westward movement essay

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Westward Expansion

By: History.com Editors

Updated: September 30, 2019 | Original: December 15, 2009

Teamsters Camping For The Night(Original Caption) Westward Movement. Teamsters establishing camp for night. Mid 19th Century wash drawing.

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson purchased the territory of Louisiana from the French government for $15 million. The Louisiana Purchase stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to New Orleans, and it doubled the size of the United States. To Jefferson, westward expansion was the key to the nation’s health: He believed that a republic depended on an independent, virtuous citizenry for its survival, and that independence and virtue went hand in hand with land ownership, especially the ownership of small farms. (“Those who labor in the earth,” he wrote, “are the chosen people of God.”) In order to provide enough land to sustain this ideal population of virtuous yeomen, the United States would have to continue to expand. The westward expansion of the United States is one of the defining themes of 19th-century American history, but it is not just the story of Jefferson’s expanding “empire of liberty.” On the contrary, as one historian writes, in the six decades after the Louisiana Purchase, westward expansion “very nearly destroy[ed] the republic.”

Manifest Destiny

By 1840, nearly 7 million Americans–40 percent of the nation’s population–lived in the trans-Appalachian West. Following a trail blazed by Lewis and Clark , most of these people had left their homes in the East in search of economic opportunity. Like Thomas Jefferson , many of these pioneers associated westward migration, land ownership and farming with freedom. 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. In 1843, one thousand pioneers took to the Oregon Trail as part of the “ Great Emigration .”

Did you know? In 1853, the Gadsden Purchase added about 30,000 square miles of Mexican territory to the United States and fixed the boundaries of the “lower 48” where they are today.

In 1845, a journalist named John O’Sullivan put a name to the idea that helped pull many pioneers toward the western frontier. Westward migration was an essential part of the republican project, he argued, and it was Americans’ “ manifest destiny ” to carry the “great experiment of liberty” to the edge of the continent: to “overspread and to possess the whole of the [land] which Providence has given us,” O’Sullivan wrote. The survival of American freedom depended on it.

Westward Expansion and Slavery

Meanwhile, the question of whether or not slavery would be allowed in the new western states shadowed every conversation about the frontier. In 1820, 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. More important, it had stipulated that in the future, slavery would be prohibited north of the southern boundary of Missouri (the 36º30’ parallel) in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase .

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. The Southern economy grew increasingly dependent on “King Cotton” and the system of forced labor that sustained it. 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.

Westward Expansion and the Mexican War

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 1837, 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 1844. Thanks to the maneuvering of Polk and his allies, Texas joined the union as a slave state in February 1846; in June, after negotiations with Great Britain, Oregon joined as a free state.

That same month, Polk declared war against Mexico , claiming (falsely) that the Mexican army had “invaded our territory and shed American blood on American soil.” The Mexican-American War proved to be relatively unpopular, in part because many Northerners objected to what they saw as a war to expand the “slaveocracy.” In 1846, Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot attached a proviso to a war-appropriations bill declaring that slavery should not be permitted in any part of the Mexican territory that the U.S. might acquire. Wilmot’s measure failed to pass, but it made explicit once again the sectional conflict that haunted the process of westward expansion.

Westward Expansion and the Compromise of 1850

In 1848, 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.C.; and fourth, a new Fugitive Slave Act would enable Southerners to reclaim runaway slaves who had escaped to Northern states where slavery was not allowed.

Bleeding Kansas

But the larger question remained unanswered. In 1854, Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas proposed that two new states, Kansas and Nebraska , be established in the Louisiana Purchase west of Iowa and Missouri. According to the terms of the Missouri Compromise, both new states would prohibit slavery because both were north of the 36º30’ parallel. However, since no Southern legislator would approve a plan that would give more power to “free-soil” Northerners, Douglas came up with a middle ground that he called “popular sovereignty”: letting the settlers of the territories decide for themselves whether their states would be slave or free.

Northerners were outraged: Douglas, in their view, had caved to the demands of the “slaveocracy” at their expense. The battle for Kansas and Nebraska became a battle for the soul of the nation. Emigrants from Northern and Southern states tried to influence the vote. For example, thousands of Missourians flooded into Kansas in 1854 and 1855 to vote (fraudulently) in favor of slavery. “Free-soil” settlers established a rival government, and soon Kansas spiraled into civil war. Hundreds of people died in the fighting that ensued, known as “ Bleeding Kansas .”

A decade later, the civil war in Kansas over the expansion of slavery was followed by a national civil war over the same issue. As Thomas Jefferson had predicted, it was the question of slavery in the West–a place that seemed to be the emblem of American freedom–that proved to be “the knell of the union.”

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Home — Essay Samples — History — Westward Expansion — Westward Expansion: Its Impact on American History and Society

Westward Expansion: Its Impact on American History and Society

Categories: American History Westward Expansion

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Words: 908 |

Published: Jan 29, 2024

Words: 908 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Context and background, manifest destiny and its influence, major events and policies, westward expansion and its impact on american society, opposition to westward expansion, westward expansion and the formation of the united states.

Cayton, A. R. L. (2012). Manifest destiny: American expansion and the empire of right. Hill and Wang.
Franklin, J. H. (1984). The meaning of the frontier in American history. Frontier in American History 169-190.
Guttmacher, P. M. (1997). Breaking the land: The transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880. History Today, 47(2), 31-37.
Mihesuah, D. A. (1996). Cultivating the rosebuds: The education of women at the Cherokee Female Seminary, 1851-1909. University of Illinois Press.
Utley, R. M. (2017). The Indian Wars: An illustrated history of the conflicts between the North American Indians and the US Army. Routledge.

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14.1: Westward Expansion and Manifest Destiny

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Catherine Locks, Sarah Mergel, Pamela Roseman, Tamara Spike & Marie Lasseter

Catherine Locks, Sarah Mergel, Pamela Roseman, Tamara Spike & Marie Lasseter
George State Universities via GALILEO Open Learning Materials

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The American expansionist movement did not begin with Manifest Destiny and the push westward in the 1840s. Americans had been pushing boundaries since the colonial era, most notably across the Appalachian Mountains. Jefferson set the stage for expansionism with the Louisiana Purchase; the movement grew in the 1830s with the Indian Removal program under Jackson, “freeing” land east of the Mississippi for the expanding population. At the turn of the century, the overwhelming majority lived east of the Appalachian Mountains; just fifty years later, about half of all Americans lived west of the mountains, a tremendous demographic shift.

The rapid western expansion of the 1840s resulted in great part from demographic, economic, and political pressures. The population of the United States grew rapidly in the period from 1800-1850, rocketing from about five million to over twenty million in a fifty-year period. Americans were increasingly land-hungry as populations grew. Throughout many of the overworked farms of the east, soil fertility was declining, making the cheap land of the west more and more attractive. Politically, many feared that if the United States did not occupy the West, then the British would. Some reasoned that westward expansion would counterbalance the increasingly industrialized and urbanized northeast, assuring that the republic of the United States would continue to be rooted in the ideals and values of Jefferson’s yeoman farmer. Expansion deeply influenced U.S. foreign policy; to the south, tensions arose with Mexico as thousands of Americans immigrated into the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas, hereafter referred to as Texas. Expansion was also deeply economically motivated. For example, Eastern merchants wanted control of west coast ports to trade with Asia. Overall, many Americans envisioned the same end, even though they favored expansion for different reasons; many, however, came to equate the idea of “spreading freedom” with spreading the United States.

The westward expansion movement continued in the 1840s. During this period, the concept of Manifest Destiny arose to give a religious and cultural justification to American expansion across the continental United States. Millions of Americans professed the belief that the destiny of the United States was to spread democratic institutions “from sea to shining sea.” Manifest Destiny asserted that Americans would expand to the limits of North America, taking political and economic control of the continent. In the process, the inhabitants of North America, including Indians and Mexicans, would be Americanized. Any attempt to resist would be forcibly extinguished. Some would even argue that, in effect, God had chosen Americans to control the Western Hemisphere. These viewpoints are evident in the speech of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, one of the leading proponents of Manifest Destiny:

I know of no human event, past or present, which promised a greater, and more beneficent change upon the earth than the arrival of…the Caucasian race…It would seem that the white race alone received the divine command, to subdue and replenish the earth! for it is the only race that has obeyed it—the only one that hunts out new and distant lands, and even a New World, to subdue and replenish…the Caucasian race now top[s] the Rocky Mountains, and spread[s] down the shores of the Pacific. In a few years a great population will grow up there, luminous with the accumulated lights of the European and American civilization...The Red race has disappeared from the Atlantic coast: the tribes that resisted civilization met extinction… For my part, I cannot murmur at what seems to be the effect of divine law… Civilization, or extinction, has been the fate of all people who have found themselves in the track of advancing Whites, and civilization, always the preference of the Whites, has been pressed as an object, while extinction has followed as a consequence of its resistance.

However, the issue was certainly not that simple. The issue of expansion raised challenging and hotly-debated questions that were taken up by both the American government and the American population. Was expansionism moral, and moreover, could a government accept and even promote expansion through moral action, or were the two mutually exclusive? Would the nation fundamentally change with the incorporation of distant lands and new populations (perceived by many as “unable to assimilate” into the U.S. population)? Would unchecked expansionism threaten American military and economic security? Was the expansion of the United States synonymous with the expansion of freedom? Finally, how was the growing nation to expand without upsetting the precarious balance between free and slaveholding states? In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Southwest Ordinance of 1790 mandated the Ohio River as a dividing line: states to the south of the river would be open to slavery. Consequently, the area north of the river was largely characterized by family farms and free labor, and to the south, largely characterized by slave labor. As the expansionist movement grew in the 1840s, the nation struggled to maintain a stalemate of sorts as territories were incorporated into the nation as states. By 1850, seven states (California, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, and Wisconsin) had entered the union as free states, and six as slaveholding states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, and Texas). As the concept of manifest destiny developed throughout the 1840s, it became increasingly apparent that it was for white Americans only, not only because of the spread of slavery as a part of westward expansion, but also because of American attitudes and policies towards the Indian and Mexican populations of areas such as Texas and California. Manifest destiny also became a justification for the aggressively expansionist policies of President James Polk.

The first movement of American settlers outside of the boundaries set by the Missouri Compromise was into the Mexican province of Texas, an area that had been sparsely populated since the early colonial era. As a newly independent country, Mexico was in a politically tumultuous state. Agustín I, emperor of the short-lived Empire of Mexico (1821-1823), hoped to populate the land that had been home to mostly Indians and Franciscan missionaries, so he invited Americans to populate Texas. At first, the invitation was extended to 300 families; however, there was no official maximum set for the future. Families were to be of good moral character, agree to abide by the laws of Mexico, and be Roman Catholic. In 1821, Stephen F. Austin led the 300 families into Texas. In the years that followed, the American population in the Mexican province exploded; by 1827, 12,000 Americans lived in Texas, outnumbering the Mexican population by 5,000.

In later years, the American population in Mexico grew even more. The American immigrants brought hundreds of slaves with them, making Texas very different from the rest of turn-of-the-century Mexico; the institution of slavery had died out in the late 1700s throughout much of Mexico, and slavery was no longer an economic foundation of the country. However, the government seemed willing to make exceptions in order to attract immigrants to the state. Cheap land was one of the many draws for Americans, slaveholding or no; immigrants to Texas paid 10 cents an acre for land. Comparable land was selling for $1.25 an acre in the United States. Moreover, each male colonist was allowed to purchase 640 acres for himself and up to 320 additional acres for his wife, up to 160 acres for each of his children, and up to 80 acres for each slave that he brought into the province. Finally, colonists were given a ten-year exemption from paying Mexican taxes.

The Mexican government, believing that the Americans could be integrated into the Mexican community, passed a battery of laws. All official transactions were to be in Spanish. Colonists were to settle deep into Texas; no foreigner was to settle within 60 miles of the U.S. boundary. Finally, foreigners who married Mexican citizens would be eligible for extra land. All of these laws, the government believed, would facilitate the acculturation of Americans into Mexican society. However, all efforts failed, and political, cultural, and economic tensions emerged between the Mexican government and the “Texans,” as opposed to the Mexican “tejanos.” From a Mexican point of view, the Texans were a growing threat. Culturally, the Texans had remained distinct from the Mexican population, due in great part to the fact that, although the colonists were required to be Catholic in order to settle in Mexico, only a very small percentage of Texans professed Catholicism. Politically, Texans dominated local government. The Mexican government also felt that the Texans were an economic threat to the tejanos. In one instance, an American settler even threatened to illegally confiscate the land of any Mexican who could not produce a deed. When the Mexican government moved to stop him, he led a revolt, which was ultimately unsuccessful. Slavery emerged as an important issue of contention in Texas; the institution of slavery was tacitly illegal in Mexico, having been a part of the revolutionary ideals, and limited by a series of restrictive laws. Though many of the Anglo immigrants were not slaveholders, some slaveholding Texans circumvented this expectation by classifying their slaves as servants indentured for life. Although the expansion of slavery into Texas had started small, the population had quickly grown and became a major source of irritation and concern for the government. An 1829 government report confirmed that the colonization efforts were ultimately unsuccessful because many Texans refused to be naturalized as Mexican citizens, remaining socially and culturally distinct and isolated. The final straw, the report concluded, was the way in which the Texans ignored slavery laws.

The government sought to weaken the influence of the Texans in a variety of ways. In 1829, President Vicente Guerrero officially outlawed slavery in Mexico; as slavery was not economically important anywhere in Mexico except for Texas, the proclamation intended directly to weaken the position of the Texans. The government also encouraged Mexican immigration into the state while simultaneously arresting further American immigration and strengthening the Texas garrisons. None of these measures succeeded; indeed, they further incited the Texans and American expansionists, who called for the incorporation of Texas into the United States through one means or another. In fact, many of the Texans had immigrated with the firm idea that Texas would eventually become part of the United States. Two presidents had even offered to purchase Texas from Mexico and were twice rejected.

The United States was not the only foreign power with an eye to taking part of Mexico; in 1829, Spain invaded in an attempt to retake the country as a colony. The invasion failed, and General Antonio López de Santa Anna Pérez de Lebrón (Santa Anna for short) gained great popularity as the “hero of Tampico.” He helped to lead a coup against the Mexican president and was himself elected president in 1833. The conservative Santa Anna overturned the Mexican Constitution of 1824, which was based on the U.S. Constitution, in favor of a new, conservative constitution called the Siete Leyes (Seven Laws). The Siete Leyes dissolved Congress and invested power in a centralized government backed by the military. This act was the last straw for the Texans; the centralization of government was alien to the Americans, who were used to separation of powers, and meant that Texans would have no political voice at all. They revolted, raising the “Federal Army of Texas” to defend the Constitution of 1824 against Santa Anna and the centralists. Expansionists in the United States and Mexican liberals opposed to Santa Anna alike encouraged the revolt. The revolt culminated in Texas’s declaration of independence on March 2, 1836 and the formation of the Republic of Texas, or the Lone Star Republic (1836-1846). Texas was not the only Mexican state to declare independence; Santa Anna also faced rebellions in the Zacatecas and the Yucatán.

Texas Revolution and the Lone Star Republic

Santa Anna successfully quelled the other rebellions but faced a greater challenge in Texas. In the winter of 1835, the president himself led an army of 6,000 soldiers into Texas. He reached San Antonio in late February of 1836, roughly coinciding with the Texans’ declaration of independence from Mexico. Santa Anna found that the Texans, including notables such as Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie, had taken shelter in an old mission building known as the Alamo . The events that followed have been presented in a variety of ways, most often reflecting the nationalist views of the historian. After holding the mission under siege, on March 5 Santa Anna sounded the degüello , a bugle call used by the Spanish since the earliest days of colonization to signal that the enemy was to be given no quarter; that is, they declared a battle to the death. Inside the mission, the Texans may or may not have heard and understood the bugle call. The defenders’ understanding of the upcoming battle, nevertheless, matched with Santa Anna’s as commander of the Alamo, W.B. Travis, declared there would be no surrender or retreat.

The following morning, the Mexicans began throwing wave after wave of troops against the wall; hundreds died under heavy artillery fire from the Texans. After about an hour, however, the numerical superiority of the Mexican army prevailed, and they breached the walls of the mission. The defenders suffered catastrophic casualties. Seven men survived the battle to surrender; they were executed as prisoners. Thirty noncombatants inside the mission were spared, including several slaves of the Texans. Santa Anna hoped thereby to convince other slaves to support the Mexicans in the rebellion. The high casualty rates on both sides reinforced the idea that peaceable settlement was impossible. Another hard Texan defeat followed on the heels of the Alamo. Again, Santa Anna ordered that all survivors taken as prisoners be executed, despite the protests of his commanding general.

After the Alamo, Americans flocked from the United States to aid and avenge their Texan compatriots. In cities such as New York and New Orleans, “Texas committees” organized volunteers to join the cause. Texans traveling to these cities gathered even more volunteers with tales of the vast acreage of available land in Texas. Up until this time, several companies of tejanos were active in the war effort and fought for independence. Indeed, largely ignored today is the fact that some of the defenders at the Alamo were tejanos. But as more and more Americans came to join in the war effort, and as more and more evident the anti-Mexican rhetoric within Texas became, most tejanos left the Texas Revolution.

Tejanos were not the only ones fleeing the Revolution; the costly defeats at Goliad and the Alamo resulted in an exodus of civilians out of Texas to Louisiana, an exodus known as the Runaway Scrape. The Texas army under the leadership of Sam Houston was also on the run from the larger army of Santa Anna. The Revolution finally came to an end at the Battle of San Jacinto, where Houston pulled off a stunning and definitive victory when he took Santa Anna by surprise. The Texans forced Santa Anna to sign not one, but two treaties: one public, one private. The public Treaty of Velasco declared the hostilities between Mexico and Texas over but did not go so far as to recognize the Republic; the private Treaty of Velasco, however, stated that in return for Santa Anna’s freedom, Mexico would accept the independence of the Lone Star Republic. After returning to Mexico City, Santa Anna repudiated the private treaty, saying that he signed it under duress and as an individual rather than dictator of Mexico. The “Texas problem” remained an issue for Mexico, although the nation was so racked with internal problems that it never launched another full-scale invasion to retake Texas. The greatest point of dispute was the border; Texas claimed the Rio Grande as the border, while Mexico held the Nueces River as the true boundary.

After the Revolution ended, Texas elected Sam Houston as its first president. The Lone Star Republic remained an independent nation from 1836 to 1846. During these years, tens of thousands more American immigrants poured into Texas. Some, both in Texas and the United States (particularly expansionists in the slaveholding South), considered that the annexation of the Republic to the Union was imminent; others took advantage of the plentiful land that the new government was giving to heads of immigrant households. While the U.S. recognized Texas as an independent nation, some feared that this annexation talk would inflame political tensions with Mexico. Indeed, the annexation of Texas and its boundary with Mexico would later become a causal factor of the Mexican-American War.

The second area of great expansion for the continental United States was the Oregon Territory, comprising present-day Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and British Columbia, stretching from the 42nd parallel, the northernmost boundary of California, to the 54th, the southernmost boundary of Alaska. Originally, Spain, Russia, Britain, and the United States all claimed the Oregon Territory. Eventually, Spain and Russia dropped their claims, leaving Britain and the U.S. as remaining contenders. British claims were based on prior discovery, exploration, and treaty rights; additionally, the most important colonizing agency was the Hudson Bay Company, which engaged in active trade with the Indians of the Pacific Northwest. The U.S. claims were also based on discovery, exploration, and treaty rights; additionally, a small number of Americans, including missionaries trying to convert Pacific Northwest Indians, joined the claim of occupation to the American list. The two countries temporarily resolved the matter with an 1818 agreement to a ten-year joint occupation, renewed in 1827, but the matter was far from settled. In the period from 1816 through the 1840s, few Americans and Europeans settled in Oregon. But beginning in the early 1840s, “Oregon Fever” gripped the United States. Oregon was touted as a land of pleasant climates and fertile soil. Several thousand American settlers began a great westward migration over the Oregon Trail. By the mid-1840s, some 5,000 Americans had populated the Territory, thus strengthening the U.S. claim to Oregon. “Oregon Fever,” moreover, fueled the idea of Manifest Destiny, popularizing it at the national level.

The famed Oregon Trail traveled by westward pioneers grew from rough trails cut by trappers, traders, and explorers. It ran for about 2,000 miles from Independence, Missouri, across the western plains and the Rocky Mountains, ending in the valleys of Oregon, most notably the Willamette Valley. As more and more immigrants came, other cities such as St. Joseph, Missouri, and Council Bluffs, Iowa, vied for business as “jumping off points” onto the trail, as outfitting the westward-bound immigrants was a profitable business in food and supplies, wagon repairs and fittings, and livestock. The journey over the trail was slow, taking somewhere around five to six months to complete. Most people walked beside their wagons much of the way to reduce the load on the oxen and wagon, and because the wagons were loaded to capacity with goods. The journey was dangerous; accidents, including drowning during river crossings, were frequent. Diseases such as cholera and dysentery were the most common killers on the journey. Although Hollywood later popularized the idea of pioneers “circling the wagons” against Indian attack on the trail, such skirmishes were actually very rare and most often provoked by the immigrants themselves. While thousands of immigrants died from disease and injury over the course of the 1840s, fewer than 120 were killed in altercations with Indians. Cooperation and coordination was very important to the success of each group traveling the trail. For this reason, many groups of immigrants drew up a formal document outlining the responsibilities and work assignments of each wagon in the group. The timing of the group’s departure and their daily progress was of pivotal importance as well; they needed to be sure that they would reach the plains late enough to have adequate grazing for the livestock, but reach the western mountains early enough to avoid the winter snows. As the movement into the west expanded, new routes branched off from the original Oregon Trail. The California Trail extended the Oregon Trail south into California, the Mormon Trail into Utah, and the Bozeman Trail north into Montana.

Election of 1844

The issue of territorial expansion became one of the paramount issues of the election of 1844. Democrat James K. Polk, Speaker of the House and protégé of Andrew Jackson, defeated Jackson’s old enemy Henry Clay in an election that revolved largely around the issues of the possible annexation of Texas and acquiring some or all of Oregon. Polk, a more vocal expansionist, won the election by a narrow majority. The Democrats also took both houses of Congress, causing many to read the election as a mandate of expansionism.

