via covered wagon, stopping in Kansas, Wisconsin, South Dakota, and beyond.

Wilder wrote of her stories, "As you read my stories of long ago I hope you will remember that the things that are truly worthwhile and that will give you happiness are the same now as they were then. Courage and kindness, loyalty, truth, and helpfulness are always the same and always needed." While Ingalls makes the point that her stories underscore traditional values that remain the same over time, this is not necessarily the only thing that made these books so popular. Perhaps part of their appeal is that they are adventure stories, with wild weather, wild animals, and wild Indians all playing a role. Does this explain their ongoing popularity? What other factors might make these stories appealing so long after they were originally written?

The first houses built by western settlers were typically made of mud and sod with thatch roofs, as there was little timber for building. Rain, when it arrived, presented constant problems for these sod houses, with mud falling into food, and vermin, most notably lice, scampering across bedding. Weather patterns not only left the fields dry, they also brought tornadoes, droughts, blizzards, and insect swarms. Tales of swarms of locusts were commonplace, and the crop-eating insects would at times cover the ground six to twelve inches deep. One frequently quoted Kansas newspaper reported a locust swarm in 1878 during which the insects devoured "everything green, stripping the foliage off the bark and from the tender twigs of the fruit trees, destroying every plant that is good for food or pleasant to the eye, that man has planted."

Farmers also faced the ever-present threat of debt and farm foreclosure by the banks. While land was essentially free under the Homestead Act, all other farm necessities cost money and were initially difficult to obtain in the newly settled parts of the country where market economies did not yet fully reach. Horses, livestock, wagons, wells, fencing, seed, and fertilizer were all critical to survival, but often hard to come by as the population initially remained sparsely settled across vast tracts of land. Railroads charged notoriously high rates for farm equipment and livestock, making it difficult to procure goods or make a profit on anything sent back east. Banks also charged high interest rates, and, in a cycle that replayed itself year after year, farmers would borrow from the bank with the intention of repaying their debt after the harvest. As the number of farmers moving westward increased, the market price of their produce steadily declined, even as the value of the actual land increased. Each year, hard-working farmers produced ever-larger crops, flooding the markets and subsequently driving prices down even further. Although some understood the economics of supply and demand, none could overtly control such forces.

Eventually, the arrival of a more extensive railroad network aided farmers, mostly by bringing much-needed supplies such as lumber for construction and new farm machinery. While John Deere sold a steel-faced plow as early as 1838, it was James Oliver's improvements to the device in the late 1860s that transformed life for homesteaders. His new, less expensive "chilled plow" was better equipped to cut through the shallow grass roots of the Midwestern terrain, as well as withstand damage from rocks just below the surface. Similar advancements in hay mowers, manure spreaders, and threshing machines greatly improved farm production for those who could afford them. Where capital expense became a significant factor, larger commercial farms-known as "bonanza farms"-began to develop. Farmers in Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota hired migrant farmers to grow wheat on farms in excess of twenty thousand acres each. These large farms were succeeding by the end of the century, but small family farms continued to suffer. Although the land was nearly free, it cost close to $1000 for the necessary supplies to start up a farm, and many would-be landowners lured westward by the promise of cheap land became migrant farmers instead, working other peoples' land for a wage. The frustration of small farmers grew, ultimately leading to a revolt of sorts, discussed in a later chapter.

Frontier House includes information on the logistics of moving across the country as a homesteader. Take a look at the list of supplies and gear. It is easy to understand why, even when the government gave the land away for free, it still took significant resources to make such a journey.

Although the West was numerically a male-dominated society, homesteading in particular encouraged the presence of women, families, and a domestic lifestyle, even if such a life was not an easy one. Women faced all the physical hardships that men encountered in terms of weather, illness, and danger, with the added complication of childbirth. Often, there was no doctor or midwife providing assistance, and many women died from treatable complications, as did their newborns. While some women could find employment in the newly settled towns as teachers, cooks, or seamstresses, they originally did not enjoy many rights. They could not sell property, sue for divorce, serve on juries, or vote. And for the vast majority of women, their work was not in towns for money, but on the farm. As late as 1900, a typical farm wife could expect to devote nine hours per day to chores such as cleaning, sewing, laundering, and preparing food. Two additional hours per day were spent cleaning the barn and chicken coop, milking the cows, caring for the chickens, and tending the family garden. One wife commented in 1879, "[We are] not much better than slaves. It is a weary, monotonous round of cooking and washing and mending and as a result the insane asylum is a third filled with wives of farmers."

