In Europe, large numbers of factory workers formed a dependent and seemingly permanent working class; by contrast, in the United States, the western frontier offered the possibility of independence and upward mobility for all. In 1843, one thousand pioneers took to the Oregon Trail as part of the “ Great Emigration .”
Full Answer
How did other federal laws influence the settlement of the west?
Other federal laws influenced the settle- ment of the American West after the land- mark Homestead Act.
Where is the western settlement?
Despite its name, the Western Settlement was more north than west of its companion Eastern Settlement and was located at the bottom of the deep Nuup Kangerlua fjord (inland from Nuuk, the modern-day Greenlandic capital).
Why did people move to the west in the 1800s?
The West was still the land of promise, and people continued to move there, some to fill the gaps between widely scattered farms in previously settled lands, others to new frontiers in Montana and Idaho. Much of the land was not the best, but improve- ments in irrigation and dry farming made it fertile and usable.
How the West was settled?
In the post–Civil War years, settlers moved westward into the Great Plains following the expansion of the railroads. How the West Was SettledPrologue 27 could commute his claim before the end of five years to a cash entry, $1.25 per acre, as long he had lived on the property for six months.
How did western expansion benefit the United States?
However, westward expansion provided the United States with vast natural resources and ports along the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts for expanding trade, key elements in creating the superpower America is today.
What things helped the settlement of the West?
Overview. Land, mining, and improved transportation by rail brought settlers to the American West during the Gilded Age.
How did the government impact the settlement of the West?
Signed into law by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, the Homestead Act encouraged westward migration and settlement by providing 160-acre tracts of land west of the Mississippi at little cost, in return for a promise to improve the land.
What were two positive outcomes of western expansion?
As it doubled the land area of the U.S., it also increased goods, services and wealth. Some advocates said that not only did the movement increase the size of the country, expanding to other countries and not just states, but it also added to farm lands needed to produce products and poultry.
What was the biggest impact of Westward Expansion?
Westward Expansion had the biggest impact on the economy and there were several positive outcomes as a result of Manifest Destiny. First, Westward Expansion led to the creation of many new technologies including steamboats, canals and the transcontinental railroads.
What were the 5 reasons for Westward Expansion?
What were 5 reasons for westward expansion?free land railroad gold and silver adventure and opportunity cattleWhat were some challenges the cowboys faced on the long drive?Violent storms, wind, rain, moving rivers, stampedes, rustlers, hot sun, discrimination, and 15 hours on the saddle38 more rows
How did westward expansion impact slavery?
The westward expansion carried slavery down into the Southwest, into Mississippi, Alabama, crossing the Mississippi River into Louisiana. Finally, by the 1840's, it was pouring into Texas. So the expansion of slavery, which became the major political question of the 1850's, was not just a political issue.
Why did the government want Western lands to be settled?
The federal government may have wanted to make sure that it could prevent other countries from trying to take the lands away from the United States by making sure the area was settled. The federal government may also have wanted to develop the resources available in the new lands.
What was the settlement of the West?
The Western Settlement (Old Norse: Vestribygð [ˈwestreˌbyɣð]) was a group of farms and communities established by Norsemen from Iceland around 985 in medieval Greenland.
What was one of the positive effects of westward expansion?
One of the positive effects of westward expansion was linking together people on both sides of the country.
Was westward movement positive or negative?
The Westward expansion gave America a chance to expand its territory, while having a chance double the land area of the United States also increased goods, services and wealth but more importantly it gave Americans …show more content…
Was the westward expansion successful?
With a resounding victory, the United States gained control of Texas, New Mexico, and California. The Oregon territory was annexed in 1846 as well, and the US controlled the land all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
What quickened the settlement of the West?
The National Road quickened the settlement of the West and the emergence of a truly national market economy by reducing transportation costs, opening up new markets, and stimulating the growth of towns.
How did the railroads help open the West?
The historic moment created the first transcontinental railroad, enabling travelers to go from coast to coast in a week's time, making it markedly easier to travel west in search of land for settlement. By 1872, under the Pacific Railroad Act, Congress awarded the railroads over 170 million acres in land grants.
What are two ways that railroads made it possible for western settlement?
In addition to transporting western food crops and raw materials to East Coast markets and manufactured goods from East Coast cities to the West Coast, the railroad also facilitated international trade. The first freight train to travel eastward from California carried a load of Japanese tea.
Why the early settlers went west?
Pioneers and settlers moved out west for different reasons. Some of them wanted to claim free land for ranching and farming from the government through the Homestead Act. Others came to California during the gold rush to strike it rich. Even others, such as the Mormons, moved west to avoid persecution.
Where did the American settlers move to?
Thousands of people crossed the Rockies to the Oregon Territory, which belonged to Great Britain, and thousands more moved into the Mexican territories of California, New Mexico and Texas. In 1837, American settlers in Texas joined with their Tejano neighbors (Texans of Spanish origin) and won independence from Mexico.
What was the Westward Expansion and the Compromise of 1850?
