What groups traveled to the West?

What groups traveled to the West?

Explore these resources to learn more about what happened between 1810 and 1893, as immigrants, American Indians, United States citizens, and freed slaves moved west.

Who started the Westward?

Westward expansion began in earnest in 1803. Thomas Jefferson negotiated a treaty with France in which the United States paid France $15 million for the Louisiana Territory – 828,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River – effectively doubling the size of the young nation.

Which group moved west first?

The first white Americans to move west were the mountain men, who went to the Rockies to hunt beaver, bear and elk in the 1820s and 1830s. Then, in 1841, a wagon train pioneered the 3,200km-long Oregon Trail to the woodland areas of the north-west coast of America.

What is the history of the west?

Often in violation of its own treaties, the United States removed Native groups to ever-shrinking reservations, incorporated the West first as territories and then as states, and, for the first time in its history, controlled the enormity of land between the two oceans. The history of the late-nineteenth-century West is not a simple story.

Was the west a frontier or frontier?

Recently, some historians have turned away from the traditional view of the West as a frontier, a “meeting point between civilization and savagery” in the words of historian Frederick Jackson Turner. They have begun writing about the West as a crossroads of cultures, where various groups struggled for property, profit, and cultural dominance.

Who are the indigenous people of the American West?

Indigenous Americans have lived in North America for over ten millennia and, into the late nineteenth century, perhaps as many as 250,000 Native people still inhabited the American West. 1 But then unending waves of American settlers, the American military, and the unstoppable onrush of American capital conquered all.

What factors led to the settlement of the American West?

Like this lesson Share. The settlement of the American West began in the 1840s and ended in the early 1900s. Several factors influenced this settlement, including the use of the Oregon Trail and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.