Posted on 02/28/2008 3:21:48 PM PST by decimon
This has got to be one of the more understated analysis I’ve seen in a long time. For example, East of the Mississippi, movement by water had long be the fastest practical means of transport. West of the Mississippi, forget it, you have to go overland.
To further complicate things, westward expansion might have been through wilderness, but it often had a destination: the West Coast. Between the British and the Spanish, what is now Texas, the southwest, California and the Pacific northwest were places, destinations, to travel to.
A lot more people wanted to go there than stop in the Great Plains. The degree of difficulty for starting fresh was very high, evidenced by the Mormon settlement of Utah—they almost starved. They probably survived by being able to provide supplies, at a price, to settlers passing through, eventually being able to support themselves.
Only technology such as the railroads and the windmill allowed for much of the Great Plains to be occupied at all. The windmill to get water to grow crops, and the railroads to transport those crops once grown.
While certainly life by today’s standards was utterly awful on the eastern seaboard, by the standards of the day it was luxurious compared to setting out on your own across the frontier.
Much of the West only opened up after the post-Civil War, Indian Wars forced the deployment of much of the Union Army West. Once the Army was there, settlers finally had an interior place to go.
Texas was an “odd man out” for much of this, as were the Oklahoma Indian territories. They had their own paradigms of expansion and growth. The great rush to occupy them as home stakes, granted by the US government, could only happen in due course.
Texas, especially, for a while was carved up by enormous ranches like the XIT (for “Ten (Counties) in Texas”), who engaged in shameless land grabbing and exploitation. But the great cattle drives to Kansas City only lasted a short while before being ended by barbed wire fences.
As more infill happened, the primary concern of the settlers was creating a civilized town for themselves and their children. This ended many of the antics surrounding frontier settlement, culminating in the Census of 1890, which was no longer able to determine a “line” of settlement. This meant that westward expansion and the frontier were finished. It all was settled. From there it was just a matter of growth.
That's a good point. If you must expand then it's best to do so over land.
The Gores are from Tennessee. Alabama considers that the North : )
Settlement of “the West” was much faster than popularly imagined. Indiana University (oldest university West of the Alleghenies) was founded, for the most part, by a crew from Harvard, who also founded what’s now called Bloomington Normal University (in Illinois), several others on the way, and when they were done some of them were still youthful enough to be professors at Stanford.
Neo Conservatives
Ping
Alabamans consider everything the North.
It was Benjamin Franklin and his Ohio Company.
Even south Florida is the north.
I have never found out when my ancestors arrived in America, I said it was before the Revolution because the first entry into the family Bible belonging to them was the birth of my great great great ? grandfather in Virginia in 1776. Maybe they were here before then and could be that was just when they got the Bible.
My G Grandfather got off the boat from Hamburg and enlisted with an Uncle in the Union Army. He went to Washington Territory and built a sawmill. Over the years fortunes went up and down until 1898 and the Gold Rush. That tough old German came back with a tidy fortune and kept it.
That was the dream that brought them to America and then to the West.
The Society of Cincinnati had a hand in westward expansion.
Under the Homestead Act, the price of land was free. How is that “not important”?
Read (not watch) James Mitchner’s “Centennial”
There ware lots of reasons
What caused westward expansion? Television viewers in California during the late 1960’s learned the answer from advertisements for MJB coffee. The ads featured people using every mode of transportation imaginable to travel westward to get the coffee, since there was “only enough for the West.”
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