The American West

After the United States declared independence from Britain in 1776, many more settlers arrived from Europe. Most of the first settlers made their homes in the eastern states, but a few travelled further west towards what are now Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois.

Many more people moved into the area around the Great Lakes after 1825, when the opening of the Erie Canal made transport much easier. To the west of the Mississippi, explorers and traders set up routes, or trails, to be followed by settlers. In 1848, at the end of the Mexican-American War, people started travelling to the newly acquired land in the West. Known as pioneers, they made the journey in long trains of covered wagons. On reaching their destinations, families chose place to settle. They chopped down trees to build homes and cleared land for farming. If crops failed, families went hungry or gathered food from the wild.

GOLD RUSH

The discovery of gold in California in 1848, and in Nevada and Colorado in 1859, attracted thousands of prospectors. They washed river gravel in large pans, hoping to find gold, but few of them made their fortunes.

   

In 1862, the US government passed the Homestead Act, which offered – for a small fee – 65 hectares of land to each family who would settle and farm for at least five years.

Thousands took up the offer, and towns sprang up all over the Great Plains and the West. The land the government was selling so cheaply was taken from the Native Americans, who were forced onto reservations.

The arrival of Europeans soon had a disastrous effect on the Native Americans, who had no resistance to diseases such as measles and smallpox. They died, too, in disputes over land, as more and more Europeans moved west looking for places to settle. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 forced all Native Americans in the eastern states to live on reservations. Their lands were taken over by European settlers.

Native Americans came under more pressure in the 1860s, when the railroads spread westwards. The buffalo (bison), on which many Plains peoples depended, were hunted almost to extinction, partly to feed the construction gangs. In 1876, the Sioux and their allies defeated the US cavalry at the Little Bighorn river. But a final massacre of over 200 Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890 brought to an end the tragic story of the ‘Indians wars’.

GERONIMO

Geronimo (1829-1909) was a leader of the Apaches. When Mexican troops killed his family, he became a guerrilla fighter, feared by both Mexican and American soldiers. He eventually surrendered and in 1905 took part in President Roosevelt’s election victory parade.