America, 1840–1895: Expansion and consolidation · GCSE History

Expansion and the move west

Many Americans believed in 'Manifest Destiny', the idea that God meant them to spread across the whole continent.
From 1843, pioneers travelled the Oregon Trail, about 2,000 miles, facing disease, weather and dangerous river crossings. The Donner Party was trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevada in 1846–47.
The Mormons, led by Brigham Young, reached the Great Salt Lake in 1847 to escape persecution, and irrigated the desert.
The California Gold Rush (1849) brought hundreds of thousands of 'forty-niners'.

The Plains Indians, such as the Lakota Sioux, lived in bands. Many were nomadic, following the buffalo, which provided food, tipis, clothing and tools. Land wasn't owned by individuals but shared, and it was sacred.
Government policy changed from the 'Permanent Indian Frontier' (1834) to reservations. The Fort Laramie Treaty (1851) set out tribal lands and promised safe passage for travellers.

The North and South were divided over slavery and states' rights, especially over whether new western states would allow slavery. After Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860, eleven Southern states left the Union and formed the Confederacy.
The Union (the North) won the Civil War (1861–65). Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation (1863) declared slaves in the Confederate states free. Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865.
Reconstruction: the 13th Amendment (1865) abolished slavery, the 14th (1868) gave citizenship and equal protection, and the 15th (1870) gave black men the vote. But Southern states passed Black Codes, the Ku Klux Klan terrorised black people, and later Jim Crow laws enforced segregation.

The Homestead Act (1862) gave 160 acres of land to settlers who farmed it for five years. The first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869, bringing more settlers and goods.
Homesteaders faced few trees (so they built sod houses), little water (wind pumps and dry farming helped), harsh weather and cattle trampling crops. Barbed wire (1874) made fencing possible, and new crops such as Turkey Red wheat suited the Plains.
The cattle industry grew after the Civil War: long drives from Texas to railheads such as Abilene (set up by Joseph McCoy in 1867), then open-range ranching, which collapsed after the terrible winter of 1886–87.

As settlers and miners moved onto Indian land, conflict followed: the Sand Creek Massacre (1864); Red Cloud's War (1866–68), which ended with the Fort Laramie Treaty (1868) creating the Great Sioux Reservation; and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (June 1876), where Custer's force was wiped out.
The mass slaughter of the buffalo, from millions to fewer than a thousand by the late 1880s, destroyed the Plains Indians' way of life. The Dawes Act (1887) broke reservations up into individual plots. The massacre at Wounded Knee (December 1890) ended armed resistance, and in 1890 the frontier was declared closed.

Manifest Destiny: The belief that Americans were meant by God to spread across the continent.
Homesteader: A settler who farmed land on the Great Plains.
Reservation: An area of land set aside for Native Americans.
Nomadic: Moving from place to place rather than living in one spot.
Confederacy: The eleven Southern states that left the Union in 1860–61.
Emancipation: Being set free from slavery.
Reconstruction: The rebuilding of the South after the Civil War.
Transcontinental railroad: The railway linking the east and west coasts of the USA, completed in 1869.