AQA GCSE History

The geography of the West

In the 1840s most Americans lived east of the Mississippi. The land beyond it was crossed by a succession of landscapes: the Great Plains, a huge area of grassland running from the Mississippi valley to the Rocky Mountains, then the Rockies themselves, the deserts and basins of the interior, and the Pacific coast. Early explorers described the Plains as unsuitable for farming, with little rain, few trees and hard, dry summers, and maps of the time labelled the area the Great American Desert. This belief discouraged settlement of the Plains for decades, and most migrants simply crossed them on the way to Oregon or California.

The attitude changed as the 1840s went on. Newspapers and politicians promoted the idea of Manifest Destiny, the belief that the United States had a God-given right, even a duty, to spread across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The phrase was popularised in the mid-1840s. It gave settlers' ambitions a moral justification and treated the land as empty and available, which ignored the many Native American peoples who already lived there. The United States added Texas (1845), took Oregon territory by agreement with Britain (1846) and gained California and much of the south-west from Mexico after the war of 1846–1848.

Why people went west

Settlers went for a mixture of push and pull reasons. Pushing them out of the East were economic hardship after the financial crash of 1837, crowded farmland, and disease and unemployment in some areas. Pulling them west were cheap and plentiful land, the hope of a fresh start, and the stories told by guidebooks, newspapers and returning travellers. Religious persecution drove one group in particular.

Pioneer farmers and the journey west

The overland trails, above all the Oregon Trail, carried pioneer families in wagon trains from starting points on the Missouri river such as Independence. A journey of roughly 2,000 miles took four to six months, and had to be timed so that the party crossed the mountains before the winter snows. Families packed a covered wagon with food, tools and bedding and travelled in groups for safety and mutual help. The hardships were severe: river crossings, shortage of water and grazing, accidents, and disease, with cholera the most feared. Attacks by Native Americans were in fact rarer than later stories suggested, and in these years the Plains peoples often traded with wagon trains. The best-known disaster was the Donner Party of 1846–1847, trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevada, where many died and some survivors resorted to cannibalism.

The Mormons and Brigham Young

The Mormons, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had been founded by Joseph Smith in New York State in 1830. Their beliefs and their practice of polygamy, together with their growing political and economic influence, made them unpopular, and they were driven from Ohio, Missouri and then Illinois. Smith was murdered by a mob in Illinois in 1844. His successor, Brigham Young, decided to lead the community beyond the borders of the United States, and in 1846–1847 the Mormons made the journey west. They settled by the Great Salt Lake in what is now Utah, then Mexican territory, and founded Salt Lake City in 1847.

The settlement succeeded because of strong leadership and discipline. Young organised the community like a business: land was shared out, irrigation channels carried water from the mountains to turn the dry soil into farmland, and each member had a task. The community sent missionaries abroad, bringing in thousands of new converts, and its farms supplied later travellers to California. The territory became American after the war with Mexico, and the Mormons later had to come to terms with the federal government.

The miners

Gold was found at Sutter's Mill in California in January 1848, and the news spread across the world in the following year, producing the Gold Rush of 1849. Prospectors, called forty-niners, came from the eastern states, Europe, China and Latin America. Early miners could pan for gold or work a rocker with little equipment, so almost anyone could try. The easy surface gold was soon gone, and mining passed to companies that could afford heavy equipment and hydraulic methods. Mining towns grew up almost overnight, and many were rough places with little law. The Gold Rush changed California completely, which became a state in 1850, and prompted further strikes elsewhere, including Colorado and Nevada later in the century.

The Plains Indians and their way of life

The Plains Indians were several different nations, including the Sioux (Lakota), Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, Apache, Pawnee and Crow. They had their own languages and customs but shared many features of life, especially among the horse-riding buffalo hunters.

The buffalo was the centre of daily life. It provided meat, which was dried for the winter, hides for clothing, blankets and tipis, bones for tools, sinew for thread and dung for fuel. The nations were nomadic, following the herds, and lived in tipis that could be taken down and moved quickly. The people lived in extended families grouped into bands, and bands joined together at some seasons for hunts and ceremonies.

Each band was led by chiefs who gained authority by wisdom and success rather than inheritance, and who ruled by consensus. Important decisions were made in a council of the tribe's leading men. Warriors earned status through bravery, with the counting of coup, touching an enemy in battle, an honour greater than killing him. Many bands had warrior societies that kept order, especially during the hunt. The Plains Indians believed that the land, animals and natural world were sacred and that land could not be owned by individuals, a belief that clashed with the settlers' view of land as property to be bought, fenced and farmed. Religion involved a Great Spirit and rituals such as the Sun Dance.

Early government policy towards the Plains Indians

In the early 1800s the government treated the land of the Plains as one where settlement would not be wanted for generations. Under the Indian Removal Act (1830), eastern tribes were pushed west of the Mississippi. In 1834 Congress defined an area west of the Mississippi, mostly the Plains, as Indian Country, which became known as the Permanent Indian Frontier. The government promised that white settlers would not enter it and that the tribes would be left alone, and it built a line of forts along the frontier to keep order.

The policy did not last. The belief in Manifest Destiny, the Oregon Trail traffic, the Gold Rush and the wish for railroads to the Pacific meant that thousands of whites crossed Indian land in the late 1840s. They killed the buffalo, used up grazing and water along the trails, and brought diseases such as cholera and smallpox, which killed large numbers of Native Americans. The Permanent Indian Frontier was effectively dead by the early 1850s, and the relationship changed from one of separation to one of growing friction, which led to the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851.