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.
The survival of American freedom depended on it. Meanwhile, the question of whether or not slavery would be allowed in the new western states shadowed every conversation about the frontier. In , 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.
However, the Missouri Compromise did not apply to new territories that were not part of the Louisiana Purchase, and so the issue of slavery continued to fester as the nation expanded. Meanwhile, more and more Northerners came to believed that the expansion of slavery impinged upon their own liberty, both as citizens—the pro-slavery majority in Congress did not seem to represent their interests—and as yeoman farmers.
They did not necessarily object to slavery itself, but they resented the way its expansion seemed to interfere with their own economic opportunity. 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 , American settlers in Texas joined with their Tejano neighbors Texans of Spanish origin and won independence from Mexico. They petitioned to join the United States as a slave state. This promised to upset the careful balance that the Missouri Compromise had achieved, and the annexation of Texas and other Mexican territories did not become a political priority until the enthusiastically expansionist cotton planter James K.
Polk was elected to the presidency in Thanks to the maneuvering of Polk and his allies, Texas joined the union as a slave state in February ; in June, after negotiations with Great Britain, Oregon joined as a free state.
In , 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 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. But the larger question remained unanswered.
In , Illinois Senator Stephen A. Learn more about the Transcontinental Railroad. Since construction began in earnest after the end of the war, most of the workers on the Union Pacific were Army veterans and Irish immigrants who had come to the U.
When the railroad was completed on May 10, , with the ceremonial driving of the last spike at Promontory Summit, Utah, it had already facilitated further population of the western states in concert with the Homestead Act. The railroads led to the decline and eventual end to the use of emigrant trails, wagon trains, and stagecoach lines, and a further constriction of the native population and their territories.
Telegraph lines were also built along the railroad right of way as the track was laid, replacing the first single-line Transcontinental Telegraph with a multi-line telegraph.
The Homestead Act of was intended to make lands opening up in the west available to a wide variety of settlers, not just those who could afford to buy land outright or buy land under the Preemption Act of , which established a lowered land price for squatters who had occupied the land for a minimum of 14 months. In the s, Southerners had opposed three similar efforts to open the west out of fear that western lands would be established as free, non-slaveholding areas. Most of those objecting to such legislation left Congress when the Southern states seceded, allowing the Homestead Act to be passed during the American Civil War.
Learn more about the Homestead Act. The Homestead Act required settlers to complete three steps in order to obtain acre lots of surveyed government land. First, an application for a land claim had to be filed, then the homesteader had to live on the land for the next five years and make improvements to it, including building a 12 by 14 shelter.
Finally, after five years, the homesteader could file for patent deed of title by filing proof of residency and proof of improvements with the local land office, which would then send paperwork with a certificate of eligibility to the General Land Office in Washington, DC, for final approval. The land was free except for a small registration fee. On New Years Eve, he met local Land Office officials and persuaded them to open early so he could file a land claim.
By the end of the century, more than 80 million acres had been granted to over , successful homesteaders. In total, about 10 percent of the U. Pony Express : The Pony Express was a system of horse and riders set up in the mids to deliver mail and packages.
It employed 80 deliverymen and between four and five hundred horses. Read more about Pony Express. It resulted in Mexico taking control. Read more about Battle Of The Alamo. It took place in North America and involved many Native American people.
Read more about French Indian War. The Sand Creek Massacre : The Sand Creek Massacre was the brutal attack of Cheyenne Indians consisting mostly of women and children by Union Soldiers that occurred, despite the flying of an American flag to show that they were peaceful and a white flag after the attack began, in Colorado in Read more about The Sand Creek Massacre.
Oregon Territory : The Oregon Territory was the name given to the area that became the state of Oregon. It became an official state in February of Read more about Oregon Territory. It was used by thousands of people to populate the western frontier. Read more about The Oregon Trail. They were led by a Sauk warrior named Black Hawk. Read more about Black Hawk War. Read more about The Mountain Meadows Massacre. John Jacob Astor : John Jacob Astor was a wealthy merchant and fur trader whose enterprise was played an important role in the westward expansion of the United States.
Read more about John Jacob Astor. Corral : The O. Corral refers to a fight at this corall in Tombstone, Arizona. Read more about the gunfight at the O. Davy Crockett : Davy Crockett was a famous Tennessee outdoorsman who also served many political offices in North America.
He was part of the Texas Revolution and died at the Alamo. Read more about Davy Crockett. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, scientists as well as society at large were fascinated by the ancient, often enormous, fossils that were being unearthed in great quantities from North America. Many of the most exciting finds were due largely to the efforts of two men, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, who stood at the forefront of vertebrate paleontology. Between and the late s, the two men classified new species of North American dinosaurs.
Scientists had previously known of only nine. The extinct animals that Cope and Marsh introduced to science include many dinosaurs commonly known today, such as Triceratops, Allosaurus, Brontosaurus, Diplodocus, and Stegosaurus. They also named and catalogued innumerable, long-vanished species of mammals, fish, and birds.