Despite this grim image, the challenges of farm life eventually empowered women to break through some legal and social barriers. Many lived more equitably as partners with their husbands than did their eastern counterparts, helping each other through both hard times and good. If widowed, a wife typically took over responsibility for the farm, a level of management that was very rare back east, where the farm would fall to a son or other male relation. Pioneer women made important decisions and were considered by their husbands to be more equal partners in the success of the homestead, due to the necessity that all members had to work hard and contribute to the farming enterprise for it to succeed. Therefore, it is not surprising that the first states to grant women's rights, including the right to vote, were those in the Pacific Northwest and Upper Midwest, where women pioneers worked the land side by side with men. Some women seemed to be well suited to the challenges that frontier life presented them. Writing to her Aunt Martha from their homestead in Minnesota in 1873, Mary Carpenter refused to complain about the hardships of farm life: "I try to trust in God's promises, but we can't expect him to work miracles nowadays. Nevertheless, all that is expected of us is to do the best we can, and that we shall certainly endeavor to do. Even if we do freeze and starve in the way of duty, it will not be a dishonorable death."

The concept of Manifest Destiny and the strong incentives to relocate sent hundreds of thousands of people west across the Mississippi. The rigors of this new way of life presented many challenges and difficulties to homesteaders. The land was dry and barren, and homesteaders lost crops to hail, droughts, insect swarms, and more. There were few materials with which to build, and early homes were made of mud, which did not stand up to the elements. Money was a constant concern, as the cost of railroad freight was exorbitant, and banks were unforgiving of bad harvests. For women, life was difficult in the extreme. Farm wives worked at least eleven hours per day on chores and had limited access to doctors or midwives. Still, they were more independent than their eastern counterparts and worked in partnership with their husbands.

As the railroad expanded and better farm equipment became available, by the 1870s, large farms began to succeed through economies of scale. Small farms still struggled to stay afloat, however, leading to a rising discontent among the farmers, who worked so hard for so little success.

Review Questions

1. What accounts for the success of large, commercial "bonanza farms?" What benefits did they enjoy over their smaller family-run counterparts?

2. How did everyday life in the American West hasten equality for women who settled the land?

Answers to Review Questions

1. Farmers who were able to invest a significant amount of capital in starting up large farms could acquire necessary supplies with ease. They also had access to new, technologically advanced farm machinery, which greatly improved efficiency and output. Such farmers hired migrant farmers to work their huge amounts of land. These "bonanza farms" were often quite successful, whereas family farms-unable to afford the supplies they needed for success, let alone take advantage of the technological innovations that would make their farms competitive-often failed.

2. Women who settled the West were considered by their husbands to be more equitable partners in the success or failure of the homestead. Because resources were so limited and the area so sparsely settled, women participated in work that was typically done only by men. Due in part to these efforts, women were able to inherit and run farms if they became widowed, rather than passing the farms along to male relations as they would in the East. The first states to begin granting rights to women, including the right to vote, were in the Pacific Northwest and Upper Midwest, where women homesteaders worked side by side with men to tame the land.

Glossary

bonanza farms large farms owned by speculators who hired laborers to work the land; these large farms allowed their owners to benefit from economies of scale and prosper, but they did nothing to help small family farms, which continued to struggle

sod house a frontier home constructed of dirt held together by thick-rooted prairie grass that was prevalent in the Midwest; sod, cut into large rectangles, was stacked to make the walls of the structure, providing an inexpensive, yet damp, house for western settlers

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By the end of this section, you will be able to: Identify the challenges that farmers faced as they settled west of the Mississippi River Describe the unique experiences of women who participated in westward migration Of the hundreds of thousands of settlers who moved west, the vast majority were homesteaders.

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The Transcontinental Railroad and the Admission of Western States

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The Transcontinental Railroad and the Admission of Western States

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Summary

When the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in 1848, the US contained fifteen free and fifteen slave states. Controversy surrounded all of the proposed solutions to the problem of slavery in the territories. Additionally, northerners railed against the legality of slavery in the District of Columbia, and southerners, in turn, complained of northern failure to comply with the Fugitive Slave Law. All of these issues had to be resolved if new states were to enter the Union.

