Series Title: Voices from America's Past

Contents
The land and the people -- The conquest -- The mining frontier -- The ranching frontier -- The farming frontier.

It is hard to fix a beginning date for the Westward Movement, unless we start with 1492 and Columbus’ first voyage of discovery. In reality the entire history of the New World is a movement of Europeans to the Western Hemisphere. In earlier booklets in this series we have dealt with the migrations of pioneers from the Atlantic Coast to the land beyond the Appalachian Mountains. We also have covered the expedition of Lewis and Clark to the Pacific Coast in 1805 and the annexation of Texas in 1845. This booklet is primarily concerned with the region beyond the Midwest, the high plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevadas, the deserts, and the fertile Pacific Coast.

Restlessness and mobility have always been distinguishing characteristics of the American people. Revolutionary War veterans settled in Ohio or Kentucky and lived to see their children move on to Missouri or Texas. Their children’s children pushed farther west to the Pacific Coast over the Oregon Trail or sailed around Cape Horn to join the gold rush in California. The westward movement still goes on, as a glance at the latest census report will quickly show. The difference is that nowadays the immigrant can arrive in California in a few hours by jet from New York, pan his gold on the assembly line of a company making guided missiles, and sleep in a cabin with a barbecue grill and a swimming pool in the back yard.

This booklet begins with descriptions of the land and the people in the Great West before the Civil War. This was a period of exploration and conquest. Until they saw for themselves, people could not believe the plains were as broad, the deserts as hot and dry, and the mountains as rugged and high as they really were. Every day was an adventure, some of which ended disastrously. But the West was conquered and the continent spanned by trail, by stagecoach route, and finally by railroad.

This booklet illustrates the various frontiers from the plains to the Pacific. The West has stimulated the American imagination as almost no other aspect of our history (the television fare on any average night proves this); hence the total literature on the subject is vast. We have selected a handful of interesting reports from the many available.