Settlers journeyed west by wagon and on horseback.
In April 1853 the Knight family—Joel, Amelia, and their seven children—left Monroe County, Iowa, in a covered wagon. Their plan was to travel west to Oregon Territory. During the next five months, they endured sickness, storms, and the loss of many of their livestock. They reached Oregon in mid-September, where Amelia Knight gave birth in the covered wagon to her eighth child. A few days later the Knight family crossed the Columbia River into Washington Territory, where they traded two yoke of oxen for a piece of land and a small log cabin.
The Knight family wasn’t unique. In the 1800s thousands of Americans traveled from their homes in the East and Midwest to new lives in the West—a time known as westward expansion.
In the years since 1492, when Christopher Columbus made his first journey to the New World, England, France, Spain, and the Netherlands had all claimed land on the continent and tried to start colonies. In April 1607 the Virginia Company of London, England, established the first permanent English settlement in North America, Jamestown Colony. Jamestown was located about 60 miles (97 kilometers) from the Chesapeake Bay in what is now Virginia.
In America the European settlers would be able to own land, a goal most knew they’d never be able to achieve in Europe. But the settlers who made the difficult journey across the ocean faced hard times in their new country, including starvation, American Indian attacks, and disease. Of the 104 settlers who arrived in Jamestown in spring 1607, fewer than 40 were alive by the winter of 1608. But the colonists persevered, and more settlers arrived, including those who established Plymouth Colony in what is now Massachusetts in 1620.
The settlers built towns and villages along the east coast of North America next to the Atlantic Ocean, an important passageway for ships and also a place where the settlers could harvest seafood to supplement their diet. Virginia became a British royal colony in 1624, and by 1670 Britain had 12 colonies in what is now the eastern United States. Georgia, the 13th original colony, was established in 1733.
By the 1700s the American colonies included three separate regions: New England, the Middle Atlantic colonies, and the South. But although the regions were distinct from one another, they united to fight the British for their independence in the Revolutionary War (1775–1783). The colonies won their freedom from British rule and were now the United States of America.
As the population of the eastern United States grew, the government wanted people to settle the West. Congress assisted this goal by enacting the Land Ordinance of 1785. This law created a uniform system in which land was divided into ships of 36 square miles (93 square km). Each township was divided into 36 sections, which were made up of 640 acres (259 hectares). In 1787 Congress enacted the Northwest Ordinance. This act established government and laws in an area north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River—now the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The U.S. government sold land to anyone who could afford it, raising money for the government and helping settlers move west at the same time. Many people took them up on the offer, which began a large westward migration.
LOUISIANA PURCHASE
In 1803 the United States increased in size considerably. That was the year the United States bought 828,000 square miles (2.1 million square km) of land from France. The land cost $15 million and covered a huge section west of the Mississippi River. After the Louisiana Purchase, the size of the United States doubled.
President Thomas Jefferson hired Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the newly acquired lands. He was especially interested in having Lewis and Clark look for a river that extended west from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. A river route would make it easier to move goods from the East to the West. The explorers left on their journey from St. Louis, Missouri, in 1804.
The Lewis and Clark expedition lasted two years. When the explorers returned in 1806, they told Jefferson that while they didn’t find a river that ran all the way to the ocean, they did discover a land filled with animals that could be trapped, thick forests, huge mountain ranges, and thousands of acres of land—plus a number of American Indian groups who were living there. Over the next several years, settlers flocked to the area. By 1840 the states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri had been formed from some of the land in the Louisiana Purchase.
MANIFEST DESTINY
In the 1840s a belief called Manifest Destiny began to gain popularity among Americans. It was the belief that God wanted Americans to live across the entire continent, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. Newspaper editor John O’Sullivan coined the term in 1845. He wrote that it was the United States’ “Manifest Destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us.”1
O’Sullivan summed up what many Americans had believed for a long time—that they had the right to live wherever they wanted and that it was their destiny to take any land they wanted. They believed that was what God wanted them to do. These Americans didn’t think that they were taking land from the American Indians. Instead they would be settling the land and improving it both for themselves and for future generations. They would also be spreading Christianity at the same time.
In 1845 the United States tested the theory of Manifest Destiny by annexing the Republic of Texas. It had been part of Mexico until declaring independence in 1836. The United States went to war with Mexico over disputes about Texas’ borders. The U.S. won the two-year Mexican War in 1848. Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico gave what is now the states of California, New Mexico, and Arizona to the U.S. in return for $15 million.
The land that opened up to settlers during the westward expansion was huge. It extended from the Appalachian Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. It spread from the Mexican border in the south to the Canadian border in the north. For the settlers who were moving from eastern cities, the frontier sounded like a dream. A dream that was about to come true.
