HOW THE WEST WAS WON?

“GO WEST, YOUNG MAN.”

The American West covers a vast area from the Mississippi River to the Pacific coast. It was largely unexplored by white settlers until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Land was scarce in the east, so many white people who wished to farm went West in search of a new life. The US government promised these pioneers land in the newly-acquired states of California and Oregon.

Many Americans believed that there should be one large American republic stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They thought that this was part of God’s plan, and they had the right to claim the land from the primitive natives.

THE HAZARDOUS JOURNEY

Large-scale migration began in 1843. By 1848, over 14,000 settlers had followed. Much of the land they crossed consisted of mountains, deserts, and huge, treeless plains. To avoid the worst of the winter blizzards in the mountains, travellers normally began their journey in late April or early May. It was not possible to travel earlier in the year, as there was not enough grass on the Great. Plains to feed the livestock. If everything went according to plan, the 2,000-mile journey took around four and a half months, covering about fifteen miles a day. Any delay meant that fierce snowstorms would be encountered in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Migrants suffered from disease, violent dust storms, wagons stuck in mud, and plagues of insects such as mosquitoes. One in 25 of the migrants failed to make their destination. Many deaths were self-inflicted. Not experienced in the use of guns, they frequently shot themselves or each other by mistake.

THE TRAGEDY OF THE DONNER FAMILY

In 1846, a group from Illinois decided to emigrate to California. One of the families was called Donner. Their story was to become one of the best-known tragedies in the history of Western emigration. They made two vital mistakes. They started late, and followed an untested route and got lost. Morals became poor, tempers flared, and one of the men was stabbed to death. It was late October by the time they started to climb the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and they were desperately short of food. It became clear that the snow had made the mountains impassable. They prepared to spend the winter in the mountain snow. Starving, they ate glue, fur, and dogs. Eventually, they ate their own dead. Out of 81 travellers, over half died.

FIRST CONTACTS WITH NATIVE AMERICANS

When the white people first explored the American West, they found Native Americans living in every part of the region, many of them on the Great Plains. White people saw the Plains Indians as savages, but in fact each tribe had its own complex culture and social structure. They didn’t believe that land should be owned by individuals or families, but it should belong to all people. They believed that human beings were indivisible from all the other elements of the natural world: animals, birds, soil, air, mountains, water, and the sun. In the early days of migration, relations between the pioneers and Native Americans were generally friendly. Trade was common, and sometimes fur traders married and integrated into Indian society. The travellers gave Native Americans blankets, beads and mirrors in exchange for food. They also sold those guns and ammunition. In the 1840s attracts on wagons were rare and the Plains Indians generally regarded these first white travellers with amusement.

GOLD FEVER AND CONFLICT

Then in 1849 came an event which greatly changed the relationship between new and Native Americans – the Gold Rush. Thousands of men of many different nationalities flocked to California, and later to Colorado and Nevada, to search for gold. With the rush came the development of mining camps and the growth of industries, towns, shops road systems, and railroads. All of this on sacred hunting grounds. Inevitably, conflict ensued. To the white people, the Great Plains were a wilderness waiting to be tamed, a resource to be exploited, and a potential source of profit. They were not concerned about damage to the environment. Native Americans did little farming and mining. They were hunters, and central to their way of life was the wild buffalo. There had been enormous hers of buffalo, estimated at 60 million, but by the mid-1880s they were virtually extinct, having been hunted by white Americans.

BROKEN AND DEFEATED

The whites took over more and more of the Indian homelands, until tensions finally exploded into war in the 1860s. Hostilities continued for over twenty years, and terrible atrocities were committed. In 1890, the Seventh Cavalry surrounded and disarmed a band of Sioux at Wounded Creek. Fighting broke out, and 146 Sioux men, women and children were slaughtered. This was the last great act of violence against the Plains Indians. The spirit of the Native Americans had finally been broken. They were persuaded to live in reservations, where government officials encouraged them to adopt an American way of life.

Really extracted from the book of HW Upper-Intermediate