Moving west

As the towns and cities on the East Coast became more crowded, people naturally wanted to use the land that lay to the west. The first people who moved west were hunters and trappers. Some of them came back east to tell others about the best routes they had found - and to be their guides. By the 1830s and 1840s more and more people were on the move. Some were adventurers who were looking for gold. There were cattle ranchers and railroad workers. But most were families who just wanted to find a good piece of land where they could build a home and settle as farmers.

At that time it was possible to go west by train - but only as far as the Mississippi River. The area further west was still wilderness - with no roads or maps to help people find their way. So it was safest for families to travel in wagon trains, with a guide. Sometimes as many as a hundred wagons moved along together. When they camped at night, they often formed circles so they could defend themselves more easily if Indians attacked.

In 1492 Christopher Columbus had written:

"So peaceful are these people that I swear there is not in the world a better nation."

Many white settlers in America only managed to survive because of the help the Indians gave them. Indians taught the Pilgrims how to grow American vegetables such as corn, beans or pumpkins. Later they helped white families on their way west, and showed them the places where they could find drinking water.

But as the settlers moved west, they claimed the land they found as their own. Because the Indians had different traditions and a simpler way of life, the whites thought of them as savages who had less right to use the land than they had themselves. In 1830 the American government made the Indians in the East move to new territory - west of the Mississippi - where they thought the land was poor. Later, when they found that the land was fertile, rich in minerals, even gold, they drove the Indians off again. Many Indians now began to see the whites as their enemies, and some tribes decided to fight for their land.

But more and more whites came. In 1869 the railroad between the East and West Coasts was finished. For the Indians, this was the beginning of the end. The Indians had no chance against all the whites who came into their land now. By 1890 many thousands of Indians had died in the battles against the American army. Thousands of others had died of disease and starvation - many on long journeys to the reservations on lands the whites had chosen for them.

Red Line New 4, Ernst Klett Verlag, Stuttgart, 1998, page 50 f.