Many Americans, Polk among them, set their sights on taking the Mexican provinces of New Mexico and California in addition to Oregon. Polk hoped to obtain New Mexico and California peacefully but was prepared to use force to take them. To this end, Polk settled with the British on the issue of Oregon in order to conserve American strength for obtaining further territory from Mexico. The issue was further complicated by speculations and indications that Britain was considering signing an alliance with Texas, which would forestall any hopes of annexation to the U.S.

Upon taking office, Polk therefore began talks with Britain. In the months after the election, the rhetoric over Oregon had grown increasingly heated. Expansionists demanded that the United States take all of Oregon Territory, threatening war with the slogan “Fifty-four forty or fight!” referring to the northernmost latitude of Oregon. Polk publicly embraced the demand for “all of Oregon.” However, he was more than willing to accept a boundary line along the 49th parallel, splitting Oregon between the U.S. and Britain. By accepting the 49th parallel boundary, the U.S. acquired Puget Sound, the first Pacific deepwater port held by the U.S. Acquiring part of Oregon also brought territory that would become free states into the Union, counterbalancing the possible annexation of Texas, sure to become slaveholding. By accepting less of Oregon, Polk and the nation could prepare for the coming war with Mexico. This compromise displeased many of the more militant expansionists, but others saw its pragmatism. Why “all of Texas” but not “all of Oregon”? Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri reportedly observed, “Because Great Britain is powerful, and Mexico is weak.”

Mormon Trek

For one group, the Mormons, westward expansion was closely linked with religious beliefs. In a migration that paralleled the early westward movement of the American population, Smith led his followers, the LatterDay Saints (or Mormons), from New York to Ohio and then on to Missouri. In each place, they were met with skepticism and, often, hostility. NonMormons were mistrustful of Mormon secret rituals, because the “new gospel” reopened the canon of the Bible, and because, led by Smith, the group denied the authority of local governments. Non-Mormons also feared that the Mormon block voting would lead to the creation of a local quasitheocracy. The Mormons were expelled from northwest Missouri in the 1838 Mormon War. They came to settle in a town in Illinois that they renamed Nauvoo, where the Saints set to construct a temple and create their new Zion. The city charter established independent courts and a Nauvoo militia. These institutions and a boom in local commerce allowed the Mormons great autonomy in the region. During this period, Smith became increasingly powerful. He expelled from the Church dissidents and many who spoke out against him. His practice of “plural marriage,” whereby he (and other Mormon leaders) was husband to multiple wives, attracted the attention and outrage of many Americans. Smith’s growing power in northwestern Missouri did not sit well with his Protestant neighbors, who feared that Mormons would come to politically dominate the region. In 1844, these concerns led to the arrest of Joseph Smith. Smith and his brother were killed by a mob as they were held for trial.

In the aftermath of Smith’s death, Brigham Young emerged as new church leader. Young oversaw the journey over the Mormon Trail, a 1,300-mile journey westward from Nauvoo to the “promised land,” an area near the Great Salt Lake in Utah, a sparsely-populated outlying province of Mexico. The first 12,000 Mormons made the trek in 1846-1847; more came later in the period from 1848-1860. From 1856-1860, the church promoted the use of handcarts, rather than wagons pulled by draft animals, as a more affordable means of migration. Many of these so-called “handcart pioneers” were new converts to the church who had recently emigrated from Europe and now were on the last leg of their migration. Over the four-year period, ten companies of handcarts made the journey along the trail; two of the ten had significant causalities.

Soon after the 1847 trek, Mormons found themselves once again residents of the United States after the defeat of Mexico in the Mexican-American War. The signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded much of the modern-day American Southwest, including Utah, to the United States. Utah was incorporated into a territory by Congress in 1860, and President Millard Fillmore appointed Brigham Young territorial governor.

Americans increasingly embraced the concept of Manifest Destiny in the 1840s. Manifest Destiny was associated not only with land expansion, but also with the idea of Americanization of Indians and Mexican residents of areas such as Texas, Oregon, and California. Moreover, many Americans likened the idea of the physical spread of the boundaries of the United States with spreading freedom. The debate over expansionism was not a simple one, but raised complex questions about the nature of freedom and republicanism and the role of the state in expansion. Many feared that expansionism was a threat to the nation, whether in the form of overextension, national security, or a changing population. Private individuals engaged in commercial and agrarian enterprises at the frontiers of expansion proved to be one of the greatest sources of pressure for expansionism, as their economic activities often preceded national expansion into the territory.

The first major movement of Americans was into the Mexican province of Texas. Beginning in 1821, American settlers poured into the region, with Americans soon outnumbering Mexicans. Cultural and religious differences and the American reliance on slave labor led to rising tensions in Texas and, ultimately, to the Texas Revolution in 1835-1836. In 1836, Texas declared independence as the Republic of Texas, or the Lone Star Republic.

In the early 1840s, thousands of Americans pushed westward into Oregon Territory over the Oregon Trail. The United States and Great Britain both laid claim to Oregon Territory; however, the greater numbers of American settlers helped to bolster U.S. claims to the region. In 1844, James K. Polk was elected president. Although he was an expansionist and courted the American public with talk of taking “all of Oregon” for the United States, he negotiated with Great Britain to accept the 49th parallel as the boundary between U.S. and British holdings. It should be noted that expansion into both Oregon and Texas meant that the delicate balance between free and slaveholding states remained intact for the meantime. Finally, the Mormon Trek was part of a greater movement in the westward expansion of the United States in the nineteenth century.

Exercise $\PageIndex{1}$

The concept of Manifest Destiny embraced the idea(s) that

the United States would expand “from sea to shining sea.”
residents of areas under expansion would be Americanized.
spreading the boundaries of the United States was equivalent to spreading freedom.
all of the above.

Exercise $\PageIndex{2}$

American settlers in the Mexican province of Texas were typically unlike tejanos in that

many were slave owners.
they remained religiously distinct from the Roman Catholic tejanos.
they demanded popular sovereignty for all, including women.

Exercise $\PageIndex{3}$

“Fifty-four forty or fight!” refers to

the border dispute between the United States and Mexico: the U.S. claimed the Rio Grande as the border, Mexico claimed the Nueces River.
American desires to expand to take “all of Oregon,” despite the British claims to the territory.
the struggles of the settlers as they traveled over the Oregon Trail.
the American desire to expand into California.

Module 10: Westward Expansion (1800-1860)

Why it matters: westward expansion.

A painting shows a white woman in flowing white robes flying westward, high over the American frontier. Where she has been, the scenery is bright; where she has yet to go, it remains dim. She hangs telegraph wire with one hand and holds a book in the other. Beneath her, farmers and other pioneers travel on foot and by covered wagon; trains and ships are visible in the distance. To the extreme west of the image, Indians and buffalo flee, driven further and further by the onslaught.

Figure 1 . In the first half of the nineteenth century, settlers began to move west of the Mississippi River in large numbers. In John Gast’s American Progress (ca. 1872), the figure of Columbia, representing the United States and the spirit of democracy, makes her way westward, bringing light to the darkness as she advances.

Why learn about Westward Expansion?

After 1800, the United States expanded westward across North America through a combination of land acquisition and settlement. American pioneers and those who supported them were confident of their right and duty to gain control of the continent and spread the benefits of their “superior” culture to the indigenous populations living in the interior of the country. In John Gast’s American Progress , the White, blonde figure of Columbia—a historical personification of the United States—strides triumphantly westward with the Star of Empire on her head. She brings education, symbolized by the schoolbook, and modern technology, represented by the telegraph wire. White settlers follow her lead, driving the helpless Natives peoples away and bringing successive waves of technological progress in their wake. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the quest for control of the West led to the Louisiana Purchase, the annexation of Texas, and the Mexican-American War. Efforts to seize western territories from Native peoples and expand the republic by warring with Mexico succeeded beyond expectations. Few nations had ever grown so quickly. Yet, this expansion led to debates about the expansion of slavery into the new Western territories, increasing the tension between Northern and Southern states that ultimately led to the Civil War.

US History. Provided by : OpenStax. Located at : https://openstax.org/books/us-history/pages/11-introduction . License : CC BY: Attribution . License Terms : Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/us-history/pages/1-introduction

National Geographic Education Blog

Bring the spirit of exploration to your classroom.

What is Westward Expansion?

During the 19th Century, more than 1.6 million square kilometers (a million square miles) of land west of the Mississippi River was acquired by the United States federal government. This led to a widespread migration west, referred to as Westward Expansion.

A variety of factors contributed to Westward Expansion, including population growth and economic opportunities on what was presented to be available land.

Manifest Destiny was the belief that it was settlers’ God-given duty and right to settle the North American continent. The notion of Manifest Destiny contributed to why European settlers felt they had a right to claim land, both inhabited and uninhabited, in western North America. They believed it was the white man’s destiny to prosper and spread Christianity by claiming and controlling land.

Manifest Destiny was used to validate the Indian Removal Acts , which occurred in the 1830s. Such legislation forced the removal of Native Americans and helped clear the way for non-native settlers to claim land in the west. When the settlers reached land populated or previously promised to Native Americans, they had no qualms claiming it for their own benefit.

It was not just spiritual prosperity that inspired settlers—outright moneymaking opportunities also motivated Westward Expansion.

Throughout most of the 19th century, there were two main ways to make money west of the Mississippi River: through gold and silver prospecting, and through developing land for agriculture, industry, or urban growth. These two activities often supported each other. In California, for instance, the actuality of “ striking it rich ” was quite short-lived, although immigrants continued to populate the new state and contribute to its agricultural and economic growth well after gold fields were discovered there in 1848.

The idea of “free land” was fairly short-lived as well. By 1890, the U.S. Census reported that there were so many permanent settlements west of the Mississippi that a western “frontier” no longer existed in the United States.

This declaration inspired a young historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, to write his famous “Frontier Thesis.” Turner claimed the “close of the frontier” was symbolic. He asserted that Westward Expansion was the most defining characteristic of American identity to date. With the close of the frontier, he thought, America was that much more “American”—liberated from European customs and attitudes surrounding social class, intellectual culture, and violence.

Many historians criticize the Frontier Thesis, and many reject the idea of an American “frontier” (which Turner described as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization”) entirely. These historians recognize that the “free land” that defined Westward Expansion came at a severe cost to Native American and Spanish-speaking populations, as well as more recent immigrants from Asia (who migrated east, across the Pacific). The Frontier Thesis ignores the development and evolution of these identities almost entirely.

To delve deeper into this complex period of American history, check out our curated resource collection page on Westward Expansion at the National Geographic Resource Library .

Exiting nps.gov

The war and westward expansion.

With Federal resources focused on waging the war farther east, both native tribes and the Confederacy attempted to claim or reclaim lands west of the Mississippi. The Federal government responded with measures (Homestead Act, transcontinental railroad) and military campaigns designed to encourage settlement, solidify Union control of the trans-Mississippi West, and further marginalize the physical and cultural presence of tribes native to the West.

Although advanced under the mantle of protection, the nation's American Indian population in the West bore the cost of the westward-looking military and political undertakings.

Architect of the Capitol

On February 13, 1861, word of secession and the specter of civil war troubled a young U.S. Army captain. "I myself come from a Union loving State," Virginia's George Pickett wrote his commander on February 13 from San Juan Island, a remote Washington Territory encampment in the extreme northwestern corner of the United States, "but matters are taking such phase at present that she and the other border territory States . . . can not make their voices heard. . . . On the other hand, I do not like to be bullied nor dragged out of the Union by the precipitory [sic] and indecent haste of South Carolina. Write me what you think the best course to pursue in case of a break up. . . . What will we do with the public property and funds[?] In some cases there might be a general scramble." Two days later, in remote New Mexico Territory, Manuelito, Armijo, Ganado Mucho, and other Navajo chieftains ended a gathering with U.S. Army officers near Fort Fauntleroy.. Recognizing the "reduced and impoverished condition of the [Navajo] Nation", Col. Edward R.S. Canby wrote of concluding a treaty that pledged support and protection but "required the Chiefs to collect their people and establish them in designated localities where they will be under the observation and control not only of the chiefs but of the troops." Canby eschewed the "most extensive conditions" directed by instructions with an eye "to place the affairs of this people in a condition that will lead as speedily as possible to the permanent settlement of all questions with them." Across the continent, Emanuel Leutze, an artist and German immigrant, labored in his New York City studio on the final stages of a mural study commissioned by the U.S. Congress Entitled Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, his triumphant vision featured rugged, white, rifle-carrying pioneers guiding covered wagon trains of American settlers across a perilous mountain ridge, away from the dark and death of the East toward the heralding light of the West. Consciously, Leutze was crafting his work to embody the popular perception of what he termed the "grand peaceful conquest of the great West." Viewed independently, these concurrent, geographically disparate episodes provide a glimpse into the regional zeitgeist - the spirit of the time - on the eve of the outbreak of war. Viewed collectively, they speak to a broader, core concern of the era: the desire for protection and security. Exacerbated by the country's crumbling harmony, concern for safety and stability flooded all corners of the fledgling nation in early 1861. As war erupted, oft-conflicting interpretations of protection presented distinctive challenges to those living, working, or with interests in what was then known as the Far West. Spurred by a desire to retain the western states and territories within the Union, the federal government's responses to these perceptions helped redefine the Western Movement and shaped the area's future for decades to come. Until the eve of the Civil War, the Westward Movement was Manifest Destiny incarnate; as such, it was consistently popularized as an East-to-West phenomenon. As unabashedly romanticized in Leutze's 1861 mural study, established routes -including the Oregon, California and Santa Fe Trails -siphoned settlers and miners westward . In response to calls for their protection from the American Indians, the federal government responded by establishing frontier and coastal forts garrisoned by Regular Army soldiers. By 1861, almost 75% of the Army's soldiers served at dozens of posts west of the Mississippi River, ranging from Pickett's post in Washington Territory to Fort Point in California's San Francisco Bay to forts scattered throughout the Southwest. The civil war brought dramatic change to these outposts. Shortly before the bombardment of Fort Sumter, U.S. Army responsibility for national protection and security set in motion an unprecedented eastward movement of soldiers and equipment. Originally meant to protect the interests of a minority of settlers and miners, these soldiers were ill-positioned for guaranteeing the well being of nearly 97% of the U.S. population that resided east of the Missouri River. These regular soldiers were spirited east as quickly as possible. With more than 10,000 soldiers serving in the western posts, this eastward movement triggered concerns over security for those left behind. President Abraham Lincoln soon authorized raising of volunteers within the states and territories "to aid in enforcing the laws and protecting public property," to replace many of the departing Regular Army soldiers and established additional forts to protect new interests. California, for example, quickly raised an infantry regiment and five cavalry companies "for the protection of the Overland Mail Route between California and the Eastern States, by way of Salt Lake City." Such concern for security was warranted, particularly in areas with populations sympathetic to the Confederacy or with interests in forging an independent Pacific Republic. Caches of U.S. arms and ammunition in western arsenals attracted special attention. In Oregon and Washington Territory, pro-Union citizens exposed a plot hatched by "conspiring traitors" to capture the arsenal at Fort Vancouver. . On February 16, faced with a hostile state militia, Gen. David Twiggs agreed to evacuate all federal troops from Texas, and surrendered federal buildings, the arsenal, and military stores valued at $1 million to the state. Confederate forces seized several other arsenals in Arkansas, and Louisiana as well. The Confederacy was quick to realize the value of the Southwest . Using Texas as a base, the Confederate plan focused on dislodging Union forces from the Southwest and continuing north to the resource-rich mines of Colorado, and possibly on to the California gold fields. Wending across Texas and then north along the Rio Grande, forces under the newly-minted Confederate Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley outmaneuvered Canby's Anglo and Native New Mexican volunteers at Valverde, occupying both Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Only Fort Union in front and an isolated Fort Craig behind challenged Sibley's plan; that was, until the swift winter march of volunteers - known as Pike's Peakers - from Colorado Territory, commanded by Col. John P. Slough came to the rescue. Alarmed by word of Sibley's progress, Slough's men raced southward. At Fort Union, they gained additional strength from the garrison and followed the Santa Fe Trail toward the occupied cities. At the same time, Confederate forces under Col. William R. Scurry followed the trail east from Santa Fe, setting the two armies on a collision course. While the fighting in the subsequent battle - known as Glorieta Pass and heralded since as the "Gettysburg of the West" - was fierce but inconclusive, it was the actions of a detachment under Maj. John Chivington, guided by Lt. Col. Manuel Chaves and his native New Mexico Volunteers, that ended the threat of a Confederate West. Chaves led Chivington's troops west across mountainous terrain in an effort to flank the Confederates. Reaching a 200-foot cliff and finding the enemy supply train below lightly guarded, Chivington's men scrambled down and destroyed everything - more than 80 wagons and 500 mules and horses. The Confederate Army left New Mexico, retreating south and east to San Antonio. Weeks later, the California Column of Union troops moved eastward from the Pacific to Tucson along the overland stagecoach route, skirmishing with Confederates at Pichaco Pass (in present day Arizona), the war's westernmost battle. After other western campaigns, culminating in the Confederate defeat at the Arkansas battle of Pea Ridge in 1862, the Confederacy was never again to provide a viable risk to the southwest. Military action was but one tool of the federal government's wartime strategy in the West. Secession initiated much change, including the elimination of Southern Congressional opposition to Republican supported "internal improvement" projects aimed at more tightly binding western states and territories to the Union. The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 allotted 30,000 acres of land for the establishment of land grant colleges in each state remaining in the Union. While focused on agriculture and mechanical arts, inclusion of the teaching of military tactics buttressed the final act. The Homestead Act of 1862 - designed, in part, to free eastern families from poverty and overcrowding - allowed any citizen or citizenship-seeker who had not borne arms against the government to lay claim to 160 acres of available public land, provided he lived on it for five years or paid $1.25 per acre after a six month residency. The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 and subsequent amendments provided aid for construction of a transcontinental railroad and telegraph line - aid in the form of generous land grants (in some instances, up to ten miles for every mile of track laid) and government bonds to the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroad companies. "The proposition is a plain one," exclaimed John R. Barret, a U.S. representative from Missouri, "and any business man must see how, by this great measure, our brethren on the Pacific slope can be protected and accommodated, our nation furnished with a necessary defense; our commerce promoted, and the most economical means provided for transportation of mails, munitions of war." The benefit of a supportive political atmosphere was not lost on President Lincoln; he played an active role in propagating an environment where the Union would be sustained, his supporters would be rewarded, and, where possible, Republican political views could be advanced. Territorial patronage was a vital tool for Lincoln. The ability to appoint men of his choice to key territorial roles -such as governors, secretaries, federal district judgeships, land office commissioners, and territorial marshals - served not only to recognize those who had lent support to him but also to institutionalize support for the issues he valued. With seven western territories ripe for patronage appointments in 1861, Lincoln predominantly named Republican supporters - known pejoratively as "The Tribe of Abraham" -to the territories' thirty-five prime positions and dozens of others. These included gubernatorial nominees William Gilpin of Colorado Territory and William Jayne of Dakota Territory, who both supported federal financing of the transcontinental railroad. Although advanced under the mantle of protection, the nation's American Indian population in the West bore the cost of these military and political undertakings, which accelerated the dispossession of American Indians and threatened the security of their lands, property, culture, and core existence. American Indian tribal response was as complex as it was individualized. Few actively sought war, but concerns for safety often led to conflict, while some saw the war as an opportunity to protect or reclaim traditional lands and reassert sovereignty. The Indian Territory's Five Civilized Nations, for example, raised over 5,000 soldiers who fought for the Confederacy at battles including Pea Ridge. Forced northward into Kansas, after refusing to align with the Confederacy, other Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles, and Creeks fought Confederates - including their own tribal members - as the Union Indian Brigade. With the enactment of political initiatives aimed at encouraging white settlement, the role of implementation often fell to the volunteer units who had replaced soldiers of the Regular Army. Although far from advocates of preserving American Indian culture, prior to the war Regular Army units had occasionally served a moderating role between settler and American Indian interests.. The western volunteers filling in behind the Regular Army soldiers were of a distinctly different mettle. As one officer noted, they were men "made of stern stuff. . . inured to mountain life. . . pioneers and miners; men self-reliant and enduring" but also prone to have "advocated the extermination of the Indians." Although overwhelmingly white, including some from the western Jewish population, many were Hispanic, others were African American, and still others were American Indian. A number- known as "galvanized Yankees" - were former Confederates who swore allegiance to the Union. As residents of the West, they possessed a more vested interest in issues that encouraged settlement and internal improvements, and many took an active, aggressive role in protecting these interests. Examples of the resulting aggressions are rife. In addition to the Bear River Massacre inflicted by California Volunteers on Shoshones in Washington Territory in 1863, in 1864, Col. Chivington led Colorado and New Mexico Volunteers in "a foul and dastardly massacre" of Arapahos and Cheyennes, primarily women and children. Later investigators found that he had, "surprised and murdered, in cold blood, the unsuspecting men, women, and children on Sand Creek, who had every reason to believe they were under the protection of the United States authorities," and then "returned to Denver and boasted of the brave deed he and the men under his command had performed." Other actions were more complex. Despite Canby's efforts in 1861, a "permanent peace" with the Navajo did not occur. Three years later, his replacement sent Kit Carson and his native New Mexico Volunteers on a scorched earth campaign against the Navajo that resulted in their relocation via the tragic Long Walk to Bosque Redondo. By war's end, federal actions to encourage white settlement in the West and more tightly bind the western territories to the Union were institutionalized and gathering momentum. The Morrill Act, the Homestead Act, and the Pacific Railroad Act, aimed at fomenting and sustaining access to the West's vast acreage, as well as President Lincoln's use of territorial appointments preserved the Union, and - in many cases - placed like-minded supporters in positions to uphold and continue these programs. Initially, the vacuum created by Regular Army troops relocating eastward lessened the government's ability to shield westward expansion, but volunteer units soon filled, sometimes aggressively, the military's role and presence in the West. This all came at an extraordinary cost - the dispossession of the West's American Indians. In the expansionist Civil War-era, Federal American Indian policies often resulted in violated treaties, violence, and the end of access to traditional lands, trade and migratory routes, water, food sources, and cultural practices. Weeks before the war's end in 1865, word of the Sand Creek Massacre and other offenses against American Indians finally triggered broader indignation. "The dealings of this nation toward the Indians," editorialized the New York Times, "form one of the most disgraceful chapters in modern history." This stimulated a congressional inquiry, led by Senator James R. Doolittle, who began a two-year investigation scrutinizing federal management of Indian affairs. It determined that "[t]he Indians everywhere. . . are rapidly decreasing in numbers from various causes: By disease; by intemperance; by wars, among themselves and with the whites; by the steady and resistless emigration of white men into the territories of the west, which, confining the Indians to still narrower limits, destroys that game which, in their normal state, constitutes their principal means of subsistence; and by the irrepressible conflict between a superior and an inferior race when brought in presence of each other." Such observations came too late, though. Mirroring Emanuel Leutze's mural study, the federal government's perceptions of protection had already helped redefine and accelerate the Western Movement and shape the region's future for decades to come. By the end of the war, the foundation for a distinctly different West had been laid. This essay is taken from The Civil War Remembered , published by the National Park Service and Eastern National. This richly illustrated handbook is available in many national park bookstores or may be purchased online from Eastern at www.eparks.com/store.

