Claiming the Far West: Territorial Expansion after 1812

Though America had won its independence from England in the Revolutionary War (1776–83), the years following that war were hardly peaceful. Conflict with Indian tribes throughout the trans-Appalachian west (the area between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River) kept settlers there from feeling comfortable in their new land. Fears that the Spanish would block American access to the port of New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi River alarmed both farmers and politicians. Most important, the British remained a force in the trans-Appalachian region, maintaining forts and supporting Indian hostilities. By the end of the War of 1812 (1812–14), however, these problems had largely been solved. The Indians had been defeated in the east, and the British no longer tried to exert an influence in the American territories. Moreover, the purchase of the Louisiana Territory (the area between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains) in 1803 meant that Americans controlled the important trading route along the Mississippi River. (See Chapter 1 for full details on all these events.)

The Louisiana Purchase opened vast expanses of land to American control, doubling the size of the young nation. A country that had once thought it would stretch only to the Mississippi River now saw its horizon expand all the way to the Rocky Mountains, and perhaps beyond to the Pacific. The possibilities of western expansion sparked dreams of exploration, of conquest, of empire, of a nation stretching from sea to shining sea. But the realization of those dreams would take another century and would involve luck, warfare, and diplomacy. As ever in America, pioneers and fortune seekers led the way, moving into new lands and bringing with them the support of an expanding nation.

The dreams of a president

One of the first Americans to embrace the dream of a coast-to-coast empire was President Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). Jefferson had read with interest Canadian fur trader Alexander Mackenzie's (c. 1755–1820) account of his 1793 explorations across the Canadian Rocky Mountains and to the shores of the Pacific. In his book, Voyages from Montreal, Mackenzie outlined his vision of a continental fur trade controlled by the British. As it became clear that the United States could expand that far west, Jefferson began to dream of an expedition that would explore the far western lands and establish a claim for American control of the fur-rich regions there. Gathering together two experienced young military officers, Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809) and William Clark (1770–1838), Jefferson gave them these instructions in a letter dated January 20, 1803, quoted in Donald Jackson's Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents: 1783–1854: "The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri River, & such principal streams of it, by its course & communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, may offer the most direct and practicable water communications across this continent, for the purposes of trade."

Lewis and Clark set out from St. Louis in May 1804 at the head of a party of thirty that included soldiers, volunteer backwoodsmen, hunters, interpreters, two French voyageurs (fur traders), and a black slave named York. Taking detailed notes as they traveled, the party ascended the Missouri River, dodged trouble with Indians in present-day South Dakota, and holed up for the winter with a band of Mandan Indians in present-day North Dakota. Over the winter they hired a French interpreter, Toussaint Charbonneau, who brought along with him his Indian wife, Sacajawea (c. 1788–c. 1812 or 1884). Sacajawea's knowledge of Indian culture helped the party befriend a band of Shoshone Indians, who provided the travelers with horses and pointed them toward a passage across the difficult Rocky Mountains. Lewis and Clark led their party across the mountains and eventually down the Columbia River. On December 3, 1805, they reached the Pacific, thus staking the United States's claim to the vast lands that would become known as the Oregon Country. (However, it would be 1848 before those claims were secure.)

The drive for expansion

As news of Lewis and Clark's voyage reached the American people, it excited an impulse for westward expansion that was already strong. Ever since the Revolutionary War (1776–83), Americans had seen their future in the West. The western lands, they believed, could be cleared and farmed, made subject to the settler's seemingly irresistible impulse to tame the land. Every man could own his own farm, provide for his family, and become a citizen in the expanding republic. Not only would the land be tamed and farmed, asserted religious leaders; it would also be Christianized. They believed that the Native Americans living on the land were uncivilized but would become civilized through their experience of Christian religions—or would die resisting. The Louisiana Purchase and the success of Lewis and Clark's expedition only encouraged Americans' desire for western land.

This enthusiasm combined with a variety of other factors to create a national mood that fueled expansion. Among the most pressing of the expansionist forces was population growth. Thanks to a high birthrate and continued immigration, the American population grew from about five million in 1800 to nearly twenty-three million by the middle of the nineteenth century. Of these, some four million moved into the western territories between 1820 and 1850. Economic depressions in the late 1810s and 1830s also encouraged expansion as people turned to the cheap western lands for sustenance. Finally, a number of popular writers encouraged Americans to think of themselves as a "superior people" whose job it was to civilize peoples they considered inferior—namely, the Indians.