Early in 1850, Henry Clay proposed a solution, known as the Compromise of 1850, to resolve these disputes. His proposal had six major points:

· The admission of California as a free state.
· The division of the remainder of the Mexican cession into two territories, New Mexico and Utah, without restrictions on slavery in either.
· The settlement of a New Mexico-Texas border dispute in favor of New Mexico;
· An agreement that the federal government would assume Texas' debt.
· The continuation of slavery but abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia
· The institution of a more effective Fugitive Slave Law

He presented all of these proposals together in an omnibus bill. Though Congress rejected the bill, all of its individual measures were passed.

Still, the issue of the future of slavery remained far from settled, and the disagreement between North and South eventually spawned the Civil War. As the national focus centered on the growing conflict, the conflict itself, and, later, on the period of Reconstruction, expansion no longer monopolized Americans' attention. Even so, expansion continued at a steady pace. Between September 1850, when California was admitted to the union, and 1870, Minnesota, Oregon, Kansas, Nevada, and Nebraska were all admitted as states. Even so, much of the territory in the West remained uninhabited and unorganized.

On May 10, 1869, at Promontory Point, Utah, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroad companies connected tracks extending from Sacramento, California to Omaha, Nebraska. The historic moment created the first transcontinental railroad, enabling travelers to go from coast to coast in a week's time, making it markedly easier to travel west in search of land for settlement. By 1872, under the Pacific Railroad Act, Congress awarded the railroads over 170 million acres in land grants. The railroads created bureaus and sent agents to the East and to Europe to attract potential settlers on these lands. Portraying the West as a land of limitless opportunity, the bureaus offered long-term loans and free transportation to the West. Between 1870 and 1900, not only did the railroads attract settlers from nearby states, but also brought 2.2 million foreign immigrants to the trans-Mississippi West. Desiring quick payment of loans, railroads encouraged these settlers to grow and sell cash crops.

The Homestead Act, passed in 1862, offered 160 acres of land to anyone who would pay $10, live on the land for five years, and cultivate and improve it. The Act encouraged many additional Americans and foreigners to move to the undeveloped West. Despite the romantic portrayals of the railroads, Western farmers continued to face difficult conditions. Suffering a depression between 1873 and 1878, and facing the constant threat of natural disaster, many returned East. Those who remained struggled to build homes and communities amid mosquito infestations and other harsh conditions. Farm settlements eventually became thriving communities, with churches, schools, and markets, and farmers grew close with their neighbors. The towns built opera houses and hotels and labored to bring modernization and sophistication to the West.

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the transcontinental railroad and the admission of western states

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Westward Expansion (1807-1912): The Transcontinental Railroad and the Admission of Western States | SparkNotes

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When the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in 1848, the US contained fifteen free and fifteen slave states. Controversy surrounded all of the proposed solutions to the problem of slavery in the territories. Additionally, northerners railed against the legality of slavery in the District of Columbia, and southerners, in turn, complained of northern failure to comply with the Fugitive Slave Law.

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Westward Expansion, technological advancements Flashcards | Quizlet

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Start studying Westward Expansion, technological advancements. Learn vocabulary, terms and more with flashcards, games and other study tools.

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Courtesy of Library of Congress, Curtis, Edward S., "[The plains of the Dakota--Sioux]," 1905

Description

Three Sioux American Indians of horseback are photographed along the Great Plains with a rock formation in background. The image was taken by Edward Curtis in 1906.

Source-Dependent Questions

What landforms represent the Great Plains region?

What do you notice about the people of the Great Plains region?

Citation Information

Curtis, Edward S., "[The plains of the Dakota--Sioux]," 1905. Courtesy of Library of Congress

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Three Sioux American Indians of horseback are photographed along the Great Plains with a rock formation in background. The image was taken by Edward Curtis in 1906. What landforms represent the Great Plains region? What do you notice about the people of the Great Plains region?