Parks with Relevant Major Resources Related to the War and the Westward Movement

Andrew Johnson National Historic Site, Arkansas Post National Memorial, Fort Davis National Historic Site, Fort Larned National Historic Site, Fort Scott National Historic Site, Fort Union National Monument, Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Golden Spike National Historic Site, Homestead National Monument of America, Nicodemus National Historic Site, Pecos National Historical Park

andrew johnson national historic site
arkansas post national memorial
fort davis national historic site
fort laramie national historic site
fort larned national historic site
fort union national monument
fort vancouver national historic site
golden gate national recreation area
golden spike national historical park
nicodemus national historic site
pecos national historical park
westward expansion

Andrew Johnson National Historic Site , Arkansas Post National Memorial , Fort Davis National Historic Site , Fort Laramie National Historic Site , Fort Larned National Historic Site , Fort Union National Monument , Fort Vancouver National Historic Site , Golden Gate National Recreation Area , Golden Spike National Historical Park , Nicodemus National Historic Site , Pecos National Historical Park more »

Last updated: August 14, 2017

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Course: US history > Unit 6

The Gold Rush
The Homestead Act and the exodusters
The reservation system
The Dawes Act
Chinese immigrants and Mexican Americans in the age of westward expansion
The Indian Wars and the Battle of the Little Bighorn
The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee

Westward expansion: economic development

Westward expansion: social and cultural development
The American West
Land, mining, and improved transportation by rail brought settlers to the American West during the Gilded Age.
New agricultural machinery allowed farmers to increase crop yields with less labor, but falling prices and rising expenses left them in debt.
Farmers began to organize in local and regional cooperatives like the Grange and the Farmers’ Alliance to promote their interests.

Who owns the West?

Developing the west.

(Choice A) Railroads led to the discovery of profitable minerals. A Railroads led to the discovery of profitable minerals.
(Choice B) Railroads brought more people to the East Coast. B Railroads brought more people to the East Coast.
(Choice C) Railroads allowed farmers to sell their goods in distant markets. C Railroads allowed farmers to sell their goods in distant markets.

Farmers in an industrial age

The grange and the farmers’ alliance, what do you think.

The Homestead Act , 1862.
See OpenStax, The Westward Spirit , U.S. History, OpenStax CNX, 2019.
See David M. Kennedy and Lizabeth Cohen, The American Pageant: A History of the American People, 15th (AP) Edition, (Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2013), 584-585.
Kennedy and Cohen, The American Pageant , 512-513.
See Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty!: An American History, 5th AP Edition (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2016), 593.
Kennedy and Cohen, The American Pageant , 594-596.
Kennedy and Cohen, The American Pageant , 596-598.
See Foner, Give Me Liberty! , 641-643.

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Westward Expansion and the Quest to Conserve

Written by: Mark Thomas, University of Virginia

By the end of this section, you will:.

Compare attitudes toward the use of natural resources from 1890 to 1945

Suggested Sequencing

Use this Narrative after the Chapter 10 Introductory Essay: 1898-1919 to allow students to learn more about the American conservation movement and the steps its leaders took to preserve the natural environment.

The United States in the nineteenth century was characterized by abundance, notably of land and natural resources. Perhaps the most important resource for the expansion of the industrial sector of the American economy was timber. Trees not only covered much of the land and were ripe for harvesting, they also needed to be cut down if agriculture, the dominant sector of the economy, were to produce enough food to sustain the rapidly growing population. Timber was used to build houses and provide furniture and heating for residents; to erect factories and fuel machines; to construct ships to carry cotton (and, after 1870, wheat) across the Atlantic; to build canal barges for carrying produce from the Midwest to Atlantic seaports and imported goods from the seaports to the Midwest; to provide the sleepers on which the iron tracks for railroads rested; and to supply power for the locomotives that rode on the tracks. Gradually, as the cost of shipping goods around the country diminished because the limitations of distance were overcome, other natural resources became more important, most notably, coal, petroleum, and ores of iron, copper, and other minerals. Land was no longer simply being cleared of old-growth forests but was increasingly mined for materials needed by industry. However, sound environmental management was not always a concern, and eventually, there was a price to pay for scarring the land.

Throughout this period of continental expansion, the U.S. government pursued policies that promoted westward expansion and continental settlement. This was a matter not simply of negotiating the transfer of land from France (the Louisiana Purchase in 1803), Spain (the Florida/Adams-Onís Treaty in 1819), and Mexico (the Gadsden Treaty of 1853 for present-day Arizona and New Mexico). It also meant establishing a process by which these new territories should be settled. The governing authority to do so was established a century before by the Northwest Ordinances (1785, 1787), which provided for the systematic survey and sale of land west of the Appalachians.

As the spread of railroads accelerated the process of continental settlement and the potential for future economic opportunities, federal land policies became more generous. The turning point was the Homestead Act of 1862, which carved western lands into parcels of 640 acres and sold them to settlers for a token payment. Later, legislation followed, such as the Timber Culture Act (1873) and the Desert Land Act (1877), each designed to promote rapid transfer of federal land into private hands to boost economic expansion through the use of natural resources.

The map of the United States is divided by date of expansion. The Territory of the Original Thirteen States (Ceded by Great Britain) in 1783 includes Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, DC, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, south Carolina, Georgia, most of Alabama, most of Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and the northeastern part of Minnesota. East Florida (Spanish Cession) 1819 includes Florida. West Florida (Spanish Cession) 1819 includes the southern parts of Alabama and Mississippi, and a southeastern part of Louisiana. The Spanish Cession 1819 includes the southwestern half of Louisiana and a small part of central Colorado. The Louisiana Purchase (from France) 1803 includes half of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, central and south Minnesota, half of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, the northern part of Texas, the northeastern corner of New Mexico, eastern half of Colorado, most of Wyoming, and most of Montana. The British Cession of 1818 includes the northwestern part of Minnesota, half of North Dakota, and a small part of South Dakota. The Texas Annexation 1845 (former Republic of Texas) includes most of Texas, the southeastern part of New Mexico, central Colorado, and a small part of southern Wyoming. The Mexican Cession 1848 includes California, Nevada, Utah, western Colorado, the southwestern corner of Wyoming, the western half of New Mexico, and most of Arizona. The Oregon Territory 1846 (Treaty with Great Britain) includes Washington, Oregon, Idaho, a small part of western Wyoming, and a part of western Montana. The Gadsden Purchase 1853 (from Mexico) includes the southern parts of Arizona and New Mexico. A small part above Montana was ceded to Great Britain in 1818. The Hawaii Annexation 1898 (former Republic of Hawaii) includes Hawaii. The Alaska Purchase 1867 (from Russia) includes Alaska. Puerto Rico was ceded by Spain in 1898. The Virgin Islands were purchased from Denmark in 1917.

This map of the United States shows America’s expansion up to 1853.

But the tide was already turning, as attitudes toward the rapid and seemingly unstoppable consumption of natural resources began to change. The Transcontinental Railroad had been completed in 1869, permanently linking the East and West Coasts of the United States and allowing continuous movement of goods and people across the continent. Not only were the lines of communication and transportation complete but the settlement of the continental United States seemed close to completion as well. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner gave voice to this idea with his address on the significance of the frontier in American history, delivered to the American Historical Association in 1890. With the closing of the frontier came fears that the fundamental character of the American people would change, because it had been shaped by that frontier. Moreover, the belief that America was blessed with a near-infinite abundance of resources was under challenge.

A number of intellectual movements shaped the last decades of the nineteenth century and entered the mainstream of American intellectual and social thought in the first decades of the twentieth. The first was the idea of efficiency. Manufacturers hoping to drive down production costs embraced efficiency by reducing their consumption of resources, whose prices were rising as demand caught up with supply. Efficiency later also became the watchword of Progressivism, which sought to order an increasingly complex and chaotic world by using scientific measurement and the policy insights of experts. Scientific management and national efficiency were key elements of this movement; legislation to curb the perceived excesses of urban industrial life was among its products. Another intersection between Progressivism and the perceived closing of the frontier was the growing belief that not only was the innocence of American economic life being sullied by modernization, technology, urbanization, and the inexorable rise of big business but so was the innocence and purity of the American environment.

The settlement of the West had unleashed creative energies and an entrepreneurial spirit, and it contributed to economic, social, and geographic mobility. But as faith in abundance was increasingly replaced by an awareness of limits and fear of overuse, a budding environmental movement found itself split between those who believed in scientific management to conserve the environment for sustainable future use and those who wanted to preserve it untouched.

There were, in effect, two strands in the movement toward conserving the environment. One was represented by John Muir, a disciple of transcendentalist author Ralph Waldo Emerson and advocate for the preservation of wilderness areas before their wholesale destruction by human settlement and intensive logging. Muir was a pioneering environmentalist who became a highly influential figure through the publication of numerous books and articles on the flora, fauna, and beauty of wilderness areas, especially in the western states. He is perhaps best remembered for his roles in the creation of Yosemite National Park in 1890 and the establishment in 1892 of the Sierra Club, which remains a major force in the conservation movement today. Muir did not found the environmental movement in the United States; George Perkins Marsh, a diplomat deeply interested in conservation, had delivered a speech opposing deforestation as early as 1849 and published Man and Nature , considered the most significant early work in the conservation movement, in 1864. Nor did Muir begin the national park movement; the first national park, Yellowstone, was dedicated in 1872. But he did become the movement’s most famous advocate.

Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir stand on the edge of a cliff. A mountain range and a waterfall are behind them.

This 1906 photograph shows Theodore Roosevelt (left) and John Muir (right) on Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park, with Yosemite Valley in the background.

The other strand of the environmental movement was personified by Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the U.S. Forestry Service, who argued for scientific conservation. This was the purposeful, structured harvesting of forest resources, designed simultaneously to minimize waste and damage to western forests from industrial demands and maximize the potential for future harvesting to support continued economic expansion. Pinchot recommended not the end of logging but rather the efficient use of resources. He wanted to reduce waste by private enterprise on government-owned land and ensure the availability of lumber for the needs of industry. Order, not chaos, was his prevailing philosophy.

Both these strands of thought were reflected in the actions of Theodore Roosevelt, an instinctual preservationist and a pragmatic conservationist who was the political embodiment of the conservation movement. With his friend, fellow hunter and outdoor enthusiast George Bird Grinnell, Roosevelt founded the Boone and Crockett Club in 1887, which later became his brain trust on how to balance the interests of the natural environment with the demands of a modern American economy. Roosevelt was acutely aware of the combination of circumstances that made a solution so urgent. He also understood that the West represented the last frontier of American expansion, and that the tensions between nature and modernization would be fought on land that was under the federal government’s control. He saw it as a national problem that could be solved only by the national government.

Roosevelt was by no means the first U.S. president to take steps to protect the environment. In 1891, Congress had repealed the Timber Culture Act, replacing it with the Forest Reserve Act, which gave the federal government the power to create forest reserves on some 50 million acres of federal land that were set aside over the next decade. But it was Roosevelt, through a combination of publicity and policy, who became known as the conservation president. His actions added an additional 230 million acres to protected terrain in the form of forest reserves, national parks, and game and bird reserves. Much of this was done by presidential edict through executive order, but Congress added to the powers of the presidency by passing the Newlands Reclamation Act in 1902, which laid down the basis for irrigation of arid western lands that has shaped the geography of the region over the past century.

Congress and the president joined forces in 1905 to create the U.S. Forest Service. Pinchot was appointed the first head of the agency, with extensive powers to shape conservation policy. But his proposal to extend the precepts of scientifically managed conservation to the national parks angered preservationists such as Muir, who sought protection of wilderness areas.

The rapid expansion of national forests (121 were established during Roosevelt’s presidency, mostly by executive order) created tensions between the president and Congress, especially among representatives from the western states who thought the policy had gone too far too quickly. In 1907, to restrain Roosevelt’s use of presidential power, Congress passed legislation that prevented the establishment of new national forests by executive order. In the same year, the Denver Public Lands Convention, set up by the governor of Colorado and attended mostly by representatives of western ranching and mining interests, called for a moratorium or halt on the setting aside of national forests and national parks, because they wanted to use the land’s natural resources.

Gifford Pinchot, pictured here in 1909, was the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service and an advocate for scientific conservation.

In the end, neither vision of environmentalism prevailed over the other. Congress continued to create national parks and national forests. Roosevelt left the presidency in 1909 and Pinchot was fired from the Forestry Service in 1910 after a political spat with the secretary of the Interior, but both men continued their advocacy of conservation policies as private individuals and both remained influential. (Pinchot became a two-term governor of Pennsylvania in the 1920s and 1930s, pursuing progressive policies including unemployment relief and public works programs.) But the Golden Era of conservation had passed, and the ideas that had fostered it were eclipsed by more the immediate issues of war, prosperity, and depression. It was not until the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 that a new wave of environmentalism began, stimulated by industrialism’s impact not just on the well-being of wilderness areas but on the health and welfare of the American people.

Review Questions

1. A systematic process for the survey and sale of western lands and the orderly admission of new states into the Union was established by the

Northwest Ordinance
Missouri Compromise
Compromise of 1850
Homestead Act of 1862

2. The goal of federal land policy before the late nineteenth century was

protecting natural resources
establishing a national park system
nationalizing the timber and mining industries
fostering economic expansion by increasing private ownership of land

3. The conservation movement of the early twentieth century echoed the progressive movement’s emphasis on

increasing efficiency and scientific management
expanding the American western frontier
decreasing immigration to the United States
increasing the power of the rural western states

4. Efficient use of the environment and its resources through government regulation is best represented by the ideas of

logging and mining interests
the Sierra Club
Gifford Pinchot

5. Actions taken by the U.S. government to protect the environment before the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt included all the following except

the establishment of federal forest reserves
the creation of the U.S. Forest Service
the establishment of Yosemite National Park in California
the creation of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming

6. Theodore Roosevelt became known as the conservation president largely because

he was the first president to support actions to protect the environment
he undertook environmental policy initiatives that generated publicity
he had unlimited congressional support for his environmental policies
he united ranching and mining interests in support of federal environmental policies

Free Response Questions

Explain why the environmental movement developed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Explain how Theodore Roosevelt’s actions reflected the environmental ideas of both John Muir and Gifford Pinchot.

AP Practice Questions

“Conservation means development as much as it does protection. I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. . . . Moreover, I believe that the natural resources must be used for the benefit of all our people, and not monopolized for the benefit of the few . . . Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation. Let me add that the health and vitality of our people are at least as well worth conserving as their forests, waters, lands, and minerals, and in this great work the national government must bear a most important part.”

Theodore Roosevelt, “New Nationalism Speech,” August 31, 1910 (A speech delivered at the dedication of the John Brown Memorial Park in Osawatomie, Kansas)

1. Which of the following developments represented a continuation of the sentiments in the excerpt?

Support for laissez-faire economic policies
Expansion of mechanized farming on the Great Plains during the 1920s and 1930s
Development of post-World War II suburbs
Restrictions on pesticide use after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring

2. This excerpt most directly reflected a growing belief that

the United States was transitioning to an urban, industrial economy
greater government action was needed to counter problems with economic development
presidential leadership was superior to congressional action
the growth of popular culture led to uniformity of public opinion

3. This excerpt was most directly shaped by

creation of the National Park System during the Progressive Era
the popularity of the Populist Party
the Great Migration
tensions between preservationists and conservationists

Primary Sources

Muir, John. Our National Parks .

Muir, John. The Mountains of California .

Muir, John. Wilderness Essays .

Pinchot, Gifford. Breaking New Ground .

Pinchot, Gifford. The Fight for Conservation .

Roosevelt, Theodore. African Game Trails .

Roosevelt, Theodore. Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail .

Roosevelt, Theodore. The Winning of the West .

Suggested Resources

Brinkley, Douglas. The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America . New York: Harper Collins, 2009.

Hays, Samuel P. Conservation and The Gospel Of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 . Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999.

Worster, Donald. A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir . Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011.

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History Resources

Rural America: The Westward Movement

By tim bailey, unit objective.

This unit is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based teaching resources. These units were developed to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts of historical significance. Through a step-by-step process, students will acquire the skills to analyze any primary or secondary source material.

Over the course of four lessons the students will analyze primary source documents that present examples of both the perception and the reality of American westward migration during the 1800s. These documents represent both the romanticism and the cruel realities of this period. Students will closely read and analyze a variety of texts with the purpose of not only understanding the literal but also inferring the more subtle contexts within these documents. Students will use textual evidence to draw their conclusions and present arguments as directed in each lesson.

In this lesson the students will carefully read three short primary source documents that advocate Americans moving west and becoming settlers of this untamed land. The students will analyze the documents and identify the arguments that are being made for westward migration.

Introduction

The Great Western Migration On April 30, 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte of France sold Thomas Jefferson, then President of the United States, 885,000 square miles of territory in North America for $15 million. Congress sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to find out exactly what the United States had purchased. On November 7, 1805, the Lewis and Clark expedition reached the Pacific Ocean and the way to the West was opened. Fur trappers, traders, and finally pioneer settlers followed.

President James Polk stated that it was America’s "Manifest Destiny" to settle North America from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, and the people of America showed their agreement by pushing the borders of the United States across the Mississippi River and ever westward. In 1841 the first group of 69 pioneers left Missouri and headed west, bound for Oregon. From 1841 until the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 more than 350,000 emigrants traveled by foot and wagon to reach Oregon and California. At the peak of this westward migration more than 55,000 pioneers made the hazardous crossing in a single season.

"The Lovely Ohio" (early nineteenth-century song) http://www.balladofamerica.com/music/indexes/songs/lovelyohio/index.htm
Horace Greeley letter, 1871. Source: The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC00608
Arthur Chapman, "Out Where the West Begins" from Out Where the West Begins, and Other Western Verses (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917)
Summarize for Comprehension Lesson 1

Procedures:

At the teacher’s discretion you may choose to have the students do the lessons individually, as partners, or in small groups of no more than three or four students.

Discuss the information in the introduction. You may have the students take notes on the information.
Hand out "The Lovely Ohio."
The teacher then "share reads" the song with the students. This is done by having the students follow along silently while the teacher begins reading aloud. The teacher models prosody, inflection, and punctuation. The teacher then asks the class to join in with the reading after a few sentences while the teacher continues to read along with the students, still serving as the model for the class. This technique will support struggling readers as well as English Language Learners (ELL).
You can play the song for the students at the Internet link to the Ballad of American website: http://www.balladofamerica.com/music/indexes/songs/lovelyohio/index.htm .
Hand out the Summarize for Comprehension organizer. Students will look at the document and then determine which words or phrases are the most important words or phrases in song and copy those words into the box on the right of the organizer.
After they have determined what is most important they will summarize the text in their own words. Students can brainstorm as partners or small groups but must finish their own organizer in order to complete the assignment. Remember to emphasize that they are to first use the author’s own words to determine what is important in the text and then to summarize the meaning of the text in their own words.
Repeat this process with the other two documents: the poem "Out Where the West Begins" and the editorial letter of advice by Horace Greeley.
Class discussion. What is the central argument being made in all three pieces? Have groups or individual students share their summaries and compare with other groups.

In this lesson the students will carefully read an excerpt from the journal of a young girl traveling overland with her family to settle in the Oregon Territory in 1844. The students will analyze the document in order to understand some of the difficulties of making that journey. Students will answer a series of questions designed to measure their comprehension of the text

Introduction:

The Great Western Migration The 2,000 mile journey from Missouri to Oregon was not something to be taken lightly. It was a grueling five to eight month ordeal with one in every seventeen people that began the trip dying along the way. If graves were evenly spaced along the Oregon Trail’s 2,000 mile length there would be a tombstone every 80 yards to mark the resting place of a pioneer who did not survive the journey. Starvation, accidents, hostile Native Americans whose land was being invaded, outlaws, and especially the dreaded disease cholera accounted for those who would not survive to see the lush farmlands of Oregon or the goldfields of California.

If the journey was so dangerous, why did they go? Why would pioneers risk their own lives and the lives of their families in order to make this migration? There are many reasons. Among the most commonwas the promise of something better out west than they could have in the East. In 1843 a trapper who had been to Oregon’s Willamette Valley told a group of prospective emigrants that "the pigs are running around about under the great acorn trees, round and fat, and already cooked, with knives and forks sticking in them so that you can cut off a slice whenever you are hungry." Popular publications and guide books of the time told of all of the virtues of Oregon and California. One of these books claimed that, "As far as its producing qualities are concerned taken all in all, Oregon can not be outdone . . . whether corn . . . wheat, oats, rye, barley, buckwheat, peas, beans, potatoes, turnips, cabbages, onions, parsnips, carrots, beets, currants, gooseberries, strawberries, apples, peaches, pears, or fat and healthy babies ."

"On the Plains in 1844" from Across the Plains in 1844 , by Catherine Sager Pringle
Worksheet: Critical Questions
Hand out the journal excerpt "On the Plains in 1844."
If you choose, you can share read this as you did the passages in Lesson 1 or have the students read it for themselves.
Prior to the lesson you may want to find primary source visuals of the pioneer migration such as pictures of the land crossed, wagons used, and of pioneers themselves.
Hand out the Critical Questions worksheet. Students must use actual quotations from the text as the basis for their answers. Summaries should be complete sentences.
Students can brainstorm as partners or small groups but must complete their own organizer in order to complete the assignment. Remember to emphasize that they must use the author’s own words in order to validate their answers.
Class discussion: Have groups or individual students share their answers and compare with other groups.

In this lesson the students will demonstrate their understanding of the documents presented over the past two days. They will be preparing a mock debate in which they will be role playing prospective pioneers and will be debating questions concerning the wisdom of making the journey out west.

