Westward Movement - MSN Encarta

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Introduction; Early Settlement and Growth; The Frontier to the Mississsippi; Beyond the Mississippi; The West in Popular Culture; Conclusion

The Old Northwest

After the United States defeated Britain in the American Revolution, the government of the new nation encouraged expansion even more than the British had. This encouragement can be seen in two of its earliest laws, the Ordinances of 1785 and 1787. The Ordinance of 1785 provided for the survey and sale of land in what became known as the Old Northwest—the region north of the Ohio River, west of the Appalachians, east of the Mississippi River, and south of Canada. This area encompassed the present-day states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota.

The Ordinance of 1787, called the Northwest Ordinance, forbade slavery in the Old Northwest, guaranteed English common law there, and set up a system of government that outlined how the territories could become states. The new United States government also paid revolutionary war veterans by giving them the right to take land for free in the Old Northwest. Some took up the offer. Many more sold their right to land speculators, who in turn did all they could to encourage westward migration.

At the same time, the U.S. government assured Native Americans living in the Old Northwest and in the land south of the Ohio River, called the Old Southwest, that their rights and interests would be protected. The two policies—encouraging expansion while protecting Native Americans—proved hopelessly contradictory. Several Native American tribes, including the Shawnee, Delaware, and Miami, united in a confederation to protect their lands against white settlement. They scored some stunning military victories against the United States. However, the confederation was defeated by General Anthony Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. The Treaty of Greenville, signed in 1795, ceded much of the present-day state of Ohio to the United States. Other treaties opened a majority of the Ohio Valley to white settlement by 1809, and pioneers flooded into it.

The Old Northwest contained rich farmland, thick forests, and game for food and trade. Hundreds, and then thousands of flatboats floated down the broad Ohio River every year, bringing settlers and goods to southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Most who settled this region came westward from Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and the New England states, although a large number, like the family of Abraham Lincoln, moved northward out of Kentucky. Most were Anglo-Americans and German Americans. They carried their cultures with them—languages, values, customs, traditions, and ways of making a living—which they adapted to the demands of their new environment. Towns appeared with marketplaces, seats of government, and manufacturing centers for iron, glass, leather goods, barrels, and other items too expensive to import. The huge majority of the population, however, lived in the countryside. Most were independent landowners who worked modest-sized farms.

The Old Southwest

Most white pioneers moving into the Old Southwest came from Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia. The rich soil and long growing seasons offered agricultural opportunity, so the vast majority of settlers were farmers. In the Old Southwest, immigrants brought two institutions from the South, which were not found in the North: the plantation system of large landholdings owned by one family, and black slavery. Most immigrants were independent farmers without slaves, just as in the Old Northwest, but the planter elite often dominated political and social life. The two distinctive characteristics of the Old Southwest eventually led to the sectional crisis that culminated in the American Civil War (1861-1865).

Southern pioneer farmers, like those to the north, began by producing mostly for themselves, but they also hoped eventually to export their products to outside markets. At first their main export was tobacco. Then in 1793 the New Englander Eli Whitney visited Georgia and devised a machine that revolutionized Southern agriculture. The cotton gin removed easily and quickly the seeds embedded in the fibers of short-staple cotton—a process that had previously been done very slowly by hand. The cotton gin would allow Southerners to expand cotton production at a time when textile mills in England and the American Northeast were in need of huge amounts of cotton. The Southern frontier would soon become the largest cotton-producing region in the world. Especially after the War of 1812, when peaceful commerce was reopened with Britain, the lure of new land for cotton drew settlers rapidly toward the Mississippi River and beyond. As in the Old Northwest, cotton and especially tobacco farming rapidly exhausted the soil, damaging the environment and encouraging further movement westward in search of new land.

Clash and Mingling of Cultures

The rapid expansion in both the Old Northwest and the Old Southwest strained the interaction between Native Americans and whites, and by 1809 they were moving toward confrontation. The most significant resistance to white settlement came from a remarkable Shawnee warrior and diplomat, Tecumseh, and his brother Tensketawah, also called The Prophet. The brothers called for all Native American peoples to join together and refuse to cede any more land to whites. They also urged Native Americans to reject Euro-American trade and culture and to embrace a new religion based on a vision of Tensketawah. Although Tecumseh enlisted the support of some groups, a clash between white militia and his followers at their village, Prophetstown, in 1811 precipitated a confrontation before Native American unity could be achieved.

The War of 1812 ended significant Native American military resistance to white settlement in both the Old Northwest and the Old Southwest. Tecumseh, who had formed an alliance with Britain against the United States, was killed in 1813 when the British were defeated at the Battle of the Thames. Meanwhile, in 1814 the militia leader Andrew Jackson destroyed a large force of Creeks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in Alabama. However, the final removal of Native American peoples from these areas was yet to come. In the 1830s the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles would be taken, most of them by force, into Indian Territory, which was west of the Mississippi River in present-day Oklahoma.

By then the occupation of the region from the Appalachians to the Mississippi was virtually complete. Beginning with the 13 colonies—New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia—the country continued to grow. From 1790 to 1803 Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio became states. Louisiana was admitted in 1812. Between 1816 and 1819 one state a year was admitted to the union—Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, and Alabama—and in 1820 Missouri petitioned for statehood. Florida was acquired from Spain in 1821, and Michigan and Wisconsin were organized into territories.