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The California Gold Rush cartoon 1849 (The Wild West)

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The California Gold Rush cartoon 1849 (The Wild West)

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The California Gold Rush cartoon 1849 (The Wild West)

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Mexican American War | Season 1 | Latino Americans

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Mexican American War | Season 1 | Latino Americans

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Latino Americans
Clip: Season 1 | 2m 29s

In 1846 the US went to war with Mexico over disputed territory on the Texas boarder. President James Polk wanted to push all the way to the Pacific. Mexico surrendered in 1848 and with the addition of the seized lands, the United States doubled in size. The Mexicans that were now living in the US were offered citizenship and were told their rights would be protected under the Treaty of Hildago.

Aired: 09/16/13

Rating: NR

Problems Playing Video? Report a Problem |

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Latino Americans Clip: Season 1 | 2m 29s In 1846 the US went to war with Mexico over disputed territory on the Texas boarder. President James Polk wanted to push all the way to the Pacific. Mexico surrendered in 1848 and with the addition of the seized lands, the United States doubled in size.

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Westward Expansion: The Homestead Act of 1862 & The Frontier Thesis

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Westward Expansion: The Homestead Act of 1862 & The Frontier Thesis

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Westward Expansion: The Homestead Act of 1862 & The Frontier Thesis

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Chinese Immigration and the Transcontinental railroad

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Chinese Immigration and the Transcontinental railroad

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By the time the Civil War began, the westward expansion movement was in full swing. Although Americans had first started moving toward the Pacific more than a decade earlier, making the journey to the West was still no simple task. In order to reach California, settlers needed to either travel overland by wagon or board ships that sailed around the southern tip of South America before arriving on the West Coast of the United States. Both of these options were dangerous and time-consuming; in fact, a trip from the East Coast to California could take more than a year to complete. Railroads were well-established in the eastern part of the country by the mid-nineteenth century, but had not yet become an option for reaching its western states and territories. Settlers and businessmen alike wanted the railroad to come to the West so that people and goods could more easily make their way there. In 1862, Congress passed a bill authorizing the creation of a transcontinental railroad that would connect the West with the rest of the nation. This project involved two companies, Union Pacific and Central Pacific, and would take six years to complete. Although most of the companies' railroad workers were initially from Ireland and Union Pacific employed some native-born American soldiers, the vast majority of workers for Central Pacific were Chinese immigrants by the time the railroad was finished. These immigrants faced particularly poor working conditions and fierce discrimination, but their efforts were crucial to the construction of the railroad and to the full development of the West.

The Chinese had already established a significant presence in the United States before the call for a transcontinental railroad came about. More than 40,000 Chinese immigrants arrived in California during the 1850s. Most came from southern China and hoped to escape the poverty and social unrest that characterized their homeland. Like thousands of native-born Americans and immigrants from other parts of the world, they hoped to strike it rich during the Gold Rush. When they failed to achieve this dream and the scramble for gold had ended, many of these Chinese immigrants remained in California to perform other jobs. Some worked in the silver mines, while others worked as cooks and domestic servants in such cities as San Francisco. When work on the Transcontinental Railroad began, neither Union Pacific nor Central Pacific wanted to hire these immigrants. This was due to the general prejudices of the time. By the mid 1860s, however, the leaders of Central Pacific had realized that it was difficult to recruit railroad workers and keep them on the job. Central Pacific's part of the project included the Sierra Nevada mountains, which rose to elevations of over 14,000 feet and were very treacherous. The company needed thousands of laborers and had only been able to find hundreds. In addition, the Irish workers it had managed to hire were requesting higher wages. Since Central Pacific's portion of the railroad began in Sacramento, California and there was already a relatively large Chinese population in the northern part of the state, the company decided to begin recruiting Chinese laborers. These workers were willing to lay tracks in dangerous areas for extremely low pay and were also viewed as peaceful and submissive. They proved themselves to be efficient laborers, and the generally balanced diets they followed made them healthier than their Irish coworkers. By the time the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads met in Utah in 1869, Central Pacific had recruited thousands of additional workers directly from China. When the Transcontinental Railroad was complete, Chinese laborers made up over 90 percent of Central Pacific's workforce.

