American Westward Movement

I

Introduction

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

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

II

Early Settlement and Growth

A

Contest of Empires

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

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

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

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

B

British Settlement

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

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

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

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

C

Across the Appalachians

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

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

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

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

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

III

The Frontier to the Mississsippi