By the 1840s, very few Americans questioned whether the United States should be expanding into the lands west of the Mississippi River; they only asked how that expansion would occur. As Mexico and the United States argued over the borders of the Republic of Texas, formerly part of the nation of Mexico, indignant Americans proclaimed their nation's natural right to control the breadth of the continent. Most Americans assumed without question that their nation would eventually extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, while some even imagined control of all of North and South America. In 1845, as war with Mexico loomed, John L. O'Sullivan, editor of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, defined this faith in American expansion as the nation's "manifest destiny." The idea of manifest destiny implied that Americans had the God-given right to acquire and populate the territories stretching west to the Pacific. This idea has been criticized as an excuse for the bold land grabs and the slaughter of Indians that characterized expansion, but those who believed in it thought they were demonstrating the virtues of a nation founded on political liberty, individual economic opportunity, and Christian civilization.

Manifest Destiny

Though the drive to expand the United States across the continent was expressed in many ways by many influential people, the person most associated with the phrase "manifest destiny" was newspaperman John O'Sullivan. In 1845 he wrote an article in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review that suppored the annexation of Texas and spelled out the justification for America's westward march. O'Sullivan maintained that since countries such as Britain, France, Spain, and Mexico had never shown any hesitation in taking lands that would benefit their country, America should forthrightly claim those lands, including Texas, that were rightly hers. Though O'Sullivan's language is outdated, his final point rings clear to this day:

Why, were other reasoning wanting, in favor of now elevating this question of the reception of Texas into the Union, out of the lower region of our past party dissensions, up to its proper level of a high and broad nationality, it surely is to be found, found abundantly, in the manner in which other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves into it, between us and the proper parties to the case, in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.

Texas

On February 14, 1819, American diplomat John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) and Spanish ambassador Luis de Onís signed a treaty that granted the United States the Spanish territory of Florida and established a border between the United States and Mexico in present-day Texas. The first part of the treaty was executed without dispute, but the border would soon become the bone of contention that would ultimately bring Texas into the union. Angry that the United States had largely ceded the Texas territory to the Spanish, American settlers began to move into East Texas in 1821. By that time, however, the land was no longer controlled by Spain but by Mexico, which had won independence from Spain that same year. As more and more settlers moved in, Mexico felt it needed to solidify its control of the region. Threatened by the settlers' democratic ideas and their Protestant religion, Mexico sent troops into Texas and banned further settlement in the 1830s.

Texas's American settlers decided to form their own provisional government in 1835 and hoped that either Mexico would recognize their independence or the United States would come to their defense and claim Texas as a state. But the path to self-government would not be easy. Bands of Texans achieved early successes against Mexican troops, but in 1836 a large army led by Mexican dictator General Antonio López de Santa Anna (1794–1876)—who referred to himself as the "Napoleon of the West"—moved on the Texans. Though Texas military leader Sam Houston (1793–1863) counseled retreat, a force of some 187 men under Lieutenant Colonel William B. Travis prepared to face the Mexicans from the stronghold of the Alamo Mission in San Antonio. With Travis were both American settlers and Mexican residents who resented the harsh rule of Santa Anna.

Remember the Alamo!

For ten days, Santa Anna and his men laid siege to the thick-walled Alamo. Both sides were equally dedicated: Santa Anna to the extermination of every last defender, and Travis and his men to "Victory or Death," as Travis wrote in a letter quoted by Harold Faber in From Sea to Sea. Death it would be, as the Mexicans finally overwhelmed the Texans on March 6, 1836, killing every male, including Travis and famous frontiersmen Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett. The Mexicans spared the lives of a number of women, children, and slaves (though the exact number is not known it is reported variously between three and thirty). But the Mexicans paid a high price for their victory: they lost about fifteen hundred men.