Although working on the railroad was a risky job for all laborers, Chinese workers faced more challenges than their white counterparts did. The Chinese were subject to suspicion and racial slurs from other workers. They were also subject to certain company policies that their non-Chinese colleagues did not have to face. For example, Central Pacific offered higher pay to its white workers and provided them with meals and shelter; meanwhile, Chinese laborers received lower wages and were expected to find their own food and tents. Chinese workers often had to live in the underground tunnels they were constructing, and more than one thousand died in accidents and avalanches while laboring in the mountains.

Without the work of these immigrants, the Transcontinental Railroad might have never been built. In turn, the West would have remained difficult to settle and might not have become as developed and populated as it is today. Despite their hard work, the Chinese experienced discrimination for generations after the completion of the railroad. California laws prevented them from being admitted as witnesses in court, voting, and becoming naturalized citizens. Chinese schoolchildren were also subject to segregation. In 1882, the federal government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned new Chinese workers from entering the United States and prevented Chinese immigrants who were already in the U.S. from becoming citizens. This law remained in effect until 1943.

For more information about early Chinese immigrants and their role in building the Transcontinental Railroad, refer to the following links.

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Chinese immigration and the Transcontinental railroad

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By the time the Civil War began, the westward expansion movement was in full swing. Although Americans had first started moving toward the Pacific more than a decade earlier, making the journey to the West was still no simple task.

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Technological Advancements of the 1800's

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Technological Advancements of the 1800's

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Technological Advancements of the 1800's

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Iowa Law to Allow Meskawaki to Purchase Land and Live in Tama, Iowa," July 15, 1856

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Iowa Law to Allow Meskawaki to Purchase Land and Live in Tama, Iowa," July 15, 1856

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Courtesy of State Historical Society of Iowa, 15 July 1856

Description

This is an excerpt of the journal from the 5th General Assembly of Iowa in 1856. The journal page shows the law that was enacted so the Meskwaki could purchase land and live in Tama, Iowa.

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Iowa Law to "Allow Meskwaki to Purchase Land and Live in Tama, Iowa," July 15, 1856

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Transcript of Iowa Law to "Allow Meskwaki to Purchase Land and Live in Tama, Iowa" Transcribed Excerpt from Iowa Law to "Allow Meskwaki to Purchase Land and Live in Tama, Iowa" Source-Dependent Questions Why were the Meskwaki allowed to stay in Tama?

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Facts, information and articles about the California Gold Rush, an event of Westward Expansion from the Wild West

California Gold Rush Facts

Dates

1848-1857

Prospectors Involved

300,000

California Gold Rush Articles

Explore articles from the History Net archives about California Gold Rush

" See all California Gold Rush Articles

California Gold Rush summary: The California Gold Rush was the largest mass migration in American history since it brought about 300,000 people to California. It all started on January 24, 1848, when James W. Marshall found gold on his piece of land at Sutter's Mill in Coloma. The news of gold quickly spread around. People from Oregon, Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) and Latin America were the first to hear the breaking news, so they were the first to arrive in order to test their luck in California by the end of 1848. Soon the others from the rest of US, Europe, Australia and China followed and since they mainly arrived during 1849 they were called the "forty-niners".

At first, the gold could be picked up from the ground but later on it was recovered from the streams and rivers with the use of pans. The gold rush peaked in 1852 and after that the gold reserves were getting thinner and harder to reach so that more sophisticated methods of mining had to be employed. The best results were achieved with hydraulic mining although it was environmentally damaging.

The gold rush resulted in the hasty development of California: many roads, churches, schools and towns were built to accommodate the gold-diggers. In the beginning, property rights in the goldfields were not covered by law and this was solved by the system of staking claims. The gold also helped to speed up the admission of California into the US as a State. All the preparations in terms of constitution and legislature were made in 1849 and California became a state in 1850.

Articles Featuring The California Gold Rush From History Net Magazines

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1848-1857 300,000 Explore articles from the History Net archives about California Gold Rush " See all California Gold Rush Articles California Gold Rush summary: The California Gold Rush was the largest mass migration in American history since it brought about 300,000 people to California. It all started on January 24, 1848, when James W.

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General Winfield Scott's entrance into Mexico City, September 14, 1847, is depicted in this print by Carl Nebel

When war broke out against Mexico in May 1846, the United States Army numbered a mere 8,000, but soon 60,000 volunteers joined their ranks. The American Navy dominated the sea. The American government provided stable, capable leadership. The economy of the expanding United States far surpassed that of the fledgling Mexican state. Morale was on the American side. The war was a rout.

