Moving West: A Growing Nation

In 1803 the United States was a young country hugging the east coast. Then, in one astonishing deal, it doubled in size overnight. Over the next seventy years, Americans poured westward — explorers, farmers, gold-diggers and railway builders. It is a story of courage and invention, but it is also a story with a painful side, because the land in the west was not empty. Native nations had lived there for thousands of years.

The Louisiana Purchase: the bargain of the century

France, led by Napoleon, owned a vast slice of North America called Louisiana — far bigger than the modern state of that name. Napoleon needed money for his wars in Europe, so in 1803 he sold the whole territory to the United States for about 15 million dollars. That worked out at roughly three cents an acre. President Thomas Jefferson had doubled the size of his country with a signature.

Lewis and Clark: mapping the unknown

Jefferson wanted to know what he had bought. He sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark with a team called the Corps of Discovery to explore all the way to the Pacific Ocean. From 1804 to 1806 they paddled rivers, crossed the Rocky Mountains, recorded hundreds of plants and animals, and drew maps. They could not have succeeded without Native American help — most famously from Sacagawea, a Shoshone woman who guided and translated for them, carrying her baby son the whole way.

Wagons west

From the 1840s, pioneer families loaded everything they owned into canvas-covered wagons and joined wagon trains heading west along routes like the Oregon Trail — a journey of about 2,000 miles that took four to six months. Frontier life was hard work: families built their own cabins, grew their own food, and children did farm chores before any schoolwork. Neighbours relied on each other for everything from barn-raising to harvest.

Gold! The rush of 1849

In 1848 gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in California. The next year, tens of thousands of hopeful diggers — nicknamed 'forty-niners' after the year 1849 — raced west by wagon and by ship. Most never struck it rich, but California's population exploded, and by 1850 it had become a state. People came from around the world, including China, Mexico, Europe and South America, making California remarkably diverse from the start.

Rails across a continent

Crossing America took months — until 1869, when the transcontinental railroad was completed. Two companies built towards each other, one from the east and one from the west, meeting at Promontory Summit in Utah, where a golden spike marked the joining of the tracks. Much of the hardest work, blasting tunnels through the Sierra Nevada mountains, was done by Chinese immigrant labourers who were paid less than other workers despite doing the most dangerous jobs. A coast-to-coast journey now took about a week.

The honest cost: broken treaties and the Trail of Tears

Here the story must be told truthfully. The land that settlers called 'the frontier' was home to Native nations — the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole and many others. The United States signed treaties — solemn legal promises — guaranteeing these nations their lands. Again and again, those treaties were broken when settlers wanted the land.

In 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. The Cherokee fought back peacefully — they took their case to the US Supreme Court and won — but the government forced them out anyway. In the late 1830s, around 16,000 Cherokee people were made to march roughly 1,000 miles to territory in present-day Oklahoma. Thousands died of cold, hunger and disease on the journey. The Cherokee remember it as the Trail of Tears. It was not an accident and it was not inevitable — it was a choice made by people in power, and many Americans at the time protested against it.