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The California Trail came into heavy use after the California Gold Rush enticed over 250,000 gold-seekers and farmers to travel overland the gold fields and rich farmlands of California during the 1840s and 1850s. Today, over 1,000 miles of trail ruts and traces can still be seen in the vast undeveloped lands between Casper, Wyoming, and the ...
Within a few years after the end of the gold rush, in 1863, the groundbreaking ceremony for the western leg of the First transcontinental railroad was held in Sacramento. The line's completion, some six years later, financed in part with Gold Rush money, [163] united California with the central and eastern United States. Travel that had taken ...
The public announcement of the gold discovery by President Polk in late 1848 and the display of an impressive amount of gold in Washington induced thousands of gold seekers in the east to begin making plans to go to California. By the spring of 1849 tens of thousands of gold seekers headed westward for California.
The same year, the California gold rush began, triggering intensified U.S. westward expansion. California joined the Union as a free state via the Compromise of 1850. By the end of the 19th century, California was still largely rural and agricultural, with a population of about 1.4 million.
The California Gold Rush news of gold brought some 300,000 people to California from the rest of the United States and abroad. The first settlers in the west were the Spanish in New Mexico ("Californios"), followed by over 100,000 California Gold Rush miners ('49ers). California grew rapidly, and by 1880, San Francisco had become the economic ...
The Western United States (also called the American West, the Western States, the Far West, the Western territories, and the West) is one of the four census regions defined by the United States Census Bureau. As American settlement in the U.S. expanded westward, the meaning of the term the West changed.
The history of the United States from 1815 to 1849—also called the Middle Period, the Antebellum Era, or the Age of Jackson—involved westward expansion across the American continent, the proliferation of suffrage to nearly all white men, and the rise of the Second Party System of politics between Democrats and Whigs.
A gold rush or gold fever is a discovery of gold—sometimes accompanied by other precious metals and rare-earth minerals—that brings an onrush of miners seeking their fortune. Major gold rushes took place in the 19th century in Australia , Greece , New Zealand , Brazil , Chile , South Africa , the United States , and Canada while smaller ...