Polk directed the war from Washington, D.C. He sent a 4-prong attack into the Mexican heartland. John Fremont and Stephen Kearny were sent to control the coveted lands of California and New Mexico. Fremont led a group of zealous Californians to declare independence even before word of hostilities reached the West. The "Bear Flag Republic" was not taken seriously, but Fremont and his followers did march to Monterey to capture the Mexican presidio, or fort. By 1847, California was secure.

The original Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was printed in two columns, the English translation on the left and the Spanish on the right.

Meanwhile, Kearny led his troops into Santa Fe in August of 1846 causing the governor of New Mexico to flee. The city was captured without a single casualty. Soon he marched his army westward across the desert to join Fremont in California.

The attack on Mexico proper was left to two other commanders. Zachary Taylor crossed the Rio Grande with his troops upon Polk's order. He fought Santa Anna's troops successfully on his advance toward the heart of Mexico. Winfield Scott delivered the knockout punch. After invading Mexico at Vera Cruz, Scott's troops marched to the capital, Mexico City. All that remained was negotiating the terms of peace.

At home, the Whigs of the north complained bitterly about the war. Many questioned Polk's methods as misleading and unconstitutional. Abolitionists rightly feared that southerners would try to use newly acquired lands to expand slavery. Antiwar sentiment emerged in New England much as it had in the War of 1812. Writer Henry David Thoreau was sentenced to prison for refusing to pay the taxes he knew were used to fund the war effort. His essay, Civil Disobedience, became a standard of peaceful resistance for future activists.

The Mexican-American War was formally concluded by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. The United States received the disputed Texan territory, as well as New Mexico territory and California. The Mexican government was paid $15 million - the same sum issued to France for the Louisiana Territory. The United States Army won a grand victory. Although suffering 13,000 killed, the military won every engagement of the war. Mexico was stripped of half of its territory and was not consoled by the monetary settlement.

The U.S.-Mexican War, 1846-1848
An outstanding site for just browsing or for conducting serious research on the Mexican-American War. Images, documents, maps, timelines, statistics, and much more is brought to you by the Descendants of Mexican War Veterans. Easy-to-navigate and beautifully illustrated.

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The U.S.-Mexican War (1846-1848)
The Mexican-American war (1846-1848) changed the slavery debate. It almost doubled the size of the United States and began a debate, between Northerners and Southerners, over what to do with the newly acquired land.

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The Mexican-American War arose from border disputes between the U.S. and Mexico. When the war ended, Mexico lost half its territory to the U.S.

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The Louisiana Purchase: Jefferson’s constitutional gamble

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The Louisiana Purchase: Jefferson’s constitutional gamble

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On October 20, 1803, the Senate ratified a treaty with France, promoted by President Thomas Jefferson, that doubled the size of the United States. But was Jefferson empowered to make that $15 million deal under the Constitution?

The Louisiana Purchase was a seminal moment for a new nation. The land involved in the 830,000 square mile treaty would eventually encompass 15 states. In 1800, the vast region came under French control after Napoleon reached an agreement with Spain. Jefferson was very familiar with the French, due to his time in Europe as an American envoy. He also understood the potential military danger France posed if they controlled the Mississippi River.

Jefferson sent James Monroe in 1803 to France to join Robert R. Livingston in an attempt to buy some part of the territory from the Napoleon regime, in order to head off a potential armed conflict. Jefferson told his friend Monroe that "all eyes, all hopes, are now fixed on you, . . . for on the event of this mission depends the future destinies of this republic." Monroe had the authority to spend up to $10 million to acquire New Orleans and all or parts of Florida.

But when Monroe arrived in Europe, Napoleon had already made a decision to sell the territory to the United States, in order to protect other French territories in the Caribbean and to finance his military efforts in Europe. Monroe and Livingston found out Napoleon wanted $22 million for the entire territory. After several weeks of negotiations, the Americans made a deal for the $15 million purchase, which exceeded what they had the authority to spend. It took several months for the official news to reach Jefferson in Washington, D.C., and it was announced on July 4, 1803.

While the deal was instantly popular, there were problems. Negotiations would need to start with Great Britain and Spain about shared boundaries. And there was a debate about whether and how such a large property purchase was allowed under the Constitution.

