Widely held rhetoric of the nineteenth century suggested to Americans that it was their divine right and responsibility to settle the West with Protestant democratic values. The popular phrase “Go west, young man” encouraged Americans to fulfill this dream. Artists of the day depicted this westward expansion in idealized landscapes that bore little resemblance to the difficulties of life on the trail.

While a small number of individuals had pushed westward, the land west of the Mississippi was largely unknown to Americans in the early nineteenth century. Most easterners, if they thought of it at all, viewed this territory as an arid wasteland suitable only for Indians whom the federal government had “removed” from eastern lands. The reflections of early explorers who conducted scientific treks throughout the West tended to confirm this belief. Major Stephen Harriman Long, who commanded an expedition through Missouri and into the Yellowstone region in 1819–1820, frequently described the Great Plains as a arid and useless region, suitable as nothing more than a “great American desert.” But, beginning in the 1840s, a combination of economic opportunity and ideological encouragement changed the way Americans thought of the West. Buoyed by talk of America’s “manifest destiny” to expand, hundreds of settlers, and eventually hundreds of thousands, packed their lives into wagons and steamer trunks and set out for a new life in the “New West.” Some were drawn by the prospect of fertile farms in the Oregon country, where they hoped to raise their families as their ancestors had done on farms back east. Others headed to California with dreams of finding their fortune in gold. Still others believed it was their job to spread the word of God to the “heathens” on the frontier. Whatever their motivations, their dreams would come at the cost of those who already made their homes in the West.

Contrary to popular belief, the West was far from uninhabited. Indigenous Americans had lived in North America for over ten millennia and, into the late nineteenth century, perhaps as many as 250,000 Natives still inhabited the American West.^[1] Their lives were forever transformed by the great migration of white Americans westward. After the conclusion of the Civil War, new waves of settlers, the U.S. military, and the unstoppable onrush of American capital conquered peoples who had dominated the Great Plains for generations. The United States removed Native groups to ever-shrinking reservations, incorporated the West first as territories and then as states, and, for the first time in its history, came to control the enormity of land between the two oceans.

The history of the late-nineteenth-century West is many-sided. Tragedy for some, triumph for others, the many intertwined histories of the American West marked a pivotal transformation in the history of the United States.