Old West – Travel Guide At Wikivoyage

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Early history of the West

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Napoleon's France sold the Louisiana territory to the United States in 1803, and motivated the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific Coast.

In the 1830s, the United States government asserted the Manifest Destiny, the idea that the USA should expand all the way to the Pacific coast, without regard to Indians or other nations.

While Christian