Jefferson took a strict, literal view of constitutional powers, meaning that specific powers reserved for the President and Executive Branch needed to be spelled out in the Constitution. The ability to buy property from foreign governments was not among these powers listed the Constitution - a fact that his political opponents, the Federalists, were eager to point out to the President.

Instead, Jefferson considered a constitutional amendment the only way to conclude the deal with France. "The General Government has no powers but such as the Constitution gives it," he wrote to John Dickinson in 1803. "It has not given it power of holding foreign territory, and still less of incorporating it into the Union. An amendment of the Constitution seems necessary for this."

However, Jefferson had no intention of losing the deal with France. "In the meantime we must ratify and pay our money, as we have treated, for a thing beyond the Constitution, and rely on the nation to sanction an act done for its great good, without its previous authority," he told Dickinson.

Jefferson's cabinet, including James Madison, disagreed about the need for a constitutional amendment. The President also had been assured earlier in the year by Albert Gallatin, his Treasury Secretary, that any potential deal with France would be permissible and implied under the Constitution's treaty-making provisions.

Jefferson rationalized his decision for the treaty to be sent to Congress without an amendment to John Breckinridge. "It is the case of a guardian, investing the money of his ward in purchasing an important adjacent territory; and saying to him when of age, I did this for your good," he said in August 1803.

By that time, Jefferson and his supporters faced an October 31, 1803 deadline to ratify the treaty or lose the purchase. Ironically, the deal to expand federal powers would need to be sold to the Federalists, who had advocated such a position before the treaty was signed, and supported by the Republicans, Jefferson's party, which had opposed such a broad extension of presidential powers.

The debate in the Senate only lasted for two days. On October 20, 1803, the Senate voted for ratification 24-7, and the treaty was signed on October 31, 1803. In the treaty's aftermath, although some Federalists continued to view the Louisiana Purchase as unconstitutional, the purchase was never questioned in court. If it had been, Jefferson may have come in conflict with his own cousin and political rival, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall.

But years later, Marshall made his thoughts clear about the Treaty Clause in an 1823 decision called American Insurance Co. v. Canter. "The Constitution confers absolutely on the government of the Union, the powers of making war, and of making treaties; consequently, that government possesses the power of acquiring territory, either by conquest or by treaty," Marshall said.
Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.

Filed Under: Culture, Treaty and Appointments Power

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The Louisiana Purchase: Jefferson's constitutional gamble

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On October 20, 1803, the Senate ratified a treaty with France, promoted by President Thomas Jefferson, that doubled the size of the United States. But was Jefferson empowered to make that $15 million deal under the Constitution? The Louisiana Purchase was a seminal moment for a new nation.

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Chinese Railroad Workers Were Almost Written Out of History.

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Chinese Railroad Workers Were Almost Written Out of History.

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It's been 150 years since two railroads were joined together to form the first Transcontinental Railroad. At a ceremony in Utah, Chinese railroad workers were recognized for the pivotal role they played in its construction.

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Historians, scholars and descendants of workers gathered in Promontory, Utah, to celebrate the completion of a railroad in 1869 that changed the United States. Credit Credit... By Chang W. Lee

It was a seminal moment in American history: the inauguration of the first Transcontinental Railroad on May 10, 1869, in Promontory, Utah.

The day marked a profound transformation. A dangerous journey that once took months could now be completed in a week, revolutionizing the fractured country's economy.

The leaders of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads came together to celebrate the joining of the tracks, and Leland Stanford, the business tycoon and political leader who founded Stanford University, drove a ceremonial golden spike into a tie to unite them.

But many of the workers who had built the railroad were all but invisible at the ceremony, and in its retelling for many years afterward. They included about 15,000 Chinese immigrants - up to 90 percent of the work force on the Central Pacific line - who were openly discriminated against, vilified and forgotten.

Now those workers are being written back into the history of the railroad, thanks to the dogged efforts of their descendants and of scholars. At the 150th anniversary of the golden spike ceremony on Friday, and at associated events held last week in Utah, thousands gathered to recognize a more complete picture of the monumental feat.