When word reached Houston of the massacre at the Alamo and of another at a town called Goliad, he helped form an army to defeat Santa Anna. In late April 1836, Houston prepared to lead a ragtag band of nine hundred men against Santa Anna's thirteen hundred. "Victory is certain!" Houston told his men. "Trust in God and fear not! The victims of the Alamo and the names of those who were murdered at Goliad cry out for cool, deliberate vengeance. Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!" Roused for battle behind their inspirational leader, the Texans surprised the Mexicans on the plains of San Jacinto, won a decisive victory, and captured Santa Anna. In exchange for his life, Santa Anna granted the Texans independence.

The annexation of Texas

Sam Houston became the president of the Republic of Texas on October 22, 1836. In the same election, the citizens of Texas voted six to one in favor of the immediate annexation (acquisition) of Texas by the United States, with statehood assumed to follow soon after. But the United States, under President Andrew Jackson (1767–1845), was not ready to move so quickly. There was no doubt that they wanted the territory, which included most of present-day Texas and parts of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The question was, would Texas be a free or a slave state (that is, a state in which slavery was illegal or legal)? Southerners who wanted to extend the institution of slavery into new territories argued that Texas should be admitted as a slave state; northerners feared giving the slave-holding states more power and argued that all new territories admitted into the union should be free. The solution to this dilemma was nearly ten years in the making.

With slave and free states equally balanced and with relative peace on the American borders and the border with Texas, there were few compelling reasons to speed annexation. But in the 1840s things began to change. Mexico sent troops into Texas after vowing that it would reclaim the Republic, and Indian raids on frontier settlements had settlers calling for military support. Texas sent envoys to England and France to ask for assistance.

Southerners who feared that Texas would enter the nation as a free state wanted to take advantage of the large number of slave owners already in the state and pushed for immediate annexation. U.S. diplomats hated the idea that England or France might regain influence on the continent through aiding Texas. The stalemate ended when expansion-minded American President John Tyler (1790–1862) reopened talks of annexation in 1843. In 1845 Tyler's successor, James K. Polk (1795–1849), outmaneuvered opponents of adding Texas to the Union and sent a resolution to Congress calling for the admission of Texas as a state. On February 16, 1846, Texans raised the United States flag in their capital, and the matter was resolved with Texas joining the United States as a slave state. There remained the minor problem of negotiating the western boundary of the state with Mexico; that problem would take a war to solve.

Acquiring the Oregon Territory

Ever since 1818 the United States and Britain had jointly occupied the Oregon Country, the northwestern corner of the United States that included the present-day states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and western Montana. British fur traders were most familiar with the region, for they had long operated there and had hopes of securing a fur empire in the Northwest. But because neither country had a significant presence in the region, there seemed no reason to push for absolute control. In fact, the joint occupation treaty was renewed in 1827. In the 1830s, however, the balance of power began to shift.

In the 1830s American settlers began to trickle westward on what would become the Oregon Trail (a route to the West that ran from Missouri to present-day Washington). In 1835, the first of the Protestant missionaries, Samuel Parker, came west to found missions to convert the Indians; he was followed in 1836 by Marcus Whitman and his wife, Narcissa, who founded a mission in Walla Walla. The trickle of settlers turned into a steady stream by the 1840s. Parties of settlers arrived one hundred or more at a time, boosting the American population of the Oregon Country to 5000 by 1845, while the British could claim only 750 inhabitants. The settlers were backed by a solid wall of public opinion—the enthusiasm for America's manifest destiny was at its peak in the mid-1840s. What had once seemed a distant land not worthy of conflict now was viewed as an indispensable piece of the American empire.

President Polk, the same man who had pushed through the acquisition of Texas, was eager to obtain Oregon for the United States, and he used his political skills to that end as soon as he was elected. In his inaugural address on March 4, 1845, he declared: "Nor will it become in a less degree my duty to assert and maintain by all constitutional means the right of the United States to that portion of our territory which lies beyond the Rocky Mountains. Our title to the country of Oregon is clear and unquestionable, and already our people are preparing to perfect that title by occupying it with their wives and children." After lengthy though peaceful negotiations with the British, the United States obtained on June 10, 1846, all the territory south of the 49th parallel (the line of latitude that now defines the United States's northern border with Canada). As with the Louisiana Purchase, the United States had enlarged its territory dramatically with the stroke of a pen.

