Westward Ho!
After the American Revolution the country prospered and flourished and by 1898 it had the same size as today. But the economic conditions were bad in the East, so some pioneers thought that they could start a new life in the west.
So, in 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark started an expedition through territory no with man has ever seen before, mountains full of wild animals and streams full of fish…
On January 24, 1848 Gold was found and the news spread through Europe. A lot of people came there with tents or made huts and searched for gold and they had names like Red Dog or Rich Bar.
But, of course, not everyone found gold, however the liked the climate and they stayed there and established farms or created businesses.
Until 1865 in the Far West lived a lot of people, but the area from the Mississippi westward had been ignored. With the Homestead Act of 1862 they tried that people also settle there. So, they sold the land very cheaply, but the living conditions were very hard, because it was windswept and barren.
However, the Great Plans were ideal for raising cattle and growing grain. The people there lived in awful conditions, because trees were scarce so the built dugouts or sod houses and they were dirty and muddy and the weather was so extreme, with howling winds and a lot of snow.
In the West there were also no cattle, so they needed cowboys to bring them there. The live for the cowboys was very hard, the worked very long hours, in all kinds of weather. They had to search for lost ones, drag them out some were or brand the cattle.
The hayday for the cowboys was 1865 until 1885. When they brought all the cattle to the West, they go paid and the hell-raising began.
They spent all their money in saloons and went back broke.
The white needed more and more land, so the Indians had no place. They sent the Indians to the grassland west, to the land no one wanted. In the “Trail of Tears” in 1838 the white transported the Cherokees hundreds of miles away, were many, thousands died.
Another tribe, the plains Indians (Crow, Sioux, Cheyenne, etc.) unified to resistance against the white. But the slaughtered all the buffalo, so they lost their whole livelihood. ---->
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