Western Expansion

After the Louisiana Purchase, many people living in the Eastern United States decided to move West to start settlements in the new lands. The Homestead Act of 1862 spurred the West's settlement by encouraging farmers to move there by granting them land. Freedmen were also drawn to the West to escape their former masters and get their own land.

Westward expansion was also driven on by the discovery of gold, silver, and other minerals in the territory that is now California, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, and Montana. Many prospectors came to these areas, hoping to make their fortunes, but most were disappointed. Many companies sprung up to mine these minerals, and this industrial boom necessitated the construction of the Pacific Railroad, or America's first transcontinental railroad.

This expansion came at the cost of the Indian tribes living in the Western lands. There were three options for the Indians: be relocated to small areas in the United States which were deemed Indian camps, fight the United States, or try to flee to Canada. Indian camps, or reservations, were usually on useless land and had poor living conditions, so many chose to either defend their land or flee to Canada. Those who chose to defend their lands were met with American armies fresh from the Civil War, and were mostly massacred. The Indian tribes were never united against the American settlers, which was one of the main reasons for their failure to keep their lands safe. The Sioux tribe was the only one to make it to Canada, although many individual Indians managed to get there.

Another major industry that popped up in the West after the Civil War was that of longhorn cattle farming. Due to the high price and demand of beef in the East, cattle farming became a profitable business. From 1866 to 1888, the most common mode of getting the cows to market was the 'long drive', where cowboys drove huge herds of cattle across the prairies to towns in which they would be slaughtered and shipped east in trains. One of the most important of these 'cattle towns' was Dodge City, Kansas.

Many of the people who traveled to the West did so to take advantage of the Homestead Act, which would give a settler the right to claim as much as 160 acres of land in the Great Plains by staking a claim on the property and then living there for five years. However, it wasn't easy to live in the Plains, as there were many challenges to overcome. Some of these were:

1. The land was often insufficient for farming, while livestock, equipment, and seed were expensive, as they had to be imported from the East.
2. The weather was very unpredictable, with droughts, hail, and pests frequently destroying crops.
3. Transportation costs and high interest rates on loans created financial problems for many homesteaders.
4. Overproduction led to falling crop prices, causing many homesteaders to give up.

In the 1840s, America expanded greatly in the West, obtaining a large amount of land from Mexico as a result of winning the Mexican-American war. This land included modern-day California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and parts of Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. These areas were flooded with Americans from the East, who came to make their fortunes in the West after gold was found in California in 1848. The arrival of these Americans largely destroyed Spanish culture in that area, but the Spanish style of architecture and names (Los Angeles, San Diego), remain to this day.

Many advances in technology were made during this time that made life on the frontier easier. The invention of telegram and telephone made it easier for settlers who had access to this technology to talk with their families back home. Another example is barbed wire, which made it easier and cheaper for farmers to keep unwanted animals off their farms. One of the greatest inventors of this time, and of all time, was Thomas Edison, who is credited for inventing the lightbulb and over two thousand other inventions.