War with Mexico

Nowhere was the power of manifest destiny felt more strongly than in the brewing conflict with Mexico. According to historian Harold Faber:

"The vision of golden California as part of the United States was the real cause of the Mexican War. There were tensions on the Mexican border, there were problems concerning the annexation of Texas, there were insults and misunderstandings on both sides—all this was true enough. But behind the hostile attitudes and moves was the fact that the United States was determined to expand to the Pacific. Neither Indians nor the elements nor the legality of Mexican claims was going to stand in the way. Manifest destiny was in the air Americans breathed, and President Polk was determined to do all in his power to stretch the geographical limits of the United States to the Pacific Ocean. Polk did not want war, he merely wanted the fruits of war, the land and territory of a neighboring country."

At the center of the dispute that would lead the United States and Mexico into war in 1846 was the question of the border between the newly established state of Texas and its former ruler, Mexico. The United States claimed as the border the river known as the Rio Grande, but the Mexicans insisted that the border should be the Nueces River, well east of the Rio Grande. The territory about which they were arguing was not vast, but it was important to both countries. Of lesser importance were financial claims and ill feelings resulting from the recent acquisition of Texas. It should have been an easy matter to negotiate—but negotiation did not come easily for either side.

President Polk sent diplomat John Slidell (1793–1871) to Mexico City to negotiate with the new Mexican president, José Joaquín Herrera. But at the same time he charged General Zachary Taylor (1784–1850), Colonel Stephen W. Kearny (1794–1848), and Commander John D. Sloat to prepare for war from their separate outposts near the border with Mexico. Herrera wanted peace, but he was hounded by critics who charged that he would meekly give away Mexican territory to a country that most Mexicans perceived as aggressive and greedy. Faced with this political pressure, Herrera refused to talk with Slidell. Both sides held their breath to see what the other would do. On April 24, 1846, the Mexicans gave the Americans an excuse to fight by launching an attack on Taylor's forces on the Rio Grande. Telling Congress that the Mexicans had "at last invaded our territory and shed the blood of our fellow-citizens on our own soil," Polk declared war on Mexico in May 1846.

As wars go, the Mexican-American War (1846–48) was neither particularly bloody nor hard fought. Kearny led his troops and a mass of volunteers southwest on the Santa Fe Trail in the blistering heat of summer; more men died from the heat than in battle. In fact, Kearny took the New Mexican capital of Santa Fe without firing a shot and in August 1846 claimed New Mexico as U.S. territory. California had been claimed by American settlers in July 1846 in what was known as the Bear Flag Revolt. The Californians gladly raised the American flag over the territory when Commander Sloat arrived in Monterey, having met little resistance. With the seizure of New Mexico and California, the United States had met its objectives. But it seemed that Polk still had a score to settle with an old adversary: General Santa Anna, who had retaken control of Mexico shortly after the war began.

Storming Mexico City

Though they had already achieved their goals, American forces entered Mexico in early 1847. Future President Zachary Taylor led his outnumbered forces to a stunning victory in Monterrey, Mexico, and signed a peace treaty (though it was later invalidated by his political enemy, President Polk). General Winfield Scott (1786–1866), defying logic, landed his troops in Vera Cruz, on the eastern coast of Mexico, and then marched them across the Mexican continent and straight to the Mexican capital, Mexico City. Facing a force three times the size of his own, Scott defeated the Mexican troops under Santa Anna in the Battle of Chapultepec and raised the American flag over the capital in September 1847.

Had they desired, the soldiers might have taken all of Mexico as an American possession. But racist American politicians did not want to rule over a land of nonwhites. Instead, diplomat Nicholas Trist offered the Mexican government eighteen million dollars in exchange for the cession of more than half a million acres of land. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on February 2, 1848, granted to the United States all or part of the present-day states of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. It was a territorial addition second only to the Louisiana Purchase.

