WESTWARD EXPANSION

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

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