The Great Western Migration Oregon seemed, from all accounts, to be paradise on Earth. All you had to do was get there and claim your little bit of heaven. It was that hope that made it worth the risks of the journey. In addition, the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California in 1848 created a huge surge in the number of people choosing to emigrate to the West and try their luck in California.

These factors pulled people west while a number of factors pushed people out of the East. The first of these was a series of financial crises, the first in 1837, which brought about a depression and ruined many farmers. In addition, a series of epidemics were sweeping many parts of the eastern United States: typhoid, dysentery, tuberculosis, scarlet fever, malaria, and yellow fever. Perhaps the most devastating of all was cholera, which had arrived from Asia in the 1830s and in 1850 accounted for more than 50,000 deaths in the United States.

Others choose to emigrate to the West for the same reason that many people came to the Atlantic shores of America two centuries before: religious freedom. The Mormon pioneers, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, left Illinois in 1846 to find a place to practice their religion without fear of persecution and settled in the Salt Lake valley of Utah. Adventurers, missionaries, land speculators, and many others with a variety of goals followed the reasoning of Henry David Thoreau when he said, "Eastward, I go only by force, but westward I go free . . . the prevailing tendency of my countrymen."

The Great Western Migration
"The Wisconsin Emigrant" http://www.balladofamerica.com/music/indexes/songs/wisconsinemigrant/index.htm

Students should be organized into groups of three to five students. All of the students should have copies of the listed materials.

Discuss the information in the introduction.
Share read the song "The Wisconsin Emigrant" with the class and then listen to the song by using the link above.
Discuss the song by asking text-based questions: What reasons does the husband give for wanting to move to Wisconsin? What reasons does his wife give for staying? According to the husband, what will be better if they move? What argument does his wife make that finally convinces him to stay?
Tell the students that they are going to have a mock debate based on the reasons to journey out west in the 1800s or stay in the East. They need to choose one person in their group to be a debate moderator; the rest of the group will be divided evenly between those in favor of moving and those in favor of staying.
Inform the students that they will be writing the script for a debate based on the issues raised in the primary documents and the secondary source document that they have been studying. This script is to be written as a team effort and everyone in the group will have a copy of the final script. This will not be an actual debate but more like a short reader’s theater piece.
The teacher will provide one question that all groups must address during their debate. The students should add another two to four relevant questions. The answers they write must be taken directly from the primary source material.
It is important that the students portraying those who want to move and those who don’t want to move use the actual text from the documents to make their arguments.
What is the best reason for making or not making this journey? (Make sure to support your answer with evidence from the text.)
Students can then construct two to four questions of their own to be answered by either side with the opportunity for rebuttal.
Remind the students that everyone in the group needs to work on the script, not just one side or the other, and that the responses need to be taken directly from what the authors of the documents wrote.
Student will present their scripted debate in Lesson 4.

In this lesson the students will demonstrate their understanding of the documents presented over the past three days. They will be participating in a mock debate in which they will be role playing prospective pioneers and will be debating questions concerning the wisdom of making the journey out west.

There were many factors both pulling and pushing Americans into moving out west in the 1800s. There were also many reasons not to make the dangerous journey. That fateful decision, to move or to stay, is the subject of today’s debate.

Student-prepared debate scripts and any supporting documents from previous lessons.
Students will present their debates to the rest of the class while role playing both sides of the argument; to move out west or stay in the East.
One student in the group acts as the debate moderator and asks the scripted questions that the group wrote in Lesson 4.
Each side answers the questions, and if they have written rebuttals they can offer them as well. Each group should have from three to five questions and answers prepared for the debate.
Class discussion: After all of the debate presentations are concluded, discuss the best arguments made by the groups and the best text-based evidence used.

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The Westward Movement: A Guide to Selected Sources for the Study of the American Frontier and West Bibliography by Gary Shearer Reference Librarian Pacific Union College Library

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The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893)

By Frederick J. Turner, 1893

Editor's Note: Please note, this is a short version of the essay subsequently published in Turner's essay collection, The Frontier in American History (1920). This text is closer to the original version delivered at the 1893 meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, published in Annual Report of the American Historical Association , 1893, pp. 197–227.

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.” This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people—to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, “We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!” 1 So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government; the differentiation of simple colonial governments into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the great West. Even the slavery struggle, which is made so exclusive an object of attention by writers like Prof. von Holst, occupies its important place in American history because of its relation to westward expansion.

In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.

The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier—a fortified boundary line running through dense populations. The most significant thing about the American frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free land. In the census reports it is treated as the margin of that settlement which has a density of two or more to the square mile. The term is an elastic one, and for our purposes does not need sharp definition. We shall consider the whole frontier belt, including the Indian country and the outer margin of the “settled area” of the census reports. This paper will make no attempt to treat the subject exhaustively; its aim is simply to call attention to the frontier as a fertile field for investigation, and to suggest some of the problems which arise in connection with it.

In the settlement of America we have to observe how European life entered the continent, and how America modified and developed that life and reacted on Europe. Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an American environment. Too exclusive attention has been paid by institutional students to the Germanic origins, too little to the American factors. The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness; but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American. At first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American. As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines. And to study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history.

Stages of Frontier Advance

In the course of the seventeenth century the frontier was advanced up the Atlantic river courses, just beyond the “fall line,” and the tidewater region became the settled area. In the first half of the eighteenth century another advance occurred. Traders followed the Delaware and Shawnese Indians to the Ohio as early as the end of the first quarter of the century. 2 Gov. Spotswood, of Virginia, made an expedition in 1714 across the Blue Ridge. The end of the first quarter of the century saw the advance of the Scotch-Irish and the Palatine Germans up the Shenandoah Valley into the western part of Virginia, and along the Piedmont region of the Carolinas. 3 The Germans in New York pushed the frontier of settlement up the Mohawk to German Flats. 4 In Pennsylvania the town of Bedford indicates the line of settlement. Settlements had begun on New River, a branch of the Kanawha, and on the sources of the Yadkin and French Broad. 5 The King attempted to arrest the advance by his proclamation of 1763, 6 forbidding settlements beyond the sources of the rivers flowing into the Atlantic; but in vain. In the period of the Revolution the frontier crossed the Alleghanies into Kentucky and Tennessee, and the upper waters of the Ohio were settled. 7 When the first census was taken in 1790, the continuous settled area was bounded by a line which ran near the coast of Maine, and included New England except a portion of Vermont and New Hampshire, New York along the Hudson and up the Mohawk about Schenectady, eastern and southern Pennsylvania, Virginia well across the Shenandoah Valley, and the Carolinas and eastern Georgia. 8 Beyond this region of continuous settlement were the small settled areas of Kentucky and Tennessee, and the Ohio, with the mountains intervening between them and the Atlantic area, thus giving a new and important character to the frontier. The isolation of the region increased its peculiarly American tendencies, and the need of transportation facilities to connect it with the East called out important schemes of internal improvement, which will be noted farther on. The “West,” as a self-conscious section, began to evolve.

From decade to decade distinct advances of the frontier occurred. By the census of 1820, 9 the settled area included Ohio, southern Indiana and Illinois, southeastern Missouri, and about one-half of Louisiana. This settled area had surrounded Indian areas, and the management of these tribes became an object of political concern. The frontier region of the time lay along the Great Lakes, where Astor’s American Fur Company operated in the Indian trade, 10 and beyond the Mississippi, where Indian traders extended their activity even to the Rocky Mountains; Florida also furnished frontier conditions. The Mississippi River region was the scene of typical frontier settlements. 11

The rising steam navigation 12 on western waters, the opening of the Erie Canal, and the westward extension of cotton 13 culture added five frontier states to the Union in this period. Grund, writing in 1836, declares: “It appears then that the universal disposition of Americans to emigrate to the western wilderness, in order to enlarge their dominion over inanimate nature, is the actual result of an expansive power which is inherent in them, and which by continually agitating all classes of society is constantly throwing a large portion of the whole population on the extreme confines of the State, in order to gain space for its development. Hardly is a new State or Territory formed before the same principle manifests itself again and gives rise to a further emigration; and so is it destined to go on until a physical barrier must finally obstruct its progress.” 14

In the middle of this century the line indicated by the present eastern boundary of Indian Territory, Nebraska, and Kansas marked the frontier of the Indian country. 15 Minnesota and Wisconsin still exhibited frontier conditions, 16 but the distinctive frontier of the period is found in California, where the gold discoveries had sent a sudden tide of adventurous miners, and in Oregon, and the settlements in Utah. 17 As the frontier has leaped over the Alleghanies, so now it skipped the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains; and in the same way that the advance of the frontiersmen beyond the Alleghanies had caused the rise of important questions of transportation and internal improvement, so now the settlers beyond the Rocky Mountains needed means of communication with the East, and in the furnishing of these arose the settlement of the Great Plains and the development of still another kind of frontier life. Railroads, fostered by land grants, sent an increasing tide of immigrants into the far West. The United States Army fought a series of Indian wars in Minnesota, Dakota, and the Indian Territory.

By 1880 the settled area had been pushed into northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, along Dakota rivers, and in the Black Hills region, and was ascending the rivers of Kansas and Nebraska. The development of mines in Colorado had drawn isolated frontier settlements into that region, and Montana and Idaho were receiving settlers. The frontier was found in these mining camps and the ranches of the Great Plains. The superintendent of the census for 1890 reports, as previously stated, that the settlements of the West lie so scattered over the region that there can no longer be said to be a frontier line.

In these successive frontiers we find natural boundary lines which have served to mark and to affect the characteristics of the frontiers, namely: The “fall line;” the Alleghany Mountains; the Mississippi; the Missouri, where its direction approximates north and south; the line of the arid lands, approximately the ninety-ninth meridian; and the Rocky Mountains. The fall line marked the frontier of the seventeenth century; the Alleghanies that of the eighteenth; the Mississippi that of the first quarter of the nineteenth; the Missouri that of the middle of this century (omitting the California movement); and the belt of the Rocky Mountains and the arid tract, the present frontier. Each was won by a series of Indian wars.

The Frontier Furnishes a Field for Comparative Study of Social Development

At the Atlantic frontier one can study the germs of processes repeated at each successive frontier. We have the complex European life sharply precipitated by the wilderness into the simplicity of primitive conditions. The first frontier had to meet its Indian question, its question of the disposition of the public domain, of the means of intercourse with older settlements, of the extension of political organization, of religious and educational activity. And the settlement of these and similar questions for one frontier served as a guide for the next. The American student needs not to go to the “prim little townships of Sleswick” for illustrations of the law of continuity and development. For example, he may study the origin of our land policies in the colonial land policy; he may see how the system grew by adapting the statutes to the customs of the successive frontiers. 18 He may see how the mining experience in the lead regions of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa was applied to the mining laws of the Rockies, 19 and how our Indian policy has been a series of experimentations on successive frontiers. Each tier of new States has found in the older ones material for its constitutions. 20 Each frontier has made similar contributions to American character, as will be discussed farther on.

But with all these similarities there are essential differences, due to the place element and the time element. It is evident that the farming frontier of the Mississippi Valley presents different conditions from the mining frontier of the Rocky Mountains. The frontier reached by the Pacific Railroad, surveyed into rectangles, guarded by the United States Army, and recruited by the daily immigrant ship, moves forward at a swifter pace and in a different way than the frontier reached by the birch canoe or the pack horse. The geologist traces patiently the shores of ancient seas, maps their areas, and compares the older and the newer. It would be a work worth the historian’s labors to mark these various frontiers and in detail compare one with another. Not only would there result a more adequate conception of American development and characteristics, but invaluable additions would be made to the history of society.

Loria, 21 the Italian economist, has urged the study of colonial life as an aid in understanding the stages of European development, affirming that colonial settlement is for economic science what the mountain is for geology, bringing to light primitive stratifications. “America,” he says, “has the key to the historical enigma which Europe has sought for centuries in vain, and the land which has no history reveals luminously the course of universal history.” There is much truth in this. The United States lies like a huge page in the history of society. Line by line as we read this continental page from west to east we find the record of social evolution. It begins with the Indian and the hunter; it goes on to tell of the disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the trader, the pathfinder of civilization; we read the annals of the pastoral stage in ranch life; the exploitation of the soil by the raising of unrotated crops of corn and wheat in sparsely settled farming communities; the intensive culture of the denser farm settlement; and finally the manufacturing organization with city and factory system. 22 This page is familiar to the student of census statistics, but how little of it has been used by our historians. Particularly in eastern States this page is a palimpsest. What is now a manufacturing State was in an earlier decade an area of intensive farming. Earlier yet it had been a wheat area, and still earlier the “range” had attracted the cattle-herder. Thus Wisconsin, now developing manufacture, is a State with varied agricultural interests. But earlier it was given over to almost exclusive grain-raising, like North Dakota at the present time.

Each of these areas has had an influence in our economic and political history; the evolution of each into a higher stage has worked political transformations. But what constitutional historian has made any adequate attempt to interpret political facts by the light of these social areas and changes? 23

The Atlantic frontier was compounded of fisherman, far trader, miner, cattle-raiser, and farmer. Excepting the fisherman, each type of industry was on the march toward the West, impelled by an irresistible attraction. Each passed in successive waves across the continent. Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file—the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer—and the frontier has passed by. Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession with wider intervals between. The unequal rate of advance compels us to distinguish the frontier into the trader’s frontier, the rancher’s frontier, or the miner’s frontier, and the farmer’s frontier. When the mines and the cow pens were still near the fall line the traders’ pack trains were tinkling across the Alleghanies, and the French on the Great Lakes were fortifying their posts, alarmed by the British trader’s birch canoe. When the trappers scaled the Rockies, the farmer was still near the mouth of the Missouri.

The Indian Trader’s Frontier

Why was it that the Indian trader passed so rapidly across the continent? What effects followed from the trader’s frontier? The trade was coeval with American discovery, The Norsemen, Vespuccius, Verrazani, Hudson, John Smith, all trafficked for furs. The Plymouth pilgrims settled in Indian cornfields, and their first return cargo was of beaver and lumber. The records of the various New England colonies show how steadily exploration was carried into the wilderness by this trade. What is true for New England is, as would be expected, even plainer for the rest of the colonies. All along the coast from Maine to Georgia the Indian trade opened up the river courses. Steadily the trader passed westward, utilizing the older lines of French trade. The Ohio, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Platte, the lines of western advance, were ascended by traders. They found the passes in the Rocky Mountains and guided Lewis and Clarke, 24 Fremont, and Bidwell. The explanation of the rapidity of this advance is connected with the effects of the trader on the Indian. The trading post left the unarmed tribes at the mercy of those that had purchased fire-arms—a truth which the Iroquois Indians wrote in blood, and so the remote and unvisited tribes gave eager welcome to the trader. “The savages,” wrote La Salle, “take better care of us French than of their own children; from us only can they get guns and goods.” This accounts for the trader’s power and the rapidity of his advance. Thus the disintegrating forces of civilization entered the wilderness. Every river valley and Indian trail became a fissure in Indian society, and so that society became honeycombed. Long before the pioneer farmer appeared on the scene, primitive Indian life had passed away. The farmers met Indians armed with guns. The trading frontier, while steadily undermining Indian power by making the tribes ultimately dependent on the whites, yet, through its sale of guns, gave to the Indians increased power of resistance to the farming frontier. French colonization was dominated by its trading frontier; English colonization by its farming frontier. There was an antagonism between the two frontiers as between the two nations. Said Duquesne to the Iroquois, “Are you ignorant of the difference between the king of England and the king of France? Go see the forts that our king has established and you will see that you can still hunt under their very walls. They have been placed for your advantage in places which you frequent. The English, on the contrary, are no sooner in possession of a place than the game is driven away. The forest falls before them as they advance, and the soil is laid bare so that you can scarce find the wherewithal to erect a shelter for the night.”

And yet, in spite of this opposition of the interests of the trader and the farmer, the Indian trade pioneered the way for civilization. The buffalo trail became the Indian trail, and this because the trader’s “trace;” the trails widened into roads, and the roads into turnpikes, and these in turn were transformed into railroads. The same origin can be shown for the railroads of the South, the far West, and the Dominion of Canada. 25 The trading posts reached by these trails were on the sites of Indian villages which had been placed in positions suggested by nature; and these trading posts, situated so as to command the water systems of the country, have grown into such cities as Albany, Pittsburg, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Council Bluffs, and Kansas City. Thus civilization in America has followed the arteries made by geology, pouring an ever richer tide through them, until at last the slender paths of aboriginal intercourse have been broadened and interwoven into the complex mazes of modern commercial lines; the wilderness has been interpenetrated by lines of civilization growing ever more numerous. It is like the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the originally simple, inert continent. If one would understand why we are to-day one nation, rather than a collection of isolated states, he must study this economic and social consolidation of the country. In this progress from savage conditions lie topics for the evolutionist. 26

The effect of the Indian frontier as a consolidating agent in our history is important. From the close of the seventeenth century various intercolonial congresses have been called to treat with Indians and establish common measures of defense. Particularism was strongest in colonies with no Indian frontier. This frontier stretched along the western border like a cord of union. The Indian was a common danger, demanding united action. Most celebrated of these conferences was the Albany congress of 1754, called to treat with the Six Nations, and to consider plans of union. Even a cursory reading of the plan proposed by the congress reveals the importance of the frontier. The powers of the general council and the officers were, chiefly, the determination of peace and war with the Indians, the regulation of Indian trade, the purchase of Indian lands, and the creation and government of new settlements as a security against the Indians. It is evident that the unifying tendencies of the Revolutionary period were facilitated by the previous cooperation in the regulation of the frontier. In this connection may be mentioned the importance of the frontier, from that day to this, as a military training school, keeping alive the power of resistance to aggression, and developing the stalwart and rugged qualities of the frontiersman.

The Rancher’s Frontier

It would not be possible in the limits of this paper to trace the other frontiers across the continent. Travelers of the eighteenth century found the “cowpens” among the canebrakes and peavine pastures of the South, and the “cow drivers” took their droves to Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York. 27 Travelers at the close of the War of 1812 met droves of more than a thousand cattle and swine from the interior of Ohio going to Pennsylvania to fatten for the Philadelphia market. 28 The ranges of the Great Plains, with ranch and cowboy and nomadic life, are things of yesterday and of to-day. The experience of the Carolina cowpens guided the ranchers of Texas. One element favoring the rapid extension of the rancher’s frontier is the fact that in a remote country lacking transportation facilities the product must be in small bulk, or must be able to transport itself, and the cattle raiser could easily drive his product to market. The effect of these great ranches on the subsequent agrarian history of the localities in which they existed should be studied.

The Farmer’s Frontier

The maps of the census reports show an uneven advance of the farmer’s frontier, with tongues of settlement pushed forward and with indentations of wilderness. In part this is due to Indian resistance, in part to the location of river valleys and passes, in part to the unequal force of the centers of frontier attraction. Among the important centers of attraction may be mentioned the following: fertile and favorably situated soils, salt springs, mines, and army posts.

The frontier army post, serving to protect the settlers from the Indians, has also acted as a wedge to open the Indian country, and has been a nucleus for settlement. 29 In this connection mention should also be made of the Government military and exploring expeditions in determining the lines of settlement. But all the more important expeditions were greatly indebted to the earliest pathmakers, the Indian guides, the traders and trappers, and the French voyageurs, who were inevitable parts of governmental expeditions from the days of Lewis and Clarke. 30 Each expedition was an epitome of the previous factors in western advance.

Salt Springs

In an interesting monograph, Victor Hehn 31 has traced the effect of salt upon early European development, and has pointed out how it affected the lines of settlement and the form of administration. A similar study might be made for the salt springs of the United States. The early settlers were tied to the coast by the need of salt, without which they could not preserve their meats or live in comfort. Writing in 1752, Bishop Spangenburg says of a colony for which he was seeking lands in North Carolina, “They will require salt & other necessaries which they can neither manufacture nor raise. Either they must go to Charleston, which is 300 miles distant * * * Or else they must go to Boling’s Point in Va on a branch of the James & is also 300 miles from here * * * Or else they must go down the Roanoke—I know not how many miles—where salt is brought up from the Cape Fear.” 32 This may serve as a typical illustration. An annual pilgrimage to the coast for salt thus became essential. Taking flocks or furs and ginseng root, the early settlers sent their pack trains after seeding time each year to the coast. 33 This proved to be an important educational influence, since it was almost the only way in which the pioneer learned what was going on in the East. But when discovery was made of the salt springs of the Kanawha, and the Holston, and Kentucky, and central New York, the West began to be freed from dependence on the coast. It was in part the effect of finding these salt springs that enabled settlement to cross the mountains.

From the time the mountains rose between the pioneer and the seaboard, a new order of Americanism arose. The West and the East began to get out of touch of each other. The settlements from the sea to the mountains kept connection with the rear and had a certain solidarity. But the overmountain men grew more and more independent. The East took a narrow view of American advance, and nearly lost these men. Kentucky and Tennessee history bears abundant witness to the truth of this statement. The East began to try to hedge and limit westward expansion. Though Webster could declare that there were no Alleghanies in his politics, yet in politics in general they were a very solid factor.

The exploitation of the beasts took hunter and trader to the west, the exploitation of the grasses took the rancher west, and the exploitation of the virgin soil of the river valleys and prairies attracted the farmer. Good soils have been the most continuous attraction to the farmer’s frontier. The land hunger of the Virginians drew them down the rivers into Carolina, in early colonial days; the search for soils took the Massachusetts men to Pennsylvania and to New York. As the eastern lands were taken up migration flowed across them to the west. Daniel Boone, the great backwoodsman, who combined the occupations of hunter, trader, cattle-raiser, farmer, and surveyor—learning, probably from the traders, of the fertility of the lands on the upper Yadkin, where the traders were wont to rest as they took their way to the Indians, left his Pennsylvania home with his father, and passed down the Great Valley road to that stream. Learning from a trader whose posts were on the Red River in Kentucky of its game and rich pastures, he pioneered the way for the farmers to that region. Thence he passed to the frontier of Missouri, where his settlement was long a landmark on the frontier. Here again he helped to open the way for civilization, finding salt licks, and trails, and land. His son was among the earliest trappers in the passes of the Rocky Mountains, and his party are said to have been the first to camp on the present site of Denver. His grandson, Col. A. J. Boone, of Colorado, was a power among the Indians of the Rocky Mountains, and was appointed an agent by the Government. Kit Carson’s mother was a Boone. 34 Thus this family epitomizes the backwoodsman’s advance across the continent.