Today, more than a century after their great discoveries, the names Cope and Marsh—like Lewis and Clark or Stanley and Livingstone—remain linked together in history books. Unlike these other famous duos, however, Cope and Marsh hated each other with a passion.
As a result, not all of the animals that they described became permanent additions to the roster of extinct species. Their race for preeminence sometimes caused the two paleontologists to give different names to the same species and announce discoveries of new animals without having adequate evidence.
The scholar then traveled to Europe to study, and while visiting his uncle in England Marsh approached him with the idea of awarding money to Yale for a museum of natural sciences, which Marsh could run as a professor. After some negotiation—Peabody preferred Harvard—Marsh got his way. In he became the first professor of paleontology in North America. Unlike Marsh, Edward Drinker Cope was an early achiever.
Born in , at the tender age of six he recorded his impressions of a fossil known as Icthyosaur. When Cope was 18 he published a scientific paper on salamanders, the first of some 1, writings he would produce in his lifetime. In he left Haverford and moved to Haddonfield, New Jersey, to study fossils found there.
At that time, the study of dinosaurs was relatively new. In fossil-hunter Ferdinand Hayden found some Iguanodon -like teeth in Montana that were the first North American fossils determined to be from dinosaurs. These bones from a dinosaur called Hadrosaurus showed that the animal must have walked erect rather than on all fours like a lizard. The find attracted both Marsh and Cope, and the two men spent a week together in exploring the fossil fields there. Perhaps marsh and cope were fated to clash.
Both men were notoriously flawed personalities competing in a relatively exclusive field. Throughout his life his detractors said that he was autocratic and petty; that he appropriated the work of his assistants and published it under his own name; and that he was a tightwad who never paid his employees on time.
Marsh and a dozen students set out on his first Yale-sponsored expedition in August He picked up an army escort in Nebraska and explored portions of Kansas and the territories of Wyoming and Utah. The expedition returned to Yale in December with 36 boxes of specimens, which included a hollow bone fragment that appeared to be from the wing of a flying reptile known as a Pterodactyl.
Marsh himself had found the fossil in a narrow canyon in western Kansas. As the race to discover extinct species intensified, Cope and Marsh began to clash. In Cope attempted to search for fossils in a part of Wyoming Territory that Marsh considered his turf. By the two were exchanging heated letters. I was never so angry in my life. The dinosaur rush began in earnest in after a mining teacher named Ar-thur Lakes wrote to Marsh about fossil bones he had discovered near Morrison, Colorado.
When Marsh did not reply, Lakes sent some samples to Cope. The shipment included the first remains of a Stegosaurus. At about the same time that Lakes made his discovery, another Colorado teacher, O.
Unlike Marsh, Cope responded quickly. Among the first specimens Lucas sent to him were the vertebrae of a huge animal that Cope named Camarasaurus chambered reptile after its hollow bones. Yet Lakes had come upon portions of the same species of creature, and Marsh had already named it Titanosaurus. Marsh had published first, and according to scientific tradition he won the right to name the animal. In the spirit of underhanded competition that would characterize the relationship, Marsh asked Mudge to woo Lucas over to his side, but the schoolmaster remained loyal to Cope.
For his part, Cope would try several times to win over Mudge, to no avail. The bones are very thick, well preserved, and easy to get out. The site at Como Bluff proved to be a mother lode of dinosaurs from the Jurassic Period, a stage in the Mesozoic Era that ended million years ago.
The men working for Cope and Marsh had to carefully extract the fossil bones from the surrounding rock, laboring through searing summer heat or frigid winter cold. They toiled in the West during a time when hostile Indians were a very real threat. Cope and Marsh made occasional visits to the digs but usually continued their feud by proxy. The competition between the rival camps grew in intensity and animosity. The era of covered wagon emigration came to an end when the first Transcontinental Railroad was completed in , linking the east and west coasts of America by train for the first time.
Its construction was a massive undertaking, totaling 1, miles of track laid across the most mountainous parts of the country. Two companies, the Union Pacific in the east and the Central Pacific in the west, built the track from both ends, meeting in the middle at Promontory Summit in Utah.
The railroad opened up the west to a new level of mobility; a journey that had taken six months or more by wagon could now be done in about a week. The Wild West was not so wild anymore, but the image of the frontier and the perseverance it took to get there has remained as a defining piece of American history. Perhaps the most notorious true story from the pioneer era is that of the Donner Party, who became trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevada and resorted to cannibalism to survive.
The original party consisted of two families, the Donners and the Reeds, who left Springfield, Illinois for California in the spring of They first travelled to Independence, Missouri, the crossroads of the major pioneer routes. From there, they set off along the California Trail, joining up with other wagon trains they met along the way.
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