Westward Expansion and the Compromise of 1850. Bleeding Kansas. In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson purchased the territory of Louisiana from the French government for $15 million. The Louisiana Purchase stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to New Orleans, and it doubled the size of the United States.
Why was the Mexican American war so unpopular?
That same month, Polk declared war against Mexico, claiming (falsely) that the Mexican army had “invaded our territory and shed American blood on American soil.” The Mexican-American War proved to be relatively unpopular, in part because many Northerners objected to what they saw as a war to expand the “slaveocracy.” In 1846, Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot attached a proviso to a war-appropriations bill declaring that slavery should not be permitted in any part of the Mexican territory that the U.S. might acquire. Wilmot’s measure failed to pass, but it made explicit once again the sectional conflict that haunted the process of westward expansion.
What was the Missouri compromise?
The acquisition of this land re-opened the question that the Missouri Compromise had ostensibly settled: What would be the status of slavery in new American territories? After two years of increasingly volatile debate over the issue, Kentucky Senator Henry Clay proposed another compromise. It had four parts: first, California would enter the Union as a free state; second, the status of slavery in the rest of the Mexican territory would be decided by the people who lived there; third, the slave trade (but not slavery) would be abolished in Washington, D.C.; and fourth, a new Fugitive Slave Act would enable Southerners to reclaim runaway slaves who had escaped to Northern states where slavery was not allowed.
What did Jefferson believe about the Westward Expansion?
To Jefferson, westward expansion was the key to the nation’s health: He believed that a republic depended on an independent, virtuous citizenry for its survival, and that independence and virtue went hand in hand with land ownership, especially the ownership of small farms.
What was the Westward Migration?
Westward migration was an essential part of the republican project , he argued, and it was Americans’ “ manifest destiny ” to carry the “great experiment of liberty” to the edge of the continent: to “overspread and to possess the whole of the [land] which Providence has given us,” O’Sullivan wrote.
How many square miles did the Gadsden Purchase add to the United States?
Did you know? In 1853, the Gadsden Purchase added about 30,000 square miles of Mexican territory to the United States and fixed the boundaries of the “lower 48” where they are today.
How was the West settled?
How the West Was Settled. The 150-Year-Old Homestead Act Lured Americans Looking for a New Life and New Opportunities. By Greg Bradsher. W. hen the war for American independence formally ended in 1783, the United States covered more than 512 million acres of land. By 1860, the nation had acquired more than 1.4 billion more acres, ...
How did the Homestead Act affect the American West?
Therefore, new laws allowed settlers to acquire up to 1,120 acres when used in conjunction with the preemption and homestead laws. To promote the growth and preservation of timber on the western prairie and to ad- just the Homestead Act to western condi- tions, Congress passed the Timber Culture Law of March 3, 1873, which was intended to promote the planting of trees. The Desert Land Act of March 3, 1877, intended to promote the establishment of individual farms, was actually backed by wealthy cattle- men. Neither law proved successful. The Timber and Stone Act of June 3, 1878, put almost 3.6 million acres of valuable forest land into private hands before it was finally re- pealed in 1900. The act applied only to lands “unfit for cultivation” and “valuable chiefly for timber” or stone in California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington and was extended to the remainder of the public domain (ex- cept Alaska) in 1892. It allowed claimants to buy up to 160 acres at $2.50 an acre. A tim- ber magnate could use dummy entrymen to grab the nation’s richest forest lands for little cost. The act was so unsatisfactory that the General Land Office recommended its repeal almost annually between 1878 and 1900. Land fraud became so bad that Congress in 1879 created the first Public Lands Commission to look into revising land laws but paid little attention to its recommendations. The head of the General Land Office, William A. J. Sparks, declared in 1885 that “the public domain was being made the prey
How did the Homestead Act help the economy?
Homestead laws, despite their inadequa- cies, did foster economic growth , which was certainly in the national interest. They enabled large numbers of people of modest means to obtain farms, either free or at rela- tively low cost. The United States’ greatest period of ag- ricultural expansion was between 1860 and 1920. It is probably safe to say that Homestead Act accounted for a substantial proportion of the new farms opened during that period. And certainly the Homestead Act left an important legacy in the develop- ment of the country. In 1936, the year after most homestead- ing was effectively ended, Congress created the Homestead National Monument of America in Beatrice, Nebraska, as a me- morial to all the settlers who had built the American West and to commemorate the changes to the land and the nation brought about by the Homestead Act of 1862. P
Where did homesteading occur?
During the first decade of the 20th cen-tury, homesteading increased in the plateau and basin states, as settlers moved into the cold desert of southern Oregon and into interior Washington, California east of the Sierras, and Arizona. Homesteading did not increase in Alaska, despite the gold rush. The Enlarged Homestead Act of February 19, 1909, increased the maximum permis-sible homestead to 320 acres of nonirri-gable land in parts of Colorado, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Arizona, and Wyoming. The law responded to the dryland farming movement that grew soon after the turn of the century. Lands previously thought to be useful only for grazing now became valuable for agriculture as farmers adopted techniques of deep plow-ing, compacting, summer fallowing, and seeding drought-resistant crops. As with the 1862 Homestead Act, the homesteaders had to reside on the land.
