Summary:
Details why the Western Expansion is such an important part of American History. Tells of the hardships explorers faced and how they overcame the seemingly impossible.
For generations children have been studying the Western Expansion or Homesteading Era in their school history classes. Many books, such as the Little House on the Prairie books written by Laura Ingalls Wilder, a survivor of the experience, teach us about the time period and what struggles they had to face and overcome. The Western Expansion was an important time for the newly founded America; it proved what America is today.
"No one who had not homesteaded can understand the fascination and terror of it." (Laura Ingalls Wilder) The spirit of the pioneers that lived in the 19th century came because of a need to own land. Today is the same as 1888, in that land can't be created, but can only be divided and divided again. With each division, a plot of land becomes smaller and smaller, never bigger. In 1862 the government passed the Homestead Act. In exchange for a small fee the government would give each family 160 acres if they would settle and farm their land for at least five years. Thousands of pioneers took them up on the offer and soon towns and cities were popping up all over the West.
Emigrants from the East could only imagine what the West would be like. The stories that were told to them by explorers and missionaries, who had come back from travels to the West, filled their minds with pictures of huge open landscapes, lots of game to hunt for food, and many rivers and lakes. We can all understand why the Eastern settlers longed for this type of life, even then some of the larger cities in the East were moving into what is called the "industrial age." The streets were crowded with men wandering around looking for jobs and the air was being polluted by coal smoke from the factories. Because these cities had changed so quickly, in some cases only a couple of years, the early settlers began to experience a longing for the simpler life they had had before. However, when it came down to it, everyone was still excited by the mention of two words: "Free land."
Most homesteaders had no idea how difficult their lives would be. When they finally got to the West--assuming they didn't die from the many diseases during their journey--they found tough land, dust storms, and plagues of grasshoppers. Disease was another factor that made life especially difficult. It was not common for children, especially those under five, to die of some kind of illness. Bugs often carried and spread diseases around that killed many new settlers. Also the philosophy of "Safety in Numbers" would prove true in the West. Weather it was the men defending their families from the Indians or asking a neighbor when you needed something to survive, the homesteaders depended on their each other for help and as a sense of security.
Those who stayed were responsible for turning the prairie into America's most industrious farmland. One woman wrote: "When we got in our first crop of wheat I used to ...watch it wave as the wind blew over it and think I had never seen anything so beautiful." The men and woman of the Western Expansion are the same type of men and woman of today. They had the right spirit. "I will do what needs to be done and you can not mess with me while I'm doing it." The same kind of spirit America had during the attacks on September 11--You can't mess with us. We are going to stand up for ourselves and work through this problem--is the same kind of spirit that the settlers possessed. Runaway horses, prairie fire, blizzards, heat, sunstroke, Indians, lice, snakes and the fact that they were alone with more 160 acres of land between them and their nearest neighbor were just a few of the types of things that the western pioneers of the 1800s faced. There were certainly those who gave up and moved back to the East where they felt more secure. However, many more stayed and helped build and shape the West one bundle of hay at a time, one small farm at a time, and then eventually one town at a time. They traveled on horseback, in covered wagons, or some even walked. For these men and woman it wasn't a question of how long it would take them to do it, only that it had to be done. And they certainly did it.
This is the complete article, containing 745 words
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