The Gadsden Purchase

No sooner had Americans taken more than half a million acres of Mexican land in the Mexican-American War (1846–48) than they set their sights on a slice of land that lay just south of the borders of present-day New Mexico and Arizona. Railroad builders and their backers in Congress searched eagerly for a southern route that would link California to the settled areas in the East, and they found it—in Mexico. Luckily for the Americans, Mexico was in desperate need of cash. Thus, in 1853 James B. Gadsden (1788–1858), president of the South Carolina Railroad Company, negotiated with Mexican President López de Santa Anna to sell the 29,000 square miles of territory for $10 million. Stymied by political haggling, southern railroad builders lost the race to build the first transcontinental railroad, but their Southern Pacific line became an important connector between east and west.

Populating the West

In the early 1800s, the idea that American territories would stretch all the way to the Pacific was merely a dream, and those who thought it possible assumed that such expansion could only occur in the distant future. But by 1854, Americans had claimed the territory that makes up the biggest part of the contiguous United States. Much of it remained wild, unclaimed by any settlers and inhabited by Indians if it was inhabited at all. But it was no longer foreign land, and it now seemed inevitable that Americans would spread out and populate the vast expanses that had once seemed so distant. Territorial expansion had largely ended; now it was time to populate the West.

Land and gold

Though fur trappers and mountain men had made forays into the Far West in the early nineteenth century, it wasn't until the opening of the various trails west in the 1820s and 1830s that significant numbers of American settlers moved beyond the Mississippi River. The Santa Fe Trail began to be a major commercial route in 1821, but it was the Oregon Trail that allowed first hundreds and then thousands of emigrants to leave their homes in the settled east and venture out in search of a new life. Between 1843, the year of the first Great Migration west, and 1869, when the transcontinental railway was finished, the Oregon Trail and its spur to California carried an estimated 350,000 pioneers across 2,000 miles of tortuous terrain. Drawing them west were the fertile land of Oregon and the goldfields of California.

In 1849, James Marshall discovered gold on the American River in the Sacramento Valley of California. The news of gold in California spread through the United States like wildfire. The New York Herald reported on January 11, 1849 that "The spirit of emigration which is carrying off thousands to California so far from dying away increases and expands every day. All classes of our citizens seem to be under the influence of this extraordinary mania." Emigration to the state had been a trickle, but now it turned into a steady flow. An estimated thirty-two thousand people took the overland routes to California in 1849, and another forty-four thousand came in 1850. The territory of California now had enough inhabitants to petition for statehood, which was granted in 1850. The United States now had an official outpost on the West Coast, and the Pony Express (an early postal service), telegraph lines, and eventually the transcontinental railroad all connected east to west (see Chapter 11). Construction projects like the railroad helped create settlements along the way and further sped the populating of the West.

The California gold rush was not the only mining boom to bring settlers to the West. In 1859 miners flocked to Nevada to exploit the so-called Comstock Lode of gold and silver. In that same year gold was discovered near Pikes Peak in Colorado, and gold, silver, and lead mining flourished there between 1859 and 1880. According to Roger Barr in The American Frontier, "The last great mining frontier opened in 1877, when gold was discovered in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory." Mining brought droves of prospectors into the region, and they were soon followed by families and by merchants eager to profit by providing goods and services to the miners. In this way whole communities were founded. It is not a coincidence that the first western territories to attain statehood were mining states: California, which joined the union in 1850; Nevada, in 1864; and Colorado, in 1876.

Farmers and ranchers

Miners were not the only settlers in the American West. Writes Barr, "As in earlier American frontiers, it was farmers, the last in the line of frontiersmen, who truly conquered the West. Dissatisfied by the conditions at home, lured by the promise of free land, and aided by new technology, they came by the thousands to the Great Plains beginning in the 1850s." Farmers moving out onto the Plains had to learn new methods of farming, and they were aided by technological advances, such as John Deere's invention of the steel plow (1837), which made their work easier. Another invention, barbed wire (1874), allowed farmers to fence off their land to keep the growing numbers of livestock from trampling their crops.