How many homestead patents were issued in the 1880s?
During the 1880s, nearly 193,000 home- stead patents were issued, nearly three times as many as in the previous decade. This re- sulted, by the late 1880s, in the public do- main rapidly diminishing. In 1887 Congress, seeking to satisfy the nation’s hunger for land, adopted a policy of giving individual farms to reservation Indians and opening the remaining Indian lands to settlers. The Great Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota and Chippewa lands in Minnesota and other Indian land was opened to settlement. The most famous opening was the “land rush” in Oklahoma. In 1885, Congress authorized the Indian Office to extinguish all native claims to the two unoccupied portions of the region—the Oklahoma District and the Cherokee Outlet. For the next three years, Indian agents did nothing, knowing that any settlement would doom the whole reservation system. During that time, “boomers” continued moving into the areas. Western pressure forced the Indian Office in Washington to act. In January 1889, the Creeks and Seminoles were forced to sur- render their rights to the Oklahoma District in return for cash awards of nearly 4.2 mil- lion dollars. Two months later, Congress officially opened the district to settlers un- der the Homestead Act and authorized the President to locate two land offices there. Acting under those instructions, President Benjamin Harrison announced that the Oklahoma District would be thrown open at noon on April 22, 1889. Thousands of people gathered for a land rush. A few days before the opening, they were allowed to surge across the Cherokee Outlet on the north and the Chickasaw reservation on the south to the borders of the promised land. Most waited along the southern border of Kansas and the northern boundary of Texas. Rumor had it that many had already sneaked across the border to establish the town of Guthrie hours ahead of schedule, thereby earning the name “sooners.” On the morn- ing of April 22, 100,000 persons surround- ed the Oklahoma District. By sunset, every available homestead lot had been claimed, over 1.9 million acres. Oklahoma City had a population of 10,000 tent dwellings by that night and Guthrie, nearly 15,000. The rush also resulted in the creation of the towns of Kingfisher, Stillwater, and Norman. A little over a year later, on May 2, 1890, Congress created the Oklahoma Territory. After the Oklahoma Territory was set up in 1890, its population was increased dur- ing the next years by a series of reservation “openings.” The Sauk, Fox, and Potawatomi lands, 900,000 acres in all, were thrown open in September 1891; the 3 million acres of the Cheyenne-Arapaho reservation went in April 1892. The latter were quickly settled by 30,000 waiting homesteaders. A more dramatic rush occurred at noon on September 16, 1893, when 100,000 to 150,000 home seekers rushed the 6.5 mil- lion acres of the Cherokee Outlet.
What was the purpose of the Homestead Act?
During the 1840s, the call for homestead legislation received sup- port from eastern labor reformers, who envisioned free land as a means by which industrial workers could escape low wages and deplorable working conditions. Congress did, on occasion, offer free land in regions the nation wanted settled. But the landmark law that governed how public land was distributed and settled for over 100 years came in 1862. The Homestead Act, which became law on May 20, 1862, was responsible for helping settle much of the American West. In its centennial year in 1962, President John F. Kennedy called the act “the single greatest stimulus to national de- velopment ever enacted.” This past year marked the 150th anniversary of the Homestead Act. The provisions of the Homestead Act, while not perfect and often fraudulently manipulated, were responsible for helping settle much of the American West. In all, between 1862 and 1976, well over 270 million acres (10 percent of the area of the United States) were claimed and settled under the act.
How many acres did the Homestead Act give?
Pre–Homestead Act legislation included the Armed Occupation Law of 1842, which offered 160 acres to each person willing to fight the Indian insurgence in Florida and occupy and cultivate the land for five years. Between 1850 and 1853, Congress offered 320 acres to single men and 640 acres to couples settling in the Oregon Country.
Manifest Destiny
Westward Expansion and Slavery
- Meanwhile, the question of whether or not slavery would be allowed in the new western states shadowed every conversation about the frontier. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise had attempted to resolve this question: It had admitted Missouri to the union as a slave state and Maine as a free state, preserving the fragile balance in Congress. More important, it had stipulat…
Westward Expansion and The Mexican War
- Despite this sectional conflict, Americans kept on migrating West in the years after the Missouri Compromise was adopted. Thousands of people crossed the Rockies to the Oregon Territory, which belonged to Great Britain, and thousands more moved into the Mexican territories of California, New Mexico and Texas. In 1837, American settlers in Texas joi...
Westward Expansion and The Compromise of 1850
- In 1848, the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican War and added more than 1 million square miles, an area larger than the Louisiana Purchase, to the United States. The acquisition of this land re-opened the question that the Missouri Compromise had ostensibly settled: What would be the status of slavery in new American territories? After two years of increasingly volatil…
Bleeding Kansas
- But the larger question remained unanswered. In 1854, Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas proposed that two new states, Kansas and Nebraska, be established in the Louisiana Purchase west of Iowaand Missouri. According to the terms of the Missouri Compromise, both new states would prohibit slavery because both were north of the 36º30’ parallel. However, since no Southe…