The farmer’s advance came in a distinct series of waves. In Peck’s New Guide to the West, published in Boston in 1837, occurs this suggestive passage:

Generally, in all the western settlements, three classes, like the waves of the ocean, have rolled one after the other. First comes the pioneer, who depends for the subsistence of his family chiefly upon the natural growth of vegetation, called the “range,” and the proceeds of hunting. His implements of agriculture are rude, chiefly of his own make, and his efforts directed mainly to a crop of corn and a “truck patch.” The last is a rude garden for growing cabbage, beans, corn for roasting ears, cucumbers, and potatoes. A log cabin, and, occasionally, a stable and corn-crib, and a field of a dozen acres, the timber girdled or “deadened,” and fenced, are enough for his occupancy. It is quite immaterial whether he ever becomes the owner of the soil. He is the occupant for the time being, pays no rent, and feels as independent as the “lord of the manor.” With a horse, cow, and one or two breeders of swine, he strikes into the woods with his family, and becomes the founder of a new county, or perhaps state. He builds his cabin, gathers around him a few other families of similar tastes and habits, and occupies till the range is somewhat subdued, and hunting a little precarious, or, which is more frequently the case, till the neighbors crowd around, roads, bridges, and fields annoy him, and he lacks elbow room. The preemption law enables him to dispose of his cabin and cornfield to the next class of emigrants; and, to employ his own figures, he “breaks for the high timber,” “clears out for the New Purchase,” or migrates to Arkansas or Texas, to work the same process over.

The next class of emigrants purchase the lands, add field to field, clear out the roads, throw rough bridges over the streams, put up hewn log houses with glass windows and brick or stone chimneys, occasionally plant orchards, build mills, schoolhouses, court-houses, etc., and exhibit the picture and forms of plain, frugal, civilized life.

Another wave rolls on. The men of capital and enterprise come. The settler is ready to sell out and take the advantage of the rise in property, push farther into the interior and become, himself, a man of capital and enterprise in turn. The small village rises to a spacious town or city; substantial edifices of brick, extensive fields, orchards, gardens, colleges, and churches are seen. Broadcloths, silks, leghorns, crapes, and all the refinements, luxuries, elegancies, frivolities, and fashions are in vogue. Thus wave after wave is rolling westward; the real Eldorado is still farther on.

A portion of the two first classes remain stationary amidst the general movement, improve their habits and condition, and rise in the scale of society.

The writer has traveled much amongst the first class, the real pioneers. He has lived many years in connection with the second grade; and now the third wave is sweeping over large districts of Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. Migration has become almost a habit in the west. Hundreds of men can be found, not over 50 years of age, who have settled for the fourth, fifth, or sixth time on a new spot. To sell out and remove only a few hundred miles makes up a portion of the variety of backwoods life and manners. 35

Omitting those of the pioneer farmers who move from the love of adventure, the advance of the more steady farmer is easy to understand. Obviously the immigrant was attracted by the cheap lands of the frontier, and even the native farmer felt their influence strongly. Year by year the farmers who lived on soil whose returns were diminished by unrotated crops were offered the virgin soil of the frontier at nominal prices. Their growing families demanded more lands, and these were dear. The competition of the unexhausted, cheap, and easily tilled prairie lands compelled the farmer either to go west and continue the exhaustion of the soil on a new frontier, or to adopt intensive culture. Thus the census of 1890 shows, in the Northwest, many counties in which there is an absolute or a relative decrease of population. These States have been sending farmers to advance the frontier on the plains, and have themselves begun to turn to intensive farming and to manufacture. A decade before this, Ohio had shown the same transition stage. Thus the demand for land and the love of wilderness freedom drew the frontier ever onward.

Having now roughly outlined the various kinds of frontiers, and their modes of advance, chiefly from the point of view of the frontier itself, we may next inquire what were the influences on the East and on the Old World. A rapid enumeration of some of the more noteworthy effects is all that I have time for.

Composite Nationality

First, we note that the frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people. The coast was preponderantly English, but the later tides of continental immigration flowed across to the free lands. This was the case from the early colonial days. The Scotch Irish and the Palatine Germans, or “Pennsylvania Dutch,” furnished the dominant element in the stock of the colonial frontier. With these peoples were also the freed indented servants, or redemptioners, who at the expiration of their time of service passed to the frontier. Governor Spottswood of Virginia writes in 1717, “The inhabitants of our frontiers are composed generally of such as have been transported hither as servants, and, being out of their time, settle themselves where laud is to be taken up and that will produce the necessarys of life with little labour.” 36 Very generally these redemptioners were of non-English stock. In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality or characteristics. The process has gone on from the early days to our own. Burke and other writers in the middle of the eighteenth century believed that Pennsylvania 37 was “threatened with the danger of being wholly foreign in language, manners, and perhaps even inclinations.” The German and Scotch-Irish elements in the frontier of the South were only less great. In the middle of the present century the German element in Wisconsin was already so considerable that leading publicists looked to the creation of a German state out of the commonwealth by concentrating their colonization. 38 Such examples teach us to beware of misinterpreting the fact that there is a common English speech in America into a belief that the stock is also English.

Industrial Independence

In another way the advance of the frontier decreased our dependence on England. The coast, particularly of the South, lacked diversified industries, and was dependent on England for the bulk of its supplies. In the South there was even a dependence on the Northern colonies for articles of food. Governor Glenn, of South Carolina, writes in the middle of the eighteenth century: “Our trade with New York and Philadelphia was of this sort, draining us of all the little money and bills we could gather from other places for their bread, flour, beer, hams, bacon, and other things of their produce, all which, except beer, our new townships begin to supply us with, which are settled with very industrious and thriving Germans. This no doubt diminishes the number of shipping and the appearance of our trade, but it is far from being a detriment to us.” 39 Before long the frontier created a demand for merchants. As it retreated from the coast it became less and less possible for England to bring her supplies directly to the consumer’s wharfs, and carry away staple crops, and staple crops began to give way to diversified agriculture for a time. The effect of this phase of the frontier action upon the northern section is perceived when we realize how the advance of the frontier aroused seaboard cities like Boston, New York, and Baltimore, to engage in rivalry for what Washington called “the extensive and valuable trade of a rising empire.”

Effects on National Legislation

The legislation which most developed the powers of the National Government, and played the largest part in its activity, was conditioned on the frontier. Writers have discussed the subjects of tariff, land, and internal improvement, as subsidiary to the slavery question. But when American history comes to be rightly viewed it will be seen that the slavery question is an incident. In the period from the end of the first half of the present century to the close of the civil war slavery rose to primary, but far from exclusive, importance. But this does not justify Dr. von Holst (to take an example) in treating our constitutional history in its formative period down to 1828 in a single volume, giving six volumes chiefly to the history of slavery from 1828 to 1861, under the title “Constitutional History of the United States.” The growth of nationalism and the evolution of American political institutions were dependent on the advance of the frontier. Even so recent a writer as Rhodes, in his History of the United States since the compromise of 1850, has treated the legislation called out by the western advance as incidental to the slavery struggle.

This is a wrong perspective. The pioneer needed the goods of the coast, and so the grand series of internal improvement and railroad legislation began, with potent nationalizing effects. Over internal improvements occurred great debates, in which grave constitutional questions were discussed. Sectional groupings appear in the votes, profoundly significant for the historian. Loose construction increased as the nation marched westward. 40 But the West was not content with bringing the farm to the factory. Under the lead of Clay—“Harry of the West”—protective tariffs were passed, with the cry of bringing the factory to the farm. The disposition of the public lands was a third important subject of national legislation influenced by the frontier.

The Public Domain

The public domain has been a force of profound importance in the nationalization and development of the Government. The effects of the struggle of the landed and the landless States, and of the ordinance of 1787, need no discussion. 41 Administratively the frontier called out some of the highest and most vitalizing activities of the General Government. The purchase of Louisiana was perhaps the constitutional turning point in the history of the Republic, inasmuch as it afforded both a new area for national legislation and the occasion of the downfall of the policy of strict construction. But the purchase of Louisiana was called out by frontier needs and demands. As frontier States accrued to the Union the national power grew. In a speech on the dedication of the Calhoun monument Mr. Lamar explained: “In 1789 the States were the creators of the Federal Government; in 1861 the Federal Government was the creator of a large majority of the States.”

When we consider the public domain from the point of view of the sale and disposal of the public lands we are again brought face to face with the frontier. The policy of the United States in dealing with its lands is in sharp contrast with the European system of scientific administration. Efforts to make this domain a source of revenue, and to withhold it from emigrants in order that settlement might be compact, were in vain. The jealousy and the fears of the East were powerless in the face of the demands of the frontiersmen. John Quincy Adams was obliged to confess: “My own system of administration, which was to make the national domain the inexhaustible fund for progressive and unceasing internal improvement, has failed.” The reason is obvious; a system of administration was not what the West demanded; it wanted land. Adams states the situation as follows: “The slaveholders of the South have bought the cooperation of the western country by the bribe of the western lands, abandoning to the new Western States their own proportion of the public property and aiding them in the design of grasping all the lands into their own hands.” Thomas H. Benton was the author of this system, which he brought forward as a substitute for the American system of Mr. Clay, and to supplant him as the leading statesman of the West. Mr. Clay, by his tariff compromise with Mr. Calhoun, abandoned his own American system. At the same time he brought forward a plan for distributing among all the States of the Union the proceeds of the sales of the public lands. His bill for that purpose passed both Houses of Congress, but was vetoed by President Jackson, who, in his annual message of December, 1832, formally recommended that all public lands should be gratuitously given away to individual adventurers and to the States in which the lands are situated. 42

“No subject,” said Henry Clay, “which has presented itself to the present, or perhaps any preceding, Congress, is of greater magnitude than that of the public lands.” When we consider the far-reaching effects of the Government’s land policy upon political, economic, and social aspects of American life, we are disposed to agree with him. But this legislation was framed under frontier influences, and under the lead of Western statesmen like Benton and Jackson. Said Senator Scott of Indiana in 1841: “I consider the preemption law merely declaratory of the custom or common law of the settlers.”

National Tendencies of the Frontier

It is safe to say that the legislation with regard to land, tariff, and internal improvements—the American system of the nationalizing Whig party—was conditioned on frontier ideas and needs. But it was not merely in legislative action that the frontier worked against the sectionalism of the coast. The economic and social characteristics of the frontier worked against sectionalism. The men of the frontier had closer resemblances to the Middle region than to either of the other sections. Pennsylvania had been the seed-plot of frontier emigration, and, although she passed on her settlers along the Great Valley into the west of Virginia and the Carolinas, yet the industrial society of these Southern frontiersmen was always more like that of the Middle region than like that of the tide-water portion of the South, which later came to spread its industrial type throughout the South.

The Middle region, entered by New York harbor, was an open door to all Europe. The tide-water part of the South represented typical Englishmen, modified by a warm climate and servile labor, and living in baronial fashion on great plantations; New England stood for a special English movement—Puritanism. The Middle region was less English than the other sections. It had a wide mixture of nationalities, a varied society, the mixed town and county system of local government, a varied economic life, many religious sects. In short, it was a region mediating between New England and the South, and the East and the West. It represented that composite nationality which the contemporary United States exhibits, that juxtaposition of non-English groups, occupying a valley or a little settlement, and presenting reflections of the map of Europe in their variety. It was democratic and nonsectional, if not national; “easy, tolerant, and contented;” rooted strongly in material prosperity. It was typical of the modern United States. It was least sectional, not only because it lay between North and South, but also because with no barriers to shut out its frontiers from its settled region, and with a system of connecting waterways, the Middle region mediated between East and West as well as between North and South. Thus it became the typically American region. Even the New Englander, who was shut out from the frontier by the Middle region, tarrying in New York or Pennsylvania on his westward march, lost the acuteness of his sectionalism on the way. 43

The spread of cotton culture into the interior of the South finally broke down the contrast between the “tide-water” region and the rest of the State, and based Southern interests on slavery. Before this process revealed its results the western portion of the South, which was akin to Pennsylvania in stock, society, and industry, showed tendencies to fall away from the faith of the fathers into internal improvement legislation and nationalism. In the Virginia convention of 1829–30, called to revise the constitution, Mr. Leigh, of Chesterfield, one of the tide-water counties, declared:

One of the main causes of discontent which led to this convention, that which had the strongest influence in overcoming our veneration for the work of our fathers, which taught us to contemn the sentiments of Henry and Mason and Pendleton, which weaned us from our reverence for the constituted authorities of the State, was an overweening passion for internal improvement. I say this with perfect knowledge, for it has been avowed to me by gentlemen from the West over and over again. And let me tell the gentleman from Albemarle (Mr. Gordon) that it has been another principal object of those who set this ball of revolution in motion, to overturn the doctrine of State rights, of which Virginia has been the very pillar, and to remove the barrier she has interposed to the interference of the Federal Government in that same work of internal improvement, by so reorganizing the legislature that Virginia, too, may be hitched to the Federal car.

It was this nationalizing tendency of the West that transformed the democracy of Jefferson into the national republicanism of Monroe and the democracy of Andrew Jackson. The West of the war of 1812, the West of Clay, and Benton, and Harrison, and Andrew Jackson, shut off by the Middle States and the mountains from the coast sections, had a solidarity of its own with national tendencies. 44 On the tide of the Father of Waters, North and South met and mingled into a nation. Interstate migration went steadily on—a process of cross-fertilization of ideas and institutions. The fierce struggle of the sections over slavery on the western frontier does not diminish the truth of this statement; it proves the truth of it. Slavery was a sectional trait that would not down, but in the West it could not remain sectional. It was the greatest of frontiersmen who declared: “I believe this Government can not endure permanently half slave and half free. It will become all of one thing or all of the other.” Nothing works for nationalism like intercourse within the nation. Mobility of population is death to localism, and the western frontier worked irresistibly in unsettling population. The effects reached back from the frontier and affected profoundly the Atlantic coast and even the Old World.

Growth of Democracy

But the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. As has been indicated, the frontier is productive of individualism. Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression. Prof. Osgood, in an able article, 45 has pointed out that the frontier conditions prevalent in the colonies are important factors in the explanation of the American Revolution, where individual liberty was sometimes confused with absence of all effective government. The same conditions aid in explaining the difficulty of instituting a strong government in the period of the confederacy. The frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted democracy.

The frontier States that came into the Union in the first quarter of a century of its existence came in with democratic suffrage provisions, and had reactive effects of the highest importance upon the older States whose peoples were being attracted there. An extension of the franchise became essential. It was western New York that forced an extension of suffrage in the constitutional convention of that State in 1821; and it was western Virginia that compelled the tide-water region to put a more liberal suffrage provision in the constitution framed in 1830, and to give to the frontier region a more nearly proportionate representation with the tide-water aristocracy. The rise of democracy as an effective force in the nation came in with western preponderance under Jackson and William Henry Harrison, and it meant the triumph of the frontier—with all of its good and with all of its evil elements. 46 An interesting illustration of the tone of frontier democracy in 1830 comes from the same debates in the Virginia convention already referred to. A representative from western Virginia declared:

But, sir, it is not the increase of population in the West which this gentleman ought to fear. It is the energy which the mountain breeze and western habits impart to those emigrants. They are regenerated, politically I mean, sir. They soon become working politicians; and the difference, sir, between a talking and a working politician is immense. The Old Dominion has long been celebrated for producing great orators; the ablest metaphysicians in policy; men that can split hairs in all abstruse questions of political economy. But at home, or when they return from Congress, they have negroes to fan them asleep. But a Pennsylvania, a New York, an Ohio, or a western Virginia statesman, though far inferior in logic, metaphysics, and rhetoric to an old Virginia statesman, has this advantage, that when he returns home he takes off his coat and takes hold of the plow. This gives him bone and muscle, sir, and preserves his republican principles pure and uncontaminated.

So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power. But the democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers as well as it benefits. Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and all the manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly developed civic spirit. In this connection may be noted also the influence of frontier conditions in permitting lax business honor, inflated paper currency and wild-cat banking. The colonial and revolutionary frontier was the region whence emanated many of the worst forms of an evil currency. 47 The West in the war of 1812 repeated the phenomenon on the frontier of that day, while the speculation and wild-cat banking of the period of the crisis of 1837 occurred on the new frontier belt of the next tier of States. Thus each one of the periods of lax financial integrity coincides with periods when a new set of frontier communities had arisen, and coincides in area with these successive frontiers, for the most part. The recent Populist agitation is a case in point. Many a State that now declines any connection with the tenets of the Populists, itself adhered to such ideas in an earlier stage of the development of the State. A primitive society can hardly be expected to show the intelligent appreciation of the complexity of business interests in a developed society. The continual recurrence of these areas of paper-money agitation is another evidence that the frontier can be isolated and studied as a factor in American history of the highest importance. 48

Attempts to Check and Regulate the Frontier

The East has always feared the result of an unregulated advance of the frontier, and has tried to check and guide it. The English authorities would have checked settlement at the headwaters of the Atlantic tributaries and allowed the “savages to enjoy their deserts in quiet lest the peltry trade should decrease.” This called out Burke’s splendid protest:

If you stopped your grants, what would be the consequence? The people would occupy without grants. They have already so occupied in many places. You cannot station garrisons in every part of these deserts. If you drive the people from one place, they will carry on their annual tillage and remove with their flocks and herds to another. Many of the people in the back settlements are already little attached to particular situations. Already they have topped the Appalachian mountains. From thence they behold before them an immense plain, one vast, rich, level meadow; a square of five hundred miles. Over this they would wander without a possibility of restraint; they would change their manners with their habits of life; would soon forget a government by which they were disowned; would become hordes of English Tartars; and, pouring down upon your unfortified frontiers a fierce and irresistible cavalry, become masters of your governors and your counselers, your collectors and comptrollers, and of all the slaves that adhered to them. Such would, and in no long time must, be the effect of attempting to forbid as a crime and to suppress as an evil the command and blessing of Providence, “Increase and multiply.” Such would be the happy result of an endeavor to keep as a lair of wild beasts that earth which God, by an express charter, has given to the children of men.

But the English Government was not alone in its desire to limit the advance of the frontier and guide its destinies. Tidewater Virginia 49 and South Carolina 50 gerrymandered those colonies to insure the dominance of the coast in their legislatures. Washington desired to settle a State at a time in the Northwest; Jefferson would reserve from settlement the territory of his Louisiana purchase north of the thirty-second parallel, in order to offer it to the Indians in exchange for their settlements east of the Mississippi. “When we shall be full on this side,” he writes, “we may lay off a range of States on the western bank from the head to the mouth, and so range after range, advancing compactly as we multiply.” Madison went so far as to argue to the French minister that the United States had no interest in seeing population extend itself on the right bank of the Mississippi, but should rather fear it. When the Oregon question was under debate, in 1824, Smyth, of Virginia, would draw an unchangeable line for the limits of the United States at the outer limit of two tiers of States beyond the Mississippi, complaining that the seaboard States were being drained of the flower of their population by the bringing of too much land into market. Even Thomas Becton, the man of widest views of the destiny of the West, at this stage of his career declared that along the ridge of the Rocky mountains “the western limits of the Republic should be drawn, and the statue of the fabled god Terminus should be raised upon its highest peak, never to be thrown down.” 51 But the attempts to limit the boundaries, to restrict land sales and settlement, and to deprive the West of its share of political power were all in vain. Steadily the frontier of settlement advanced and carried with it individualism, democracy, and nationalism, and powerfully affected the East and the Old World.

Missionary Activity

The most effective efforts of the East to regulate the frontier came through its educational and religious activity, exerted by interstate migration and by organized societies. Speaking in 1835, Dr. Lyman Beecher declared: “It is equally plain that the religious and political destiny of our nation is to be decided in the West,” and he pointed out that the population of the West “is assembled from all the States of the Union and from all the nations of Europe, and is rushing in like the waters of the flood, demanding for its moral preservation the immediate and universal action of those institutions which discipline the mind and arm the conscience, and the heart. And so various are the opinions and habits, and so recent and imperfect is the acquaintance, and so sparse are the settlements of the West, that no homogeneous public sentiment can be formed to legislate immediately into being the requisite institutions. And yet they are all needed immediately in their utmost perfection and power. A nation is being ‘born in a day.’ * * * But what will become of the West if her prosperity rushes up to such a majesty of power, while those great institutions linger which are necessary to form the mind and the conscience and the heart of that vast world. It must not be permitted. * * * Let no man at the East quiet himself and dream of liberty, whatever may become of the West. * * * Her destiny is our destiny.” 52

With the appeal to the conscience of New England, he adds appeals to her fears lest other religious sects anticipate her own. The New England preacher and school-teacher left their mark on the West. The dread of Western emancipation from New England’s political and economic control was paralleled by her fears lest the West cut loose from her religion. Commenting in 1850 on reports that settlement was rapidly extending northward in Wisconsin, the editor of the Home Missionary writes: “We scarcely know whether to rejoice or mourn over this extension of our settlements. While we sympathize in whatever tends to increase the physical resources and prosperity of our country, we can not forget that with all these dispersions into remote and still remoter corners of the land the supply of the means of grace is becoming relatively less and less.” Acting in accordance with such ideas, home missions were established and Western colleges were erected. As seaboard cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore strove for the mastery of Western trade, so the various denominations strove for the possession of the West. Thus an intellectual stream from New England sources fertilized the West. Other sections sent their missionaries; but the real struggle was between sects. The contest for power and the expansive tendency furnished to the various sects by the existence of a moving frontier must have had important results on the character of religious organization in the United States. The multiplication of rival churches in the little frontier towns had deep and lasting social effects. The religious aspects of the frontier make a chapter in our history which needs study.

Intellectual Traits

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; 53 that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

Since the meeting of the American Historical Association, this paper has also been given as an address to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, December 14, 1893. I have to thank the Secretary of the Society, Mr. Reuben G. Thwaites, for securing valuable material for my use in the preparation of the paper.

1. Abridgment of Debates of Congress, v., p. 706.

2. Bancroft (1860 ed.), III, pp. 344, 345, citing Logan MSS.; [Mitchell] Contest in America, etc. (1752), p. 237.

3. Kercheval, History of the Valley; Bernheim, German Settlements in the Carolinas; Winsor, Narrative and Critical History of America, V, p. 304; Colonial Records of North Carolina, IV, p. xx; Weston, Documents Connected with the History of South Carolina, p. 82; Ellis and Evans, History of Lancaster County, Pa., chs. iii, xxvi.

