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The American frontier, also known as the Old West, and popularly known as the Wild West, encompasses the geography, history, folklore, and culture associated with the forward wave of American expansion in mainland North America that began with European colonial settlements in the early 17th century and ended with the admission of the last few ...
1882 hand-colored map depicting the western half of the continental United States. This timeline of the American Old West is a chronologically ordered list of events significant to the development of the American West as a region of the continental United States. The term "American Old West" refers to a vast geographical area and lengthy time ...
American settlers began following the trail in 1841, with the first recorded settler wagon traingroup being the 1843 "Great Migration" of about 900 settlers, led in part by Marcus Whitman. [ 2 ] [ 3 ] The Provisional Government of Oregon was established by such settlers in 1843, generally limited to the Willamette Valley.
The Jacksonians wanted expansion, known as manifest destiny, into new lands that would be occupied by farmers and planters. Thanks to the annexation of Texas, the defeat of Mexico in war, and a compromise with Britain, the western third of the nation rounded out the continental United States by 1848.
The United States began expanding beyond North America in 1856 with the passage of the Guano Islands Act, causing many small and uninhabited, but economically important, islands in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean to be claimed. [4] Most of these claims were eventually abandoned, largely because of competing claims from other countries.
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 11 December 2024. Cultural belief of 19th-century American expansionists For other uses, see Manifest Destiny (disambiguation). American Progress (1872) by John Gast is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west. Columbia, a personification of the United States, is shown leading ...
The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 gave Western farmers use of the important Mississippi River waterway, removed the French presence from the western border of the United States, and, most important, provided U.S. settlers with vast potential for expansion. A few weeks afterward, war resumed between Britain and Napoleon's France.
The years between 1870 and 1914 saw the expansion of Western power. By 1914, the Western and some Asian and Eurasian empires like the Empire of Japan, Russian Empire, Ottoman Empire, and Qing China dominated the entire planet.