The frontier story was not, however, entirely one of conflict. The different peoples of the frontier sometimes mingled peacefully and changed one another. Native Americans adapted horses, firearms, iron pots, blankets, fishhooks, hatchets, and many other European goods to their own purposes. Some wore woolen shirts, drank tea with sugar, and lived in log cabins introduced by Swedes and Finns. Similarly, white pioneers began growing corn, squash, beans, and pumpkins, crops that were introduced to them by Native Americans. They also began using many of the Native American folk medicines. From their hairstyles to their moccasins, the first settlers often resembled Native Americans more than they resembled whites living in the east.

The English language also expanded as frontier peoples exchanged vocabularies. Pecan, muskrat, opossum, hickory, and many other words came from Native American languages; prairie and cookie from the Dutch; and cockroach and alligator from the Spanish. Old words took on new meanings. In England corn meant any grain, but on the frontier it came to mean maize, or Native American corn. The many uses of maize were reflected in the more than 150 word combinations that were developed using the word corn. Because the skin of an adult male deer was often traded on the southern frontier for the main Spanish coin in that area, a buck and a dollar came to mean the same thing.

The people were as mixed as the languages they spoke. From the Atlantic coastal islands to the Mississippi and beyond, many cultures met and produced generations that blended different races and ethnic groups—English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, African Americans, and scores of Native American tribes. The resulting ethnic stew was one of the most enduring legacies of westward expansion.

Beyond the Mississippi

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As the frontier expanded beyond the Mississippi, it was moved by many of the same patterns and themes that had been important east of the river. Once again pioneers were drawn westward by economic opportunity and the chance to escape or purify an earlier way of life. Again the United States found itself in bloody conflict with rivals, such as Mexico and Native American tribes. The mix of people and exchange of cultures continued, now with an even richer mix of influences. The U.S. government played an even greater role in shaping the course of expansion west of the Mississippi.

Forces other than the search for farmland also propelled the frontier westward. The Far West was a vast storehouse of resources—gold, silver, coal, iron, copper, timber, rich soil, and immense grazing lands. The rise of industry created an almost limitless market for many of the West’s riches. That, and an expanding overseas market, gave immigrants additional reasons to move west. Rapid advances in transportation such as the building of the railroads made it easier for immigrants to move west.

However, the frontier did not uniformly expand westward from the Mississippi River. By the 1840s, the line of settlement had moved only a few hundred miles past the river. By 1850 Arkansas, Michigan, Texas, Iowa, and Wisconsin had been admitted as states. Then the frontier jumped across the middle of the country to Oregon and California on the Pacific Coast. California became the first state on the Pacific in 1850.

The frontier then began moving both westward and eastward, as white settlers gradually pushed into the huge interior area of the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Great Basin, and the far Southwest. Oregon, Minnesota, Kansas, Nevada, Nebraska, and Colorado were admitted to the Union between 1850 and 1876, but parts of the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains were settled slowly. Then in 1889 and 1890, six states were added: North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming. This left only Utah, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona in the contiguous United States, all of which had joined the Union by 1912.

The order in which states were admitted to the Union reflects the frontier’s movement across the American West. The many resources of the West were taken and developed at different times and for different purposes by pioneers from the East. Land in the Far West was developed for farming; gold and silver were mined from the mountains; and water was diverted to help make the Great Plains more hospitable for agriculture. Instead of a steady advance of new settlement, the frontier moved as a series of explosive changes.

Explorations

The United States began exploration of the Far West much later than some other nations. In 1540 the Spanish conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado led an ambitious expedition in search of gold into New Mexico and the southern plains. Later, during the 1770s, Juan Bautista de Anza and Francisco de Escalante explored the southern Rocky Mountains and much of the Southwest, while Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed along the Pacific coast as far as northern California. French explorers and traders explored the Missouri River valley and the northern plains in the 18th century. The Englishman Alexander Mackenzie, who traveled through western Canada to the Pacific in the 1790s, was the first Euro-American known to have crossed the northern part of the continent by land, while the English navigator George Vancouver explored and mapped the north Pacific coast.

Geographic knowledge had economic and strategic value, and for this reason nations did not share this information. The United States knew little of the Far West at the time of the Louisiana Purchase when the United States acquired what was roughly the western watershed of the Mississippi River from France in 1803. President Thomas Jefferson, who already had a deep curiosity about the West, selected Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the northern reaches of the new acquisition and then to proceed to the Pacific Ocean. With the help of a Shoshone woman guide, Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark ascended the Missouri River from Saint Louis, crossed the Rocky Mountains and descended the Columbia River. After a winter on the Pacific, they retraced their route and returned. Besides being one of the great adventures of American history, the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-1806) gathered a vast amount of geographic and scientific information, established diplomatic and trade relations with some Native American tribes, and helped establish the claim of the United States to the far Northwest.

Lewis and Clark led only one of several government-sponsored expeditions. Zebulon M. Pike (1805-1806) and Stephen H. Long (1820) explored the central Great Plains and the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. While John C. Frémont covered little new ground during the 1840s, his published accounts (mostly written by his wife Jesse) taught the public about the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, Sierra Nevada, and California. Maritime expeditions under Robert Gray mapped more of the Pacific coast. In 1792 Gray explored the mouth of the Columbia River, which strengthened the claim of the United States to the Northwest.

Besides these government agents, thousands of trappers, the mountain men, traveled through the Far West after 1820 in search of furs, especially beaver pelts. During the 1820s and 1830s these men’s travels did at least as much as government expeditions to fill in what were, to the United States, blank spaces on the Western map. One leading trapper, Jedediah Smith, covered more than 16,000 miles in his explorations and provided the government with information and maps of the region.

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American Westward Movement

The Old Northwest

The Old Southwest

Clash and Mingling of Cultures

Beyond the Mississippi

Explorations