4. Parkman, Pontiac, II; Griffis, Sir William Johnson, p. 6; Simms’s Frontiersmen of New York.

5. Monette, Mississippi Valley, I, p. 311.

6. Wis. Hist. Cols., XI, p. 50; Hinsdale, Old Northwest, p. 121; Burke, “Oration on Conciliation,” Works (1872 ed.), I, p. 473.

7. Roosevelt, Winning of the West, and citations there given; Cutler’s Life of Cutler.

8. Scribner’s Statistical Atlas, xxxviii, pl. 13; MacMaster, Hist. of People of U. S., I, pp. 4, 60, 61; Imlay and Filson, Western Territory of America (London, 1793); Rochefoucault-Liancourt, Travels Through the United States of North America (London, 1799); Michaux’s “Journal,” in Proceedings American Philosophical Society, XXVI, No. 129; Forman, Narrative of a Journey Down the Ohio and Mississippi in 1780–‘90 (Cincinnati, 1888); Bartram, Travels Through North Carolina, etc. (London, 1792); Pope, Tour Through the Southern and Western Territories, etc. (Richmond, 1792); Weld, Travels Through the States of North America (London, 1799); Baily, Journal of a Tour in the Unsettled States of North America, 1796–‘97 (London, 1856); Pennsylvania Magazine of History, July, 1886; Winsor, Narrative and Critical History of America, VII, pp. 491, 492, citations.

9. Scribner’s Statistical Atlas, xxxix.

10. Turner, Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin (Johns Hopkins University Studies, Series IX), pp. 61 ff.

11. Monette, History of the Mississippi Valley, II; Flint, Travels and Residence in Mississippi; Flint, Geography and History of the Western States; Abridgment of Debates of Congress, VII, pp. 397, 398, 404; Holmes, Account of the U. S.; Kingdom, America and the British Colonies (London, 1820); Grund, Americans, II, chs. i, iii, vi (although writing, in 1836, he treats of conditions that grew out of western advance from the era of 1820 to that time); Peck, Guide for Emigrants (Boston, 1831); Darby, Emigrants’ Guide to Western and Southwestern States and Territories; Dana, Geographical Sketches in the Western Country; Kinzie, Waubun; Keating, Narrative of Long’s Expedition; Schoolcraft, Discovery of the Sources of the Mississippi River, Travels in the Central Portions of the Mississippi Valley, and Lead Mines of the Missouri; Andreas, History of Illinois, I, 86-99; Hurlbut, Chicago Antiquities; McKenney, Tour to the Lakes; Thomas, Travels through the Western Country, etc. (Auburn, N. Y., 1819).

12. Darby, Emigrants’ Guide, pp. 272 ff.; Benton, Abridgment of Debates, VII, p, 397.

13. De Bow’s Review, IV, p. 254; XVII, p. 428.

14. Grund, Americans, II, p. 8.

15. Peck, New Guide to the West (Cincinnati, 1848), ch. IV; Parkman, Oregon Trail; Hall, The West (Cincinnati, 1848); Pierce, Incidents of Western Travel; Murray, Travels in North America; Lloyd, Steamboat Directory (Cincinnati, 1856); “Forty Days in a Western Hotel” (Chicago), in Putnam’s Magazine, December, 1894; Mackay, The Western World, II, ch. II, III; Meeker, Life in the West; Bogen, German in America (Boston, 1851); Olmstead, Texas Journey; Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life; Schouler, History of the United States, V, 261–267; Peyton, Over the Alleghanies and Across the Prairies (London, 1870); Loughborough, The Pacific Telegraph and Railway (St. Louis, 1849); Whitney, Project for a Railroad to the Pacific (New York, 1849); Peyton, Suggestions on Railroad Communication with the Pacific, and the Trade of China and the Indian Islands; Benton, Highway to the Pacific (a speech delivered in the U. S, Senate, December 16, 1850).

16. A writer in The Home Missionary (1850), p. 239, reporting Wisconsin conditions, exclaims: “Think of this, people of the enlightened East. What an example, to come from the very frontiers of civilization!” But one of the missionaries writes: “In a few years Wisconsin will no longer be considered as the West, or as an outpost of civilization, any more than western New York, or the Western Reserve.”

17. Bancroft (H. H.), History of California, History of Oregon, and Popular Tribunals; Shinn, Mining Camps.

18. See the suggestive paper by Prof. Jesse Macy, The Institutional Beginnings of a Western State.

19. Shinn, Mining Camps.

20. Compare Thorpe, in Annals American Academy of Political and Social Science, September, 1891; Bryce, American Commonwealth (1888), II, p. 689.

21. Loria, Analisi della Proprieta Capitalista, II., p. 15.

22. Compare Observations on the North American Land Company, London, 1796, pp. xv,144; Logan, History of Upper South Carolina, I, pp, 149–151; Turner, Character and Influence of Indian Trade in Wisconsin, p. 18; Peck, New Guide for Emigrants (Boston, 1837), ch. iv; Compendium Eleventh Census, I, p. xl.

23. See pages 220, 221, 223, post, for illustrations of the political accompaniments of changed industrial conditions.

24. But Lewis and Clarke were the first to explore the route from the Missouri to the Columbia.

25. Narrative and Critical History of America, VIII, p.10; Sparks’ Washington Works, IX, pp. 303, 327; Logan, History of Upper South Carolina, I; McDonald, Life of Kenton, p. 72; Cong. Record, XXIII, p. 57.

26. On the effect of the fur trade in opening the routes of migration, see the author’s Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin.

27. Lodge, English Colonies, p. 152 and citations; Logan, Hist. of Upper South Carolina, I, p. 151.

28. Flint, Recollections, p. 9.

29. See Monette, Mississippi, I, p. 344.

30. Cones’, Lewis and Clarke’s Expedition, I, pp. 2, 253–259; Benton, in Cong. Record, XXIII, p. 57.

31. Hehn, Das Salz (Berlin, 1873).

32. Col. Records of N. C., V, p. 3.

33. Findley, History of the Insurrection in the Four Western Counties of Pennsylvania in the Year 1,794 (Philadelphia, 1796), p. 35.

34. Hale, Daniel Boone (pamphlet).

35. Compare Baily, Tour in the Unsettled Parts of North America (London, 1856), pp. 217–219, where a similar analysis is made for 1796. See also Collot, Journey in North America (Paris, 1826), p. 109; Observations on the North American Land Company (London, 1796), pp. XV, 144; Logan, History of Upper South Carolina.

36. “Spottswood Papers,” in Collections of Virginia Historical Society, I, II.

37. [Burke], European Settlements, etc. (1765 ed.), II, p. 200.

38. Everest, in Wisconsin Historical Collections, XII, pp. 7 ff.

39. Weston, Documents connected with History of South Carolina, p. 61.

40. See, for example, the speech of Clay, in the House of Representatives, January 30, 1824.

41. See the admirable monograph by Prof. H. B. Adams, Maryland’s Influence on the Land Cessions; and also President Welling, in Papers American Historical Association, III, p. 411.

42. Adams Memoirs, IX, pp. 247, 248.

43. Author’s article in The Ægis (Madison, Wis.), November 4, 1892.

44. Compare Roosevelt, Thomas Benton, ch. i.

45. Political Science Quarterly, II, p. 457. Compare Sumner, Alexander Hamilton, Chs. ii–vii.

46. Compare Wilson, Division and Reunion, pp. 15, 24.

47. On the relation of frontier conditions to Revolutionary taxation, see Sumner, Alexander Hamilton, Ch. iii.

48. I have refrained from dwelling on the lawless characteristics of the frontier, because they are sufficiently well known. The gambler and desperado, the regulators of the Carolinas and the vigilantes of California, are types of that line of scum that the waves of advancing civilization bore before them, and of the growth of spontaneous organs of authority where legal authority was absent. Compare Barrows, United States of Yesterday and To-morrow; Shinn, Mining Camps; and Bancroft, Popular Tribunals. The humor, bravery, and rude strength, as well as the vices of the frontier in its worst aspect, have left traces on American character, language, and literature, not soon to be effaced.

49. Debates in the Constitutional Convention, 1829–1830.

50. [McCrady] Eminent and Representative Men of the Carolinas, I, p.43; Calhoun’s Works, I, pp. 401–406.

51. Speech in the Senate, March 1, 1825; Register of Debates, I, 721.

52. Plea for the West (Cincinnati, 1835), pp. 11 ff.

53. Colonial travelers agree in remarking on the phlegmatic characteristics of the colonists. It has frequently been asked how such a people could have developed that strained nervous energy now characteristic of them. Compare Sumner, Alexander Hamilton, p. 98, and Adams’s History of the United States, I, p. 60; IX, pp. 240, 241. The transition appears to become marked at the close of the war of 1812, a period when interest centered upon the development of the West, and the West was noted for restless energy. Grund, Americans, II., ch. i.

Eurasia Review

A Journal of Analysis and News

Westward Movement And How It Shaped America’s Cultural Spirit – Analysis

By Chan Kung*

The Westward Movement refers to a mass movement in which the settlers of the eastern United States migrated to and developed the western part. It began in the late 18th century after the independence of the United States and ended in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Information online often noted that the movement promoted the development of the U.S. military and economy in territorial expansion and land annexation. Due to limited land and resources in the eastern part of the country, Americans embarked on a century-long westward journey to continue their expansion, often at the expense of the Native Americans and indigenous species.

In reality, the Westward Movement is a whole lot more than just expanding. Two animals bear huge significance to the United States and the Americas. The first being the North American bison, and the second being the beaver. North America was once a place of deserts and forests. The Native Americans were the first group of people to study and observe the bison’s migration routes, before being adopted by the then-settlers too, which formed into parts of the U.S. nationwide highway network that we know of today. Beaver pelt was the main commodity traded between the United States and Europe. In fact, its high value earned it the nickname of “soft gold” in its time.

At the beginning, settlers traveled through the Appalachian Mountains and into the west in search for beaver pelts. Later, they established settlements and built houses and villages in the area. This incited conflicts with the Native Americans, which led the British Crown to decree the Proclamation of 1763, which stated settlers are not to cross over the Appalachian Mountains. This affected many settlers, and caused them to abandon their homes and ranches in the west. This eventually gave way to the American Revolutionary War involving the 13 colonies.

Although the Westward Movement’s main objective was to expand its foothold, at that time, a severe economic crisis broke out in the late 19th century. Tragic reports of suicides and families who threw their children into wells plagued the reports daily. The incident drove settlers to relocate Midwest in hopes of attaining dreams of a better life. Meanwhile, the U.S. government had also adopted policies of active encouragement. Since then, many presidential bodies, including Abraham Lincoln’s Homestead Act, adopted measures to support the Westward Movement. This was to oppose France, who owned a much larger territory on the North American continent than the United States. At that time, the so-called “United States” only had thirteen states in the east, which was actually just a narrow strip of land along the Atlantic coast. In 1803, the United States bought more than 2 million square kilometers of French Louisiana from Napoleon Bonaparte. Yet the Americans knew almost nothing about the land they bought. U.S. President Thomas Jefferson eventually carried out a large number of expeditions under the guidance of the Native Americans, and therein was the Oregon Trail born, which kickstarted the Westward Movement.

The Westward Movement had a significant impact on the country’s political and economic life of the United States. The integration of the vast western land into the United States turned it into a truly vast country with rich natural resources; the development in western parts of the region led to the construction of large-scale railways and the influx of large numbers of emigrants as well, shaping the huge domestic market in the United States by supplying huge amount of resources to it. In a way, without the Westward Movement, there would be no United States as we know today.

Western is a movie genre familiar to many, yet most Westerns movies are actually produced through Eurocentric lenses and colonial perspective, or what most would call “looking towards the west from the east” approach. These are just a glimpse into the Western society, selective ones at that. Like the Freudian screen memories, some memories of the West are omitted, while others were made up. However, some elements in Western movies are indeed the embodiment of the American spirit, for instance sang-froid heroes who kill to stop killing.

An entire book is needed to fully explain the American spirit, but if we had to pick a word to sum the whole thing up, perhaps the word “boldness” best describes it. Russia is considerably “bold” too, as it annexed most of the vast Siberia. Still, it cannot be compared to the United States. This is because Russia’s conquest of Siberia was purely military in nature, while the U.S. Westward Movement was a large-scale immigration and colonization of men and women, young and old, facing many obstacles and challenges, and finally creating townships, economy, and cultural outcomes. This makes it utterly different from Russia’s Siberian conquest.

It is this “boldness” that can objectively describe the causes and consequences of the Westward Movement. The act of heroism, as depicted in Western movies typically reflects such attitude. It is also through such mannerisms that we see military-civilian integration in the U.S. One time, I visited a small miner’s museum and found that the tool bags used by the miners to be the same as the bullet bags used by the U.S. military in the past. The ubiquitous ATVs in American tourist attractions today have also become the standard equipment in U.S. military. In fact, I believe most Americans hardly need a crash course in driving one as they grew up with one as a child. Then, you have paratroopers who are considered advanced armies in various countries around the world, but if you have ever been to Colorado, you might notice the cables miners use to cross canyons between tall wooden platforms, transporting people, goods, and ore. All of the behaviors above are relatively innate to the Americans.

Western U.S. is different from the east, in that easterners favor a European lifestyle. Furthermore, they are more liberal and urbanized, hence the Eurocentrism. The wild west is a somewhat of a no man’s land, and people there have fought tooth and nail against nature to survive. Many tragedies had occurred during the Westward Movement, though most survived through sheer will and determination. For example, the team of emigrants led by George Donner who hailed from North Carolina in the east who ventured to the west by following the Oregon Trail. At some point in their journey, they wanted to take a cutoff, but did not expect the roads to be brutally treacherous in winter. They were blocked by the snow-capped Sierra Nevada Mountains, trapped in a winter storm, and ran out of food. When spring finally arrived, the rescue team deployed to locate them came face to face with a tragic scene – The survivors survived off their dead companions. Donner himself ate his wife’s corpse. The remaining members eventually discovered gold beneath Donner’s feet, which set off the gold rush in California later. The optimistic American changed the name of the place to Donner Pass to commemorate the pioneers who sacrificed themselves. It is such “boldness”, as in the willingness to sacrifice that makes for the true American spirit. Optimism and humor too, are also part of the western spirit. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known as Mormonism, which remains influential in the west, believes that death is only but a transition for the deceased, and it does not spell the end of life.

Things from the Midwest like jeans, T-shirts, jackets and boots are the real icons of the American culture and style. Meanwhile, suits, leather shoes, high heels and long skirts are European, foreign, and non-American. This makes the eastern society hardly representative of the country nor the American spirit. Plus, well known western American entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk have preferred a Midwest fashion style, not because they like it or are trying to pretentious, but because the western influences is deeply ingrained in them. It is the western spirit that shapes their image and culture. This is what sets western and eastern U.S. apart, but western U.S. is quintessentially the real America. California in the west has become the mecca of high-tech entrepreneurship in the world. This is by no means accidental. Entrepreneurship also requires courage and perseverance. It requires a self-motivational spirit to work.

It is worth noting that the Midwestern culture in the United States is still deeply anchored to its roots. There are very few blacks in the Midwest. Save for California and some other key cities, it is almost impossible to find other ethnic groups in the area. One time, I went to a village to attend a chuckwagon show. It was an auditorium crowded with hundreds of people. Men and women, young and old; all of them were whites and I was the only Asian present. The Hudson River Painting School was originally a group of cultural people in New York who later followed the Westward Movement. They migrated to the Midwest and created a large number of cultural and artistic works. It was through them that the works of art were born from the vast land of the Midwest. It was also there that the widely held cultural belief Manifest Destiny began to take root.

Cultural spirit is a spatial symbolic feature, and the one from western America still profoundly affects the United States today. As long as the influence continues to persist, and the Midwest continues to extend and expand. The Midwest, as the homeland and core of the American spirit, will trigger deeper social changes, which in turn deeply affects American politics, consumption styles, and social tendency. This will last until the western cultural spirit has cemented itself as the heart of the American society.

* Founder of Anbound Think Tank in 1993, Chan Kung is one of China’s renowned experts in information analysis. Most of Chan Kung‘s outstanding academic research activities are in economic information analysis, particularly in the area of public policy.

← It’s Time Pakistan Either ‘Reforms’ Or Finds Another ‘Whipping Boy’ – OpEd
Did Sanctions Cause Iran’s Environmental Problems? – Analysis →

Anbound Consulting (Anbound) is an independent Think Tank with the headquarter based in Beijing. Established in 1993, Anbound specializes in public policy research, and enjoys a professional reputation in the areas of strategic forecasting, policy solutions and risk analysis. Anbound's research findings are widely recognized and create a deep interest within public media, academics and experts who are also providing consulting service to the State Council of China.

Black Americans In The Westward Movement: The Key Figures Research Paper

Introduction, the period of the westward movement, the key figures involved in the westward movement, rights, issues and legal standing of the blacks during the movement.

The era prior to the 19 th Century portrayed the use of black Americans as slaves. The slave owners termed them as their property and great expansion of slavery was seen during this period. The Civil War that took place in the 19 th Century brought with it a need and a demand to ban slavery in the American territories (Hauswald, 1998).

This marked the beginning of the Westward movement, a historical turning point of the Native Americans, with the authorization to construct the transcontinental railroad. This created great tension between the Southerners and Northerners who were both vying for routes to the Pacific Ocean. Additionally, this led to the Native Americans being displaced when the so called ‘Civilized tribes’ began to incorporate the white people’s culture towards the end of the Civil War in 1812.

Though the Native Americans practiced some form of slavery, theirs was not a harsh practice as was the case with the Europeans in the later case. According to Quintard (1990), they did not exploit their slaves neither did they trade them in the pre-colonial era. This practice of slavery by the Native Americans changed drastically on the arrival of the colonial Europeans in North America. They introduced a new era of slavery by capturing the Native Americans and forced them to work for them in their farms. (Barstow 1923).

Though this slave trade lasted till around1730, it however led to devastating tribal wars. The Indian wars in particular in the early 18 th century, and with the increasingly numbers of Africans being imported as slaves categorically ended the Native American slave trade. The civilized Native American tribes began adopting the white culture by owning the African slaves.

They began trading the slaves and selling them to the whites. The Africans were actually abdicated from their homes and forcibly brought to work as slaves from their homes in Africa. It has been estimated that more than one million slaves were imported and sold in North America (Katz, 2005).

During their time as slave workers, some black slaves attempted to defy the slavery system. They did this by destroying the property of their owner or pretending to be sick in order to avoid work. Others were bold enough to join slave revolts and turn against their masters. There were those bold enough who managed to escape but most chose to work in the farms for their masters for fear of facing the tough consequences that could include death.

The whites kept telling the black slaves of an ‘Underground Railroad’ that was a lee way to their freedom. It should be understood that it was this talk of the railroad that led to the slaves becoming suspicious. The volunteers helped the slaves to travel north to Canada. It was a risky process and the volunteers hid the slaves during the day at certain stops along the routes and proceeded at the dark fall. The volunteers comprised of both the whites and the blacks, the blacks facing a stricter punishment of death if caught trying to aid the slaves.

The Westward movement in the United States is therefore the events and conditions that lead to the exploration and the vast settlement at the United State frontier. This process began in the 17 th century, even before the civil war and ended sometime in 1890s when the Great Plains were settled between Rocky Mountains and the River of Mississippi. The black Americans westward movement marked the last frontier and it was termed as a solid and the most persevering movement.

The key figures attempted to end the racial segregation of the slaves together with the discriminations they were facing. Their main agenda was to achieve an immediate liberation of the black Americans who had been taken up as slaves. We will discuss some key figures and their key involvement during the Westward movement.

The Buffalo Soldiers comprised of black soldiers who compared their stamina, fearlessness and strength to that of the buffalo. It was estimated that more than twenty five thousand Black Americans served in all black regiments and cavalry. Edward Hatch and Benjamin Grierson were the first commanders in chief for the negro soldiers. They historically became an integral part during the movement helping in the expansion of the nation.

Their major role during this period was to construct roads and built buildings. They also served as escorts to the settlers and further mapped the territory. They also ensured that the water supplies, the supply of forts and the telegraph lines were well defended across the West. In addition to conducting certain missions such as scouting, their main key role was to confiscate the tribes that had been designated to reservations and enter into conflict with the martial Native Americans.

The Buffalo soldiers however did not succeed without encountering challenges. Their main obstacle was characterized mainly by the intense racial tension that cultivated into attacks. They were cornered and given sound beatings and were occasionally harassed. They hardly received any recognition for their efforts and ended up being used as laborers even after the new revolution of the century.

Sojourner Truth on the other hand was a key figure who vehemently fought for the rights of women. This period saw most women being raped, ignored and discriminated against. Sojourner, a former slave fought for the abolition of slavery and the rights of women to be heard and she even attempted to aid former slaves making her a historical hero in American history.

The major challenge faced by Sojourner was getting permission to speak up in public to raise the plight of women and it wasn’t until 1851 that she first delivered a powerful speech titled ‘Ain’t I a Woman’ at a Women’s Rights Convention. Her speech was trying to emphasize that a woman should be given equal rights as their male counterparts. Sojourner Truth was also a religious character and she not only moved the crowd with her powerful speeches but also in her preaching.

During this movement, black Americans began taking part in developing the country and more of the black Americans came out portraying their ideas with a well self expressed speech. In 1772, Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable led the blacks in constructing cabins and other structures on the north bank.

This was a bold step by a black American making him the first settler of that area and the father founder of north bank, later named Chicago. He further came up with the idea of trading fur in that area and soon after, it turned into a busy trading centre with a growing population. He faced challenges in that he was discriminated against and the black Americans still suffered from inferiority complex.

Another key figure worth noting is Esteban. He was an African slave and came later to be called the Runaway slave. He was transported to Cuba in the years 1791-1804 in the company of his parents to work as slaves to an increase in demand for labor. Esteban Montejo ran away and lived in a forest for the better part of his life until he got word that slavery had been abolished.

He played a key role during the movement by educating the slaves as they still believed that the whites were still the owners of humanity. He criticized the education being given to the black Americans terming them illiterate. Esteban faced major challenges such as fear of abduction and the numerous attempts to kill him during this period.

The blacks had no rights during prior to this period. They were flogged mercilessly, sometimes resulting to death. They were referred to as the property of the owners and had no legal redress whatsoever. Graaf (1980) argues that women were brutally raped and abused and could never be allowed to speak in public.

It was not until after the movement that education was accessed to the blacks and for the first time they had power to even vote without fear. They were allowed to take up important positions in the country and could access justice. They were also able to resettle.

