Introduction

In the years between 1763 and 1890, what began as thirteen British colonies clinging to the eastern seaboard of North America expanded into a sprawling independent nation that stretched 3,000 miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. The story of the westward expansion of the United States is at once a romantic saga of human accomplishment and a tragic account of human cruelty. The steady march of American settlement into the West created national heroes and helped define the national character. Mountain men, miners, explorers, pioneers, cowboys, and outlaws lived such colorful and independent lives that their exploits continue to be celebrated in fiction and in film into the twentieth-first century. Many historians maintain that the process of settling the West—carving farms and communities out of the wilderness, surmounting tremendous odds to move whole families across the sprawling continent—made this nation's inhabitants more resourceful, independent, and rugged than their European forebears. In the romantic version of the settling of the West, stalwart pioneers carved their chosen land from a howling wilderness, building the most powerful nation in the world in the process.

However, from the perspective of the Native Americans who inhabited North America for thousands of years prior to white settlement, the westward expansion of the United States looks decidedly unromantic. Though there were wide variations among American Indian cultures, they shared a bond with the natural world and a sense that land could be used but not owned. The Indians were ill-prepared—culturally and biologically—to deal with the impact that Europeans would have on their lives. Diseases carried to the continent by Europeans took a terrible toll on Indian populations even before colonial British settlers began encroaching on Indian lands. As the colonies freed themselves from British rule and settlers pressed farther west, clashes with the Native Americans occurred more frequently. Indians were depicted as hostile and ignorant savages and whites did not hesitate to take Indian land and kill Native Americans who resisted. By the 1830s it had become official government policy to drive the Indians from land desired by white settlers. For more than a century, Americans waged relentless war on Indian populations, killing men, women, and children in their quest to rid themselves of what they called "the Indian menace." By the end of the nineteenth century, Native Americans who had survived the Indian Wars were no longer free to roam the land but were confined to reservations. To the native inhabitants of the continent, westward expansion was an utter disaster.

In this book we have tried to acknowledge the validity of different perspectives of westward expansion. Some chapters tell the story of the steady movement of settlers into the wilderness, and of the efforts of soldiers and diplomats to claim land for American control. Other chapters tell the story of the century-long conflict between whites and Indians. The book covers the gold strikes, wagon trains, and cattle drives that made westward expansion such a colorful and interesting era of American history. It also discusses the effects that westward expansion had on Native American cultures. Because this book is concerned with explaining the westward expansion of a growing nation, we have emphasized the role played by the colonial British and the Americans. But we have tried throughout to acknowledge the shaping influences exerted by American Indians as well as by the Spanish, Mexicans, French, and British.

In the chapters that follow we have tried to cover the major events and themes in the westward expansion of the United States. Our account begins with the conflict between French, British, Indian, and colonial forces in the 1750s and 1760s for control of the area just west of the Appalachian Mountains. It extends through the nineteenth century to the final defeat of the American Indians and the closing of the frontier in 1890. We have tried to present objective accounts of the romantic events that are so closely associated with westward expansion—the California gold rush, the wagon trains, railway construction, and the cowboys—but also to account for the small and mundane events that made westward expansion possible. Westward expansion was the work of an entire nation: for every dramatic leader like Andrew Jackson or Daniel Boone, there were hundreds of settlers who were equally brave and determined to claim their place in a new land. Many of the most dramatic westward movements were started not as part of the grand vision of an influential leader but as the result of independent pioneers striking out and pulling civilization along behind them. Our goal throughout has been to present an accurate portrayal of the complex, difficult, and violent process through which a young nation slowly pushed its boundaries westward.

—Tom Pendergast and Sara Pendergast