Farming in the West was greatly encouraged by the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave settlers up to 160 acres of free land if they settled on it and made improvements over a five-year span. The Timber Culture Act of 1873 granted an additional 160 acres to farmers who agreed to plant a portion of their land with trees. Though both acts were abused by land speculators (people who buy and hold on to land with the intention of later selling it for a profit), they did serve to draw many thousands of settlers from the crowded East and even from Europe into the wide-open spaces of the American West. Farming on the Plains was difficult, but by 1890 farmers had claimed more than 430 million acres of land—more land, writes Barr, "than all of their ancestors had claimed throughout American history." The biggest single land claim, known as the Oklahoma land rush, occurred on April 22, 1889, when in a single day some fifty thousand settlers claimed lands that had just been opened to settlement.

Cattle ranching vied with farming as the dominant industry in the Plains, for ranchers found that they could graze vast herds of cattle on the open grasslands that had only years before been roamed by buffalo and Indians. The construction of railroads meant that ranchers could get their cattle to slaughterhouses in the East. As soon as Joseph M. McCoy established a railhead (a point on a railroad where traffic stops) in Abilene, Kansas, in 1867, writes Barr, "the cattle industry was born. Between 1868 and 1871, nearly 1,500,000 cattle were driven from the Texas range north to Abilene and shipped east." The cattle boom did not last long, for increased competition among ranchers and between ranchers and farmers soon made cattle ranching less profitable. Though it enjoyed only a short life, cattle culture gave America one of its most enduring heroes: the cowboy.

The end of the frontier

By 1890 fourteen states and four territories had been carved out of the lands west of the Mississippi. Census figures for that year revealed that 8,525,000 people lived in these states and territories, 13.5 percent of the country's total population. A few years later, historian Frederick Jackson Turner noted in The Frontier in American History, "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 discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., [the frontier] can not, therefore, any longer have a place in census reports." The great American drive to expand across the breadth of the continent had ended.

Ever since the Revolutionary War, Americans had looked westward to the lands they had yet to conquer. For more than a century—in dramatic battles, vast land grabs, vicious wars against Indians, and the slow movement of settlers onto unclaimed land—Americans had pushed west. Spurred by their belief that the continent was destined to fall under their dominion, Americans established farms, founded communities, petitioned for statehood, and slowly but surely settled the West. In so doing they forged a unique nation, one in which individualism and democracy flourished alongside the darker traits of greed and racism.

For More Information

Books

Billington, Ray Allen, with James Blaine Hedges. Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier. New York: Macmillan, 1949.

Edwards, Cheryl, ed. Westward Expansion: Exploration and Settlement. Lowell, MA: Discovery Enterprises, 1995.

Erdosh, George. Food and Recipes of the Westward Expansion. New York: PowerKids Press, 1997.

Mancall, Peter C., ed. Westward Expansion, 1800–1860. Detroit: Gale, 1999.

Milner, Clyde A.,II, Carol A. O'Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, eds. The Oxford History of the American West. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Wexler, Alan, ed. Atlas of Westward Expansion. New York: Facts On File, 1995.

White, Richard. "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A New History of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.

Web sites

"All about the Gold Rush." PBS: Online. [Online] http://www.isu.edu/~trinmich/allabout.html (accessed April 12, 2000).

Brazoria County Historical Museum. "Award-Winning Austin Colony Exhibit." Where Texas Began. [Online] http://www.bchm.org/ (accessed April 12, 2000).

Daughters of the Republic of Texas. The Alamo in 1836: Brief Chronology of Events Concerning the Alamo. [Online] http://www.thealamo.org/alamo1836.html (accessed April 12, 2000).

"The Journals of Lewis and Clark." American Studies @ The University of Virginia: Hypertexts. [Online] http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/JOURNALS/toc.htm (accessed April 5, 2000).

Muzzey, David Saville. "The Mexican War." Museum of the City of San Francisco. [Online] http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist6/muzzey.html (accessed April 12, 2000).

Sources

Barr, Roger. The American Frontier. San Diego, CA: Lucent Books, 1996.

Billington, Ray Allen. Westward to the Pacific: An Overview of America's Westward Expansion. St. Louis MO: Jefferson National Expansion Historical Association, 1979.

Faber, Harold. From Sea to Sea: The Growth of the United States. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992.

Jackson, Donald, ed. Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents: 1783–1854. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978.

Smith, Carter, ed. The Conquest of the West: A Sourcebook on the American West. Brookfield, CT: Millbrook Press, 1992.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1950.