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Connie Young Yu, who spoke during the opening remarks. Credit... Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

"I felt such elation," said Connie Young Yu, a San Francisco-based author and historian with the Chinese Historical Society of America. In her speech at the ceremony on Friday, Ms. Yu paid tribute to the Chinese laborers' courage and sacrifice.

Ms. Yu's great-grandfather helped build the railroad, and her mother was the only descendant of the Chinese workers at the 100th celebration of the golden spike ceremony in 1969. The centennial was a bitter disappointment for the descendants of the Chinese railroad workers, she said. The president of the Chinese Historical Society was nudged off the list of speakers, and the transportation secretary, John A. Volpe, failed to mention the Chinese workers.

"Who else but Americans could have laid 10 miles of track in 12 hours?" he famously asked.

In fact, it was Chinese and Irish workers who achieved that feat. In the years that followed, the Chinese workers would face rising anti-immigrant sentiment and violence, and would be barred from citizenship by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.
[For more coverage of race, sign up here for the Race/Related newsletter.]

At another event, Barbara Chin scooped lap yuk, a dish with sun-dried seafood and cured meat, to help Don Lee, center, who prepared a meal based on his research into the foods that Chinese railroad workers ate. Credit... Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

At a ceremony on Friday, Transportation Secretary Elaine L. Chao, the first person of Chinese descent to hold the position, paid tribute to the diverse work force. In addition to Chinese workers, there were many Irish immigrants, Civil War veterans, Mormons, African-Americans and Native Americans, Ms. Chao said.

Native American communities, of course, were also forcibly displaced by the railroad and the westward expansion it enabled. An exhibit on the Chinese workers, on view at the Smithsonian through next year, also highlights the experiences of Native Americans.

Ms. Chao said that the achievements of the Chinese workers were poignant because many did not have the opportunity to become citizens, and so little record of their existence survived.

Yet the engineering feat they undertook was "every bit as consequential as the digital revolution that binds the world" today, she said.

The renewed focus on the contributions of the Chinese workers is due in large part to Gordon H. Chang, a historian at Stanford University, who has spent decades researching the workers' history and co-directs the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project.

[Read more about Dr. Chang's new book, "Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad."]
Dr. Chang noted that for many descendants of railroad workers, the 150th anniversary events marked the culmination of a lifelong effort to recover the history of their families and communities. But for him, it's also a beginning.

"I'm quite enthusiastic that because of the attention to this history, more people are going to come forward to contribute bits and pieces and documentation," he said.

The Chinese workers took on some of the most dangerous and difficult work, including cutting across the Sierra Nevada mountain range, Dr. Chang has written. Hundreds are believed to have died. But their experiences were largely unrecorded.

Mr. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, a professor of English and the humanities at Stanford, carried out painstaking research to fill that gap, drawing on historical photographs and material objects, interviews with descendants of the workers, newspaper accounts and business records.

A man passed under an arch formation where Chinese laborers used to camp out during the construction of the railroad. Credit... Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

That the research center is at Stanford is notable. Mr. Stanford - a key investor in the Central Pacific line - had disparaged Chinese immigrants, calling them "an inferior race," years before he employed thousands of them.

They were paid lower wages than white workers, even as they worked longer hours, took on the most treacherous stretches of track and became renowned for their work. Mr. Stanford would come to greatly admire them, Dr. Chang has written.

"I am painfully aware that Leland Stanford became one of the world's richest men by using Chinese labor," Dr. Chang wrote in an opinion piece published Friday in The Los Angeles Times.

"But I also try to remember that Stanford University exists because of those Chinese workers."

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Chinese Railroad Workers Were Almost Written Out of History. Now They're Getting Their Due. (Published 2019)

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It's been 150 years since two railroads were joined together to form the first Transcontinental Railroad. At a ceremony in Utah, Chinese railroad workers were recognized for the pivotal role they played in its construction. It was a seminal moment in American history: the inauguration of the first Transcontinental Railroad on May 10, 1869, in Promontory, Utah.

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HISTORY at Home: Westward Expansion and Native Americans | HISTORY

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HISTORY at Home: Westward Expansion and Native Americans | HISTORY

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HISTORY at Home: Westward Expansion and Native Americans | HISTORY

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At the start of the 19th century, settlers began venturing westward across the United States, seeking opportunity and fortune. Learn about their journeys, the explorers who paved the way and the Native Americans who were there first.