The westward movement will be remembered as a historical moment when the black Americans got their freedom. And for the first time in history, America has voted a Barrack Obama, as the president of the United States and who himself is a black American.

Barstow, C (1923). The Westward Movement. United States: Century Co.

Graaf de, L (1980). Race, Sex and Religion: Black Women in the American West, 1850-1920 . U.S.A: American Historical Association.

Hauswald, C (1998). Westward Movement: Expanding America’s Boundaries, 1800-1900. United States: Zephyr Press.

Katz, W (2005). The Black West: A Documentary and Pictorial History of the African American Role in the Westward Expansion of the United States . New York: Harlem moon/Broadway Books.

Quintard, T (1998). In Search of the Racial Frontier: Africans Americans in the West, 1528-1990 . New York: Norton.

Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2018, July 16). Black Americans In The Westward Movement: The Key Figures. https://ivypanda.com/essays/black-americans-in-the-westward-movement-the-key-figures/

"Black Americans In The Westward Movement: The Key Figures." IvyPanda , 16 July 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/black-americans-in-the-westward-movement-the-key-figures/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'Black Americans In The Westward Movement: The Key Figures'. 16 July.

IvyPanda . 2018. "Black Americans In The Westward Movement: The Key Figures." July 16, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/black-americans-in-the-westward-movement-the-key-figures/.

1. IvyPanda . "Black Americans In The Westward Movement: The Key Figures." July 16, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/black-americans-in-the-westward-movement-the-key-figures/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Black Americans In The Westward Movement: The Key Figures." July 16, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/black-americans-in-the-westward-movement-the-key-figures/.

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Published: 16 May 2024

The Egyptian pyramid chain was built along the now abandoned Ahramat Nile Branch

Eman Ghoneim ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3988-0335 1 ,
Timothy J. Ralph ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4956-606X 2 ,
Suzanne Onstine 3 ,
Raghda El-Behaedi 4 ,
Gad El-Qady 5 ,
Amr S. Fahil 6 ,
Mahfooz Hafez 5 ,
Magdy Atya 5 ,
Mohamed Ebrahim ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4068-5628 5 ,
Ashraf Khozym 5 &
Mohamed S. Fathy 6

Communications Earth & Environment volume 5 , Article number: 233 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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Archaeology
Geomorphology
Hydrogeology
Sedimentology

The largest pyramid field in Egypt is clustered along a narrow desert strip, yet no convincing explanation as to why these pyramids are concentrated in this specific locality has been given so far. Here we use radar satellite imagery, in conjunction with geophysical data and deep soil coring, to investigate the subsurface structure and sedimentology in the Nile Valley next to these pyramids. We identify segments of a major extinct Nile branch, which we name The Ahramat Branch, running at the foothills of the Western Desert Plateau, where the majority of the pyramids lie. Many of the pyramids, dating to the Old and Middle Kingdoms, have causeways that lead to the branch and terminate with Valley Temples which may have acted as river harbors along it in the past. We suggest that The Ahramat Branch played a role in the monuments’ construction and that it was simultaneously active and used as a transportation waterway for workmen and building materials to the pyramids’ sites.

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Introduction.

The landscape of the northern Nile Valley in Egypt, between Lisht in the south and the Giza Plateau in the north, was subject to a number of environmental and hydrological changes during the past few millennia 1 , 2 . In the Early Holocene (~12,000 years before present), the Sahara of North Africa transformed from a hyper-arid desert to a savannah-like environment, with large river systems and lake basins 3 , 4 due to an increase in global sea level at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). The wet conditions of the Sahara provided a suitable habitat for people and wildlife, unlike in the Nile Valley, which was virtually inhospitable to humans because of the constantly higher river levels and swampy environment 5 . At this time, Nile River discharge was high, which is evident from the extensive deposition of organic-rich fluvial sediment in the Eastern Mediterranean basin 6 . Based on the interpretation of archeological material and pollen records, this period, known as the African Humid Period (AHP) (ca. 14,500–5000 years ago), was the most significant and persistent wet period from the early to mid-Holocene in the eastern Sahara region 7 , with an annual rainfall rate of 300–920 mm yr −1 8 . During this time the Nile would have had several secondary channels branching across the floodplain, similar to those described by early historians (e.g., Herodotus).

During the mid-Holocene (~10,000–6000 years ago), freshwater marshes were common within the Nile floodplain causing habitation to be more nucleated along the desert margins of the Nile Valley 9 . The desert margins provided a haven from the high Nile water. With the ending of the AHP and the beginning of the Late Holocene (~5500 years ago to present), rainfall greatly declined, and the region’s humid phase gradually came to an end with punctuated short wet episodes 10 . Due to increased aridity in the Sahara, more people moved out of the desert towards the Nile Valley and settled along the edge of the Nile floodplain. With the reduced precipitation, sedimentation increased in and around the Nile River channels causing the proximal floodplain to rise in height and adjacent marshland to decrease in the area 11 , 12 estimated the Nile flood levels to have ranged from 1 to 4 m above the baseline (~5000 BP). Inhabitants moved downhill to the Nile Valley and settled in the elevated areas on the floodplain, including the raised natural levees of the river and jeziras (islands). This was the beginning of the Old Kingdom Period (ca. 2686 BCE) and the time when early pyramid complexes, including the Step Pyramid of Djoser, were constructed at the margins of the floodplain. During this time the Nile discharge was still considerably higher than its present level. The high flow of the river, particularly during the short-wet intervals, enabled the Nile to maintain multiple branches, which meandered through its floodplain. Although the landscape of the Nile floodplain has greatly transformed due to river regulation associated with the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s, this region still retains some clear hydro-geomorphological traces of the abandoned river channels.

Since the beginning of the Pharaonic era, the Nile River has played a fundamental role in the rapid growth and expansion of the Egyptian civilization. Serving as their lifeline in a largely arid landscape, the Nile provided sustenance and functioned as the main water corridor that allowed for the transportation of goods and building materials. For this reason, most of the key cities and monuments were in close proximity to the banks of the Nile and its peripheral branches. Over time, however, the main course of the Nile River laterally migrated, and its peripheral branches silted up, leaving behind many ancient Egyptian sites distant from the present-day river course 9 , 13 , 14 , 15 . Yet, it is still unclear as to where exactly the ancient Nile courses were situated 16 , and whether different reaches of the Nile had single or multiple branches that were simultaneously active in the past. Given the lack of consensus amongst scholars regarding this subject, it is imperative to develop a comprehensive understanding of the Nile during the time of the ancient Egyptian civilization. Such a poor understanding of Nile River morphodynamics, particularly in the region that hosts the largest pyramid fields of Egypt, from Lisht to Giza, limits our understanding of how changes in the landscape influenced human activities and settlement patterns in this region, and significantly restricts our ability to understand the daily lives and stories of the ancient Egyptians.

Currently, much of the original surface of the ancient Nile floodplain is masked by either anthropogenic activity or broad silt and sand sheets. For this reason, singular approaches such as on-ground searches for the remains of hidden former Nile branches are both increasingly difficult and inauspicious. A number of studies have already been carried out in Egypt to locate segments of the ancient Nile course. For instance 9 , proposed that the axis of the Nile River ran far west of its modern course past ancient cities such as el-Ashmunein (Hermopolis) 13 . mapped the ancient hydrological landscape in the Luxor area and estimated both an eastward and westward Nile migration rate of 2–3 km per 1000 years. In the Nile Delta region 17 , detected several segments of buried Nile distributaries and elevated mounds using geoelectrical resistivity surveys. Similarly, a study by Bunbury and Lutley 14 identified a segment of an ancient Nile channel, about 5000 years old, near the ancient town of Memphis ( men-nefer ). More recently 15 , used cores taken around Memphis to reveal a section of a lateral ancient Nile branch that was dated to the Neolithic and Predynastic times (ca. 7000–5000 BCE). On the bank of this branch, Memphis, the first capital of unified Egypt, was founded in early Pharaonic times. Over the Dynastic period, this lateral branch then significantly migrated eastwards 15 . A study by Toonen et al. 18 , using borehole data and electrical resistivity tomography, further revealed a segment of an ancient Nile branch, dating to the New Kingdom Period, situated near the desert edge west of Luxor. This river branch would have connected important localities and thus played a significant role in the cultural landscape of this area. More recent research conducted further north by Sheisha et al. 2 , near the Giza Plateau, indicated the presence of a former river and marsh-like environment in the floodplain east of the three great Pyramids of Giza.

Even though the largest concentration of pyramids in Egypt are located along a narrow desert strip from south Lisht to Giza, no explanation has been offered as to why these pyramid fields were condensed in this particular area. Monumental structures, such as pyramids and temples, would logically be built near major waterways to facilitate the transportation of their construction materials and workers. Yet, no waterway has been found near the largest pyramid field in Egypt, with the Nile River lying several kilometers away. Even though many efforts to reconstruct the ancient Nile waterways have been conducted, they have largely been confined to small sites, which has led to the mapping of only fragmented sections of the ancient Nile channel systems.

In this work, we present remote sensing, geomorphological, soil coring and geophysical evidence to support the existence of a long-lost ancient river branch, the Ahramat Branch, and provide the first map of the paleohydrological setting in the Lisht-Giza area. The finding of the Ahramat Branch is not only crucial to our understanding of why the pyramids were built in these specific geographical areas, but also for understanding how the pyramids were accessed and constructed by the ancient population. It has been speculated by many scholars that the ancient Egyptians used the Nile River for help transporting construction materials to pyramid building sites, but until now, this ancient Nile branch was not fully uncovered or mapped. This work can help us better understand the former hydrological setting of this region, which would in turn help us learn more about the environmental parameters that may have influenced the decision to build these pyramids in their current locations during the time of Pharaonic Egypt.

Position and morphology of the Ahramat Branch

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery and radar high-resolution elevation data for the Nile floodplain and its desert margins, between south Lisht and the Giza Plateau area, provide evidence for the existence of segments of a major ancient river branch bordering 31 pyramids dating from the Old Kingdom to Second Intermediate Period (2686−1649 BCE) and spanning between Dynasties 3–13 (Fig. 1a ). This extinct branch is referred to hereafter as the Ahramat Branch, meaning the “Pyramids Branch” in Arabic. Although masked by the cultivated fields of the Nile floodplain, subtle topographic expressions of this former branch, now invisible in optical satellite data, can be traced on the ground surface by TanDEM-X (TDX) radar data and the Topographic Position Index (TPI). Data analysis indicates that this lateral distributary channel lies between 2.5 and 10.25 km west from the modern Nile River. The branch appears to have a surface channel depth between 2 and 8 m, a channel length of about 64 km and a channel width of 200–700 m, which is similar to the width of the contemporary neighboring Nile course. The size and longitudinal continuity of the Ahramat Branch and its proximity to all the pyramids in the study area implies a functional waterway of great significance.

a Shows the Ahramat Branch borders a large number of pyramids dating from the Old Kingdom to the 2 nd Intermediate Period and spanning between Dynasties 3 and 13. b Shows Bahr el-Libeini canal and remnant of abandoned channel visible in the 1911 historical map (Egyptian Survey Department scale 1:50,000). c Bahr el-Libeini canal and the abandoned channel are overlain on satellite basemap. Bahr el-Libeini is possibly the last remnant of the Ahramat Branch before it migrated eastward. d A visible segment of the Ahramat Branch in TDX is now partially occupied by the modern Bahr el-Libeini canal. e A major segment of the Ahramat Branch, approximately 20 km long and 0.5 km wide, can be traced in the floodplain along the Western Desert Plateau south of the town of Jirza. Location of e is marked in white a box in a . (ESRI World Image Basemap, source: Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics).

A trace of a 3 km river segment of the Ahramat Branch, with a width of about 260 m, is observable in the floodplain west of the Abu Sir pyramids field (Fig. 1b–d ). Another major segment of the Ahramat Branch, approximately 20 km long and 0.5 km wide can be traced in the floodplain along the Western Desert Plateau south of the town of Jirza (Fig. 1e ). The visible segments of the Ahramat Branch in TDX are now partially occupied by the modern Bahr el-Libeini canal. Such partial overlap between the courses of this canal, traced in the1911 historical maps (Egyptian Survey Department scale 1:50,000), and the Ahramat Branch is clear in areas where the Nile floodplain is narrower (Fig. 1b–d ), while in areas where the floodplain gets wider, the two water courses are about 2 km apart. In light of that, Bahr el-Libeini canal is possibly the last remnant of the Ahramat Branch before it migrated eastward, silted up, and vanished. In the course of the eastward migration over the Nile floodplain, the meandering Ahramat Branch would have left behind traces of abandoned channels (narrow oxbow lakes) which formed as a result of the river erosion through the neck of its meanders. A number of these abandoned channels can be traced in the 1911 historical maps near the foothill of the Western Desert plateau proving the eastward shifting of the branch at this locality (Fig. 1b–d ). The Dahshur Lake, southwest of the city of Dahshur, is most likely the last existing trace of the course of the Ahramat Branch.

Subsurface structure and sedimentology of the Ahramat Branch

Geophysical surveys using Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and Electromagnetic Tomography (EMT) along a 1.2 km long profile revealed a hidden river channel lying 1–1.5 m below the cultivated Nile floodplain (Fig. 2 ). The position and shape of this river channel is in an excellent match with those derived from radar satellite imagery for the Ahramat Branch. The EMT profile shows a distinct unconformity in the middle, which in this case indicates sediments that have a different texture than the overlying recent floodplain silt deposits and the sandy sediments that are adjacent to this former branch (Fig. 2 ). GPR overlapping the EMT profile from 600–1100 m on the transect confirms this. Here, we see evidence of an abandoned riverbed approximately 400 m wide and at least 25 m deep (width:depth ratio ~16) at this location. This branch has a symmetrical channel shape and has been infilled with sandy Neonile sediment different to other surrounding Neonile deposits and the underlying Eocene bedrock. The geophysical profile interpretation for the Ahramat Branch at this locality was validated using two sediment cores of depths 20 m (Core A) and 13 m (Core B) (Fig. 3 ). In Core A between the center and left bank of the former branch we found brown sandy mud at the floodplain surface and down to ~2.7 m with some limestone and chert fragments, a reddish sandy mud layer with gravel and handmade material inclusions at ~2.8 m, a gray sandy mud layer from ~3–5.8 m, another reddish sandy mud layer with gravel and freshwater mussel shells at ~6 m, black sandy mud from ~6–8 m, and sandy silt grading into clean, well-sorted medium sand dominated the profile from ~8 to >13 m. In Core B on the right bank of the former branch we found recently deposited brown sandy mud at the floodplain surface and down to ~1.5 m, alternating brown and gray layers of silty and sandy mud down to ~4 m (some reddish layers with gravel and handmade material inclusions), a black sandy mud layer from ~4–4.9 m, and another reddish sandy mud layer with gravel and freshwater mussel shells at ~5 m, before clean, well-sorted medium sand dominated the profile from 5 to >20 m. Shallow groundwater was encountered in both cores concurrently with the sand layers, indicating that the buried sedimentary structure of the abandoned Ahramat Branch acts as a conduit for subsurface water flow beneath the distal floodplain of the modern Nile River.

a Locations of geophysical profile and soil drilling (ESRI World Image Basemap, source: Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics). Photos taken from the field while using the b Electromagnetic Tomography (EMT) and c Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR). d Showing the apparent conductivity profile, e showing EMT profile, and f showing GPR profiles with overlain sketch of the channel boundary on the GPR graph. g Simplified interpretation of the buried channel with the location of the two-soil coring of A and B.

It shows two-soil cores, A and core B, with soil profile descriptions, graphic core logs, sediment grain size charts, and example photographs.

Alignment of old and middle kingdom pyramids to the Ahramat Branch

The royal pyramids in ancient Egypt are not isolated monuments, but rather joined with several other structures to form complexes. Besides the pyramid itself, the pyramid complex includes the mortuary temple next to the pyramid, a valley temple farther away from the pyramid on the edge of a waterbody, and a long sloping causeway that connects the two temples. A causeway is a ceremonial raised walkway, which provides access to the pyramid site and was part of the religious aspects of the pyramid itself 19 . In the study area, it was found that many of the causeways of the pyramids run perpendicular to the course of the Ahramat Branch and terminate directly on its riverbank.

In Egyptian pyramid complexes, the valley temples at the end of causeways acted as river harbors. These harbors served as an entry point for the river borne visitors and ceremonial roads to the pyramid. Countless valley temples in Egypt have not yet been found and, therefore, might still be buried beneath the agricultural fields and desert sands along the riverbank of the Ahramat Branch. Five of these valley temples, however, partially survived and still exist in the study area. These temples include the valley temples of the Bent Pyramid, the Pyramid of Khafre, and the Pyramid of Menkaure from Dynasty 4; the valley temple of the Pyramid of Sahure from Dynasty 5, and the valley temple of the Pyramid of Pepi II from Dynasty 6. All the aforementioned temples are dated to the Old Kingdom. These five surviving temples were found to be positioned adjacent to the riverbank of the Ahramat Branch, which strongly implies that this river branch was contemporaneously functioning during the Old Kingdom, at the time of pyramid construction.

Analysis of the ground elevation of the 31 pyramids and their proximity to the floodplain, within the study area, helped explain the position and relative water level of the Ahramat Branch during the time between the Old Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period (ca. 2649–1540 BCE). Based on Fig. ( 4) , the Ahramat Branch had a high-water level during the first part of the Old Kingdom, especially during Dynasty 4. This is evident from the high ground elevation and long distance from the floodplain of the pyramids dated to that period. For instance, the remote position of the Bent and Red Pyramids in the desert, very far from the Nile floodplain, is a testament to the branch’s high-water level. On the contrary, during the Old Kingdom, our data demonstrated that the Ahramat Branch would have reached its lowest level during Dynasty 5. This is evident from the low altitudes and close proximity to the floodplain of most Dynasty 5 pyramids. The orientation of the Sahure Pyramid’s causeway (Dynasty 5) and the location of its valley temple in the low-lying floodplain provide compelling evidence for the relatively low water level proposition of the Ahramat Branch during this stage. The water level of the Ahramat Branch would have been slightly raised by the end of Dynasty 5 (the last 15–30 years), during the reign of King Unas and continued to rise during Dynasty 6. The position of Pepi II and Merenre Pyramids (Dynasty 6) deep in the desert, west of the Djedkare Isesi Pyramid (Dynasty 5), supports this notion.

It explains the position and relative water level of the Ahramat Branch during the time between the Old Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period. a Shows positive correlation between the ground elevation of the pyramids and their proximity to the floodplain. b Shows positive correlation between the average ground elevation of the pyramids and their average proximity to the floodplain in each Dynasty. c Illustrates the water level interpretation by Hassan (1986) in Faiyum Lake in correlation to the average pyramids ground elevation and average distances to the floodplain in each Dynasty. d The data indicates that the Ahramat Branch had a high-water level during the first period of the Old Kingdom, especially during Dynasty 4. The water level reduced afterwards but was raised slightly in Dynasty 6. The position of the Middle Kingdom’s pyramids, which was at lower altitudes and in close proximity to the floodplain as compared to those of the Old Kingdom might be explained by the slight eastward migration of the Ahramat Branch.

In addition, our analysis in Fig. ( 4) , shows that the Qakare Ibi Pyramid of Dynasty 8 was constructed very close to the floodplain on very low elevation, which implies that the Nile water levels were very low at this time of the First Intermediate Period (2181–2055 BCE). This finding is in agreement with previous work conducted by Kitchen 20 which implies that the sudden collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt (after 4160 BCE) was largely caused by catastrophic failure of the annual flood of the Nile River for a period of 30–40 years. Data from soil cores near Memphis indicated that the Old Kingdom settlement is covered by about 3 m of sand 11 . Accordingly, the Ahramat Branch was initially positioned further west during the Old Kingdom and then shifted east during the Middle Kingdom due to the drought-induced sand encroachments of the First Intermediate Period, “a period of decentralization and weak pharaonic rule” in ancient Egypt, spanning about 125 years (2181–2055 BCE) post Old Kingdom era. Soil cores from the drilling program at Memphis show dominant dry conditions during the First Intermediate Period with massive eolian sand sheets extended over a distance of at least 0.5 km from the edge of the western desert escarpment 21 . The Ahramat Branch continued to move east during the Second Intermediate Period until it had gradually lost most of its water supply by the New Kingdom.

The western tributaries of the Ahramat Branch

Sentinal-1 radar data unveiled several wide channels (inlets) in the Western Desert Plateau connected to the Ahramat Branch. These inlets are currently covered by a layer of sand, thus partially invisible in multispectral satellite imagery. In Sentinal-1 radar imagery, the valley floors of these inlets appear darker than the surrounding surfaces, indicating subsurface fluvial deposits. These smooth deposits appear dark owing to the specular reflection of the radar signals away from the receiving antenna (Fig. 5a, b ) 22 . Considering that Sentinel-1’s C-Band has a penetration capability of approximately 50 cm in dry sand surface 23 , this would suggest that the riverbed of these channels is covered by at least half a meter of desert sand. Unlike these former inlets, the course of the Ahramat Branch is invisible in SAR data due in large part to the presence of dense farmlands in the floodplain, which limits radar penetration and the detection of underlying fluvial deposition. Moreover, the radar topographic data from TDX revealed the areal extent of these inlets. Their river courses were extracted from TDX data using the Topographic Position Index (TPI), an algorithm which is used to compute the topographic slope positions and to automate landform classifications (Fig. 5c, d ). Negative TPI values show the former riverbeds of the inlets, while positive TPI signify the riverbanks bordering them.

a Conceptual sketch of the dependence of surface roughness on the sensor wavelength λ (modified after 48 ). b Expected backscatter characteristics in sandy desert areas with buried dry riverbeds. c Dry channels/inlets masked by desert sand in the Dahshur area. d The channels’ courses were extracted using TPI. Negative TPI values highlight the courses of the channels while positive TPI signify their banks.

Analysis indicated that several of the pyramid’s causeways, from Dynasties 4 and 6, lead to the inlet’s riverbanks (Fig. 6 ). Among these pyramids, are the Bent Pyramid, the first pyramid built by King Snefru in Dynasty 4 and among the oldest, largest, and best preserved ancient Egyptian pyramids that predates the Giza Pyramids. This pyramid is situated at the royal necropolis of Dahshur. The position of the Bent Pyramid, deep in the desert, far from the modern Nile floodplain, remained unexplained by researchers. This pyramid has a long causeway (~700 m) that is paved in the desert with limestone blocks and is attached to a large valley temple. Although all the pyramids’ valley temples in Egypt are connected to a water body and served as the landing point of all the river-borne visitors, the valley temple of the Bent Pyramid is oddly located deep in the desert, very distant from any waterways and more than 1 km away from the western edge of the modern Nile floodplain. Radar data revealed that this temple overlooked the bank of one of these extinct channels (called Wadi al-Taflah in historical maps). This extinct channel (referred to hereafter as the Dahshur Inlet due to its geographical location) is more than 200 m wide on average (Fig. 6 ). In light of this finding, the Dahshur Inlet, and the Ahramat Branch, are thus strongly argued to have been active during Dynasty 4 and must have played an important role in transporting building materials to the Bent Pyramid site. The Dahshur Inlet could have also served the adjacent Red Pyramid, the second pyramid built by the same king (King Snefru) in the Dahshur area. Yet, no traces of a causeway nor of a valley temple has been found thus far for the Red Pyramid. Interestingly, pyramids in this site dated to the Middle Kingdom, including the Amenemhat III pyramid, also known as the Black Pyramid, White Pyramid, and Pyramid of Senusret III, are all located at least 1 km far to the east of the Dynasty 4 pyramids (Bent and Red) near the floodplain (Fig. 6 ), which once again supports the notion of the eastward shift of the Ahramat Branch after the Old Kingdom.

a The two inlets are presently covered by sand, thus invisible in optical satellite imagery. b Radar data, and c TDX topographic data reveal the riverbed of the Sakkara Inlet due to radar signals penetration capability in dry sand. b and c show the causeways of Pepi II and Merenre Pyramids, from Dynasty 6, leading to the Saqqara Inlet. The Valley Temple of Pepi II Pyramid overlooks the inlet riverbank, which indicates that the inlet, and thus Ahramat Branch, were active during Dynasty 6. d Radar data, and e TDX topographic data, reveal the riverbed of the Dahshur Inlet with the Bent Pyramid’s causeway of Dynasty 4 leading to the Inlet. The Valley Temple of the Bent Pyramid overlooks the riverbank of the Dahshur Inlet, which indicates that the inlet and the Ahramat Branch were active during Dynasty 4 of the Old Kingdom.

Radar satellite data revealed yet another sandy buried channel (tributary), about 6 km north of the Dahshur Inlet, to the west of the ancient city of Memphis. This former fluvial channel (referred to hereafter as the Saqqara Inlet due to its geographical location) connects to the Ahramat Branch with a broad river course of more than 600 m wide. Data shows that the causeways of the two pyramids of Pepi II and Merenre, situated at the royal necropolis of Saqqara and dated to Dynasty 6, lead directly to the banks of the Saqqara Inlet (see Fig. 6 ). The 400 m long causeway of Pepi II pyramid runs northeast over the southern Saqqara plateau and connects to the riverbank of the Saqqara Inlet from the south. The causeway terminates with a valley temple that lies on the inlet’s riverbank. The 250 long causeway of the Pyramid of Merenre runs southeast over the northern Saqqara plateau and connects to the riverbank of the Saqqara Inlet from the north. Since both pyramids dated to Dynasty 6, it can be argued that the water level of the Ahramat Branch was higher during this period, which would have flooded at least the entrance of its western inlets. This indicates that the downstream segment of the Saqqara Inlet was active during Dynasty 6 and played a vital role in transporting construction materials and workers to the two pyramids sites. The fact that none of the Dynasty 5 pyramids in this area (e.g., the Djedkare Isesi Pyramid) were positioned on the Saqqara Inlet suggests that the water level in the Ahramat Branch was not high enough to enter and submerge its inlets during this period.

In addition, our data analysis clearly shows that the causeways of the Khafre, Menkaure, and Khentkaus pyramids, in the Giza Plateau, lead to a smaller but equally important river bay associated with the Ahramat Branch. This lagoon-like river arm is referred to here as the Giza Inlet (Fig. 7 ). The Khufu Pyramid, the largest pyramid in Egypt, seems to be connected directly to the river course of the Ahramat Branch (Fig. 7 ). This finding proves once again that the Ahramat Branch and its western inlets were hydrologically active during Dynasty 4 of the Old Kingdom. Our ancient river inlet hypothesis is also in accordance with earlier research, conducted on the Giza Plateau, which indicates the presence of a river and marsh-like environment in the floodplain east of the Giza pyramids 2 .

The causeways of the four Pyramids lead to an inlet, which we named the Giza Inlet, that connects from the west with the Ahramat Branch. These causeways connect the pyramids with valley temples which acted as river harbors in antiquity. These river segments are invisible in optical satellite imagery since they are masked by the cultivated lands of the Nile floodplain. The photo shows the valley temple of Khafre Pyramid (Photo source: Author Eman Ghoneim).

During the Old Kingdom Period, our analysis suggests that the Ahramat Branch had a high-water level during the first part, especially during Dynasty 4 whereas this water level was significantly decreased during Dynasty 5. This finding is in agreement with previous studies which indicate a high Nile discharge during Dynasty 4 (e.g., ref. 24 ). Sediment isotopic analysis of the Nile Delta indicated that Nile flows decrease more rapidly by the end of Dynasty 4 25 , in addition 26 reported that during Dynasties 5 and 6 the Nile flows were the lowest of the entire Dynastic period. This long-lost Ahramat Branch (possibly a former Yazoo tributary to the Nile) was large enough to carry a large volume of the Nile discharge in the past. The ancient channel segment uncovered by 1 , 15 west of the city of Memphis through borehole logs is most likely a small section of the large Ahramat Branch detected in this study. In the Middle Kingdom, although previous studies implied that the Nile witnessed abundant flood with occasional failures (e.g., ref. 27 ), our analysis shows that all the pyramids from the Middle Kingdom were built far east of their Old Kingdom counterparts, on lower altitudes and in close proximity to the floodplain as compared to those of the Old Kingdom. This paradox might be explained by the fact that the Ahramat Branch migrated eastward, slightly away from the Western Desert escarpment, prior to the construction of the Middle Kingdom pyramids, resulting in the pyramids being built eastward so that they could be near the waterway.

The eastward migration and abandonment of the Ahramat Branch could be attributed to gradual tilting of the Nile delta and floodplain in lower Egypt towards the northeast due to tectonic activity 28 . A topographic tilt such as this would have accelerated river movement eastward due to the river being located in the west at a relatively higher elevation of the floodplain. While near-channel floodplain deposition would naturally lead to alluvial ridge development around the active Ahramat Branch, and therefore to lower-lying tracts of adjacent floodplain to the east, regional tilting may explain the wholesale lateral migration of the river in that direction. The eastward migration and abandonment of the branch could also be ascribed to sand incursion due to the branch’s proximity to the Western Desert Plateau, where windblown sand is abundant. This would have increased sand deposition along the riverbanks and caused the river to silt up, particularly during periods of low flow. The region experienced drought during the First Intermediate Period, prior to the Middle Kingdom. In the area of Abu Rawash north 29 and Dahshur site 11 , settlements from the Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom were found to be covered by more than 3 m of desert sands. During this time, windblown sand engulfed the Old Kingdom settlements and desert sands extended eastward downhill over a distance of at least 0.5 km 21 . The abandonment of sites at Abusir (5 th Dynasty), where the early pottery-rich deposits are covered by wind-blown sand and then mud without sherds, can be used as evidence that the Ahramat Branch migrated eastward after the Old Kingdom. The increased sand deposition activity, during the end of the Old Kingdom, and throughout the First Intermediate Period, was most likely linked to the period of drought and desertification of the Sahara 30 . In addition, the reduced river discharge caused by decreased rainfall and increased aridity in the region would have gradually reduced the river course’s capacity, leading to silting and abandonment of the Ahramat Branch as the river migrated to the east.

The Dahshur, Saqqara, and Giza inlets, which were connected to the Ahramat Branch from the west, were remnants of past active drainage systems dated to the late Tertiary or the Pleistocene when rainwater was plentiful 31 . It is proposed that the downstream reaches of these former channels (wadis) were submerged during times of high-water levels of the Ahramat Branch, forming long narrow water arms (inlets) that gave a wedge-like shape to the western flank of the Ahramat Branch. During the Old Kingdom, the waters of these inlets would have flowed westward from the Ahramat Branch rather than from their headwaters. As the drought intensified during the First Intermediate Period, the water level of the Ahramat Branch was lowered and withdrew from its western inlets, causing them to silt up and eventually dry out. The Dahshur, Saqqara, and Giza inlets would have provided a bay environment where the water would have been calm enough for vessels and boats to dock far from the busy, open water of the Ahramat Branch.

Sediments from the Ahramat Branch riverbed, which were collected from the two deep soil cores (cores A and B), show an abrupt shift from well-sorted medium sands at depth to overlying finer materials with layers including gravel, shell, and handmade materials. This indicates a step-change from a relatively consistent higher-energy depositional regime to a generally lower-energy depositional regime with periodic flash floods at these sites. So, the Ahramat Branch in this region carried and deposited well-sorted medium sand during its last active phase, and over time became inactive, infilling with sand and mud until an abrupt change led the (by then) shallow depression fill with finer distal floodplain sediment (possibly in a wetland) that was utilized by people and experienced periodic flash flooding. Validation of the paleo-channel position and sediment type using these cores shows that the Ahramat Branch has similar morphological features and an upward-fining depositional sequence as that reported near Giza, where two cores were previously used to reconstruct late Holocene Nile floodplain paleo-environments 2 . Further deep soil coring could determine how consistent the geomorphological features are along the length of the Ahramat branch, and to help explain anomalies in areas where the branch has less surface expression and where remote sensing and geophysical techniques have limitations. Considering more core logs can give a better understanding of the floodplain and the buried paleo-channels.

The position of the Ahramat Branch along the western edge of the Nile floodplain suggests it to be the downstream extension of Bahr Yusef. In fact, Bahr Yusef’s course may have initially flowed north following the natural surface gradient of the floodplain before being forced to turn west to flow into the Fayum Depression. This assumption could be supported by the sharp westward bend of Bahr Yusef’s course at the entrance to the Fayum Depression, which could be a man-made attempt to change the waterflow direction of this branch. According to Römer 32 , during the Middle Kingdom, the Gadallah Dam located at the entrance of the Fayum, and a possible continuation running eastwards, blocked the flow of Bahr Yusef towards the north. However, a sluice, probably located near the village of el-Lahun, was created in order to better control the flow of water into the Fayum. When the sluice was locked, the water from Bahr Yusef was directed to the west and into the depression, and when the sluice was open, the water would flow towards the north via the course of the Ahramat Branch. Today, the abandoned Ahramat Branch north of Fayum appears to support subsurface water flow in the buried coarse sand bed layers, however these shallow groundwater levels are likely to be quite variable due to proximity of the bed layers to canals and other waterways that artificially maintain shallow groundwater. Groundwater levels in the region are known to be variable 33 , but data on shallow groundwater could be used to further validate the delineated paleo-channel of the Ahramat Branch.

The present work enabled the detection of segments of a major former Nile branch running at the foothills of the Western Desert Plateau, where the vast majority of the Ancient Egyptian pyramids lie. The enormity of this branch and its proximity to the pyramid complexes, in addition to the fact that the pyramids’ causeways terminate at its riverbank, all imply that this branch was active and operational during the construction phase of these pyramids. This waterway would have connected important locations in ancient Egypt, including cities and towns, and therefore, played an important role in the cultural landscape of the region. The eastward migration and abandonment of the Ahramat Branch could be attributed to gradual movement of the river to the lower-lying adjacent floodplain or tilting of the Nile floodplain toward the northeast as a result of tectonic activity, as well as windblown sand incursion due to the branch’s proximity to the Western Desert Plateau. The increased sand deposition was most likely related to periods of desertification of the Great Sahara in North Africa. In addition, the branch eastward movement and diminishing could be explained by the reduction of the river discharge and channel capacity caused by the decreased precipitation and increased aridity in the region, particularly during the end of the Old Kingdom.

The integration of radar satellite data with geophysical surveying and soil coring, which we utilized in this study, is a highly adaptable approach in locating similar former buried river systems in arid regions worldwide. Mapping the hidden course of the Ahramat Branch, allowed us to piece together a more complete picture of ancient Egypt’s former landscape and a possible water transportation route in Lower Egypt, in the area between Lisht and the Giza Plateau.

Revealing this extinct Nile branch can provide a more refined idea of where ancient settlements were possibly located in relation to it and prevent them from being lost to rapid urbanization. This could improve the protection measures of Egyptian cultural heritage. It is the hope that our findings can improve conservation measures and raise awareness of these sites for modern development planning. By understanding the landscape of the Nile floodplain and its environmental history, archeologists will be better equipped to prioritize locations for fieldwork investigation and, consequently, raise awareness of these sites for conservation purposes and modern development planning. Our finding has filled a much-needed knowledge gap related to the dominant waterscape in ancient Egypt, which could help inform and educate a wide array of global audiences about how earlier inhabitants were living and in what ways shifts in their landscape drove human activity in such an iconic region.

Materials and methods

The work comprised of two main elements: satellite remote sensing and historical maps and geophysical survey and sediment coring, complemented by archeological resources. Using this suite of investigative techniques provided insights into the nature and relationship of the former Ahramat Branch with the geographical location of the pyramid complexes in Egypt.

Satellite remote sensing and historical maps

Unlike optical sensors that image the land surface, radar sensors image the subsurface due to their unique ability to penetrate the ground and produce images of hidden paleo-rivers and structures. In this context, radar waves strip away the surface sand layer and expose previously unidentified buried channels. The penetration capability of radar waves in the hyper-arid regions of North Africa is well documented 4 , 34 , 35 , 36 , 37 . The penetration depth varies according to the radar wavelength used at the time of imaging. Radar signal penetration becomes possible without significant attenuation if the surface cover material is extremely dry (<1% moisture content), fine grained (<1/5 of the imaging wavelength) and physically homogeneous 23 . When penetrating desert sand, radar signals have the ability to detect subsurface soil roughness, texture, compactness, and dielectric properties 38 . We used the European Space Agency (ESA) Sentinel-1 data, a radar satellite constellation consisting of a C-Band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor, operating at 5.405 GHz. The Sentinel-1 SAR image used here was acquired in a descending orbit with an interferometric wide swath mode (IW) at ground resolutions of 5 m × 20 m, and dual polarizations of VV + VH. Since Sentinal-1 is operated in the C-Band, it has an estimated penetration depth of 50 cm in very dry, sandy, loose soils 39 . We used ENVI v. 5.7 SARscape software for processing radar imagery. The used SAR processing sequences have generated geo-coded, orthorectified, terrain-corrected, noise free, radiometrically calibrated, and normalized Sentinel-1 images with a pixel size of 12.5 m. In SAR imagery subsurface fluvial deposits appear dark owing to specular reflection of the radar signals away from the receiving antenna, whereas buried coarse and compacted material, such as archeological remains appear bright due to diffuse reflection of radar signals 40 .

Other previous studies have shown that combining radar topographic imagery (e.g., Shuttle Radar Topography Mission-SRTM) with SAR images improves the extraction and delineation of mega paleo-drainage systems and lake basins concealed under present-day topographic signatures 3 , 4 , 22 , 41 . Topographic data represents a primary tool in investigating surface landforms and geomorphological change both spatially and temporally. This data is vital in mapping past river systems due to its ability to show subtle variations in landform morphology 37 . In low lying areas, such as the Nile floodplain, detailed elevation data can detect abandoned channels, fossilized natural levees, river meander scars and former islands, which are all crucial elements for reconstructing the ancient Nile hydrological network. In fact, the modern topography in many parts of the study area is still a good analog of the past landscape. In the present study, TanDEM-X (TDX) topographic data, from the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), has been utilized in ArcGIS Pro v. 3.1 software due to its fine spatial resolution of 0.4 arc-second ( ∼ 12 m). TDX is based on high frequency X-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) (9.65 GHz) and has a relative vertical accuracy of 2 m for areas with a slope of ≤20% 42 . This data was found to be superior to other topographic DEMs (e.g., Shuttle Radar Topography Mission and ASTER Global Digital Elevation Map) in displaying fine topographic features even in the cultivated Nile floodplain, thus making it particularly well suited for this study. Similar archeological investigations using TDX elevation data in the flat terrains of the Seyhan River in Turkey and the Nile Delta 43 , 44 allowed for the detection of levees and other geomorphologic features in unprecedented spatial resolution. We used the Topographic Position Index (TPI) module of 45 with the TDX data by applying varying neighboring radiuses (20–100 m) to compute the difference between a cell elevation value and the average elevation of the neighborhood around that cell. TPI values of zero are either flat surfaces with minimal slope, or surfaces with a constant gradient. The TPI can be computed using the following expression 46 .

Where the scaleFactor is the outer radius in map units and Irad and Orad are the inner and outer radius of annulus in cells. Negative TPI values highlight abandoned riverbeds and meander scars, while positive TPI signify the riverbanks and natural levees bordering them.

The course of the Ahramat Branch was mapped from multiple data sources and used different approaches. For instance, some segments of the river course were derived automatically using the TPI approach, particularly in the cultivated floodplain, whereas others were mapped using radar roughness signatures specially in sandy desert areas. Moreover, a number of abandoned channel segments were digitized on screen from rectified historical maps (Egyptian Survey Department scale 1:50,000 collected on years 1910–1911) near the foothill of the Western Desert Plateau. These channel segments together with the former river course segments delineated from radar and topographic data were aggregated to generate the former Ahramat Branch. In addition to this and to ensure that none of the channel segments of the Ahramat Branch were left unmapped during the automated process, a systematic grid-based survey (through expert’s visual observation) was performed on the satellite data. Here, Landsat 8 and Sentinal-2 multispectral images, Sentinal-1 radar images and TDX topographic data were used as base layers, which were thoroughly examined, grid-square by grid-square (2*2 km per a square) at a full resolution, in order to identify small-scale fluvial landforms, anomalous agricultural field patterns and irregular ditches, and determine their spatial distributions. Here, ancient fluvial channels were identified using two key aspects: First, the sinuous geometry of natural and manmade features and, second the color tone variations in the satellite imagery. For example, clusters of contiguous pixels with darker tones and sinuous shapes may signify areas of a higher moisture content in optical imagery, and hence the possible existence of a buried riverbed. Stretching and edge detection were applied to enhance contrasts in satellite images brightness to enable the visualization of traces of buried river segments that would otherwise go unobserved. Lastly, all the pyramids and causeways in the study site, along with ancient harbors and valley temples, as indicators of preexisting river channels, were digitized from satellite data and available archeological resources and overlaid onto the delineated Ahramat Branch for geospatial analysis.

Geophysical survey and sediment coring

Geophysical measurements using Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and Electromagnetic Tomography (EMT) were utilized to map subsurface fluvial features and validate the satellite remote sensing findings. GPR is effective in detecting changes of dielectric constant properties of sediment layers, and its signal responses can be directly related to changes in relative porosity, material composition, and moisture content. Therefore, GPR can help in identifying transitional boundaries in subsurface layers. EMT, on the other hand, shows the variations and thickness of large-scale sedimentary deposits and is more useful in clay-rich soil than GPR. In summer 2022, a geophysical profile was measured using GPR and EMT units with a total length of approximately 1.2 km. The GPR survey was conducted with a central frequency antenna of 35 MHz and a trigger interval of 5 cm. The EMT survey was performed using the multi-frequency terrain conductivity (EM–34–3) measuring system with a spacing of 10–11 meters between stations. To validate the remote sensing and geophysical data, two sediment cores with depths of 20 m (Core A) and 13 m (Core B) were collected using a deep soil driller. These cores were collected from along the geophysical profile in the floodplain. Sieving and organic analysis were performed on the sediment samples at Tanta University sediment lab to extract information about grain size for soil texture and total organic carbon. In soil texture analysis medium to coarse sediment, such as sands, are typical for river channel sediments, loamy sand and sandy loam deposits can be interpreted as levees and crevasse splays, whereas fine texture deposits, such as silt loam, silty clay loam, and clay deposits, are representative of the more distal parts of the river floodplain 47 .

Data availability

Data for replicating the results of this study are available as supplementary files at: https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Pyramids_Elevations_and_Distances_xlsx/25216259 .

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by NSF grant # 2114295 awarded to E.G., S.O. and T.R. and partially supported by Research Momentum Fund, UNCW, to E.G. TanDEM-X data was awarded to E.G. and R.E by the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) (contract # DEM_OTHER2886). Permissions for collecting soil coring and sampling were obtained from the Faculty of Science, Tanta University, Egypt by coauthors Dr. Amr Fhail and Dr. Mohamed Fathy. Bradley Graves at Macquarie University assisted with preparation of the sedimentological figures. Hamada Salama at NRIAG assisted with the GPR field data collection.

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Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of North Carolina Wilmington, Wilmington, NC, 28403-5944, USA

Eman Ghoneim

School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University, Macquarie, NSW, 2109, Australia

Timothy J. Ralph

Department of History, The University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, 38152-3450, USA

Suzanne Onstine

Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, 60637, USA

Raghda El-Behaedi

National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics (NRIAG), Helwan, Cairo, 11421, Egypt

Gad El-Qady, Mahfooz Hafez, Magdy Atya, Mohamed Ebrahim & Ashraf Khozym

Geology Department, Faculty of Science, Tanta University, Tanta, 31527, Egypt

Amr S. Fahil & Mohamed S. Fathy

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Eman Ghoneim conceived the ideas, lead the research project, and conducted the data processing and interpretations. The manuscript was written and prepared by Eman Ghoneim. Timothy J. Ralph co-supervised the project, contributed to the geomorphological and sedimentological interpretations, edited the manuscript and the figures. Suzanne Onstine co-supervised the project, contributed to the archeological and historical interpretations, and edited the manuscript. Raghda El-Behaedi contributed to the remote sensing data processing and methodology and edited the manuscript. Gad El-Qady supervised the geophysical survey. Mahfooz Hafez, Magdy Atya, Mohamed Ebrahim, Ashraf Khozym designed, collected, and interpreted the GPR and EMT data. Amr S. Fahil and Mohamed S. Fathy supervised the soil coring, sediment analysis, drafted sedimentological figures and contributed to the interpretations. All authors reviewed the manuscript and participated in the fieldwork.

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Ghoneim, E., Ralph, T.J., Onstine, S. et al. The Egyptian pyramid chain was built along the now abandoned Ahramat Nile Branch. Commun Earth Environ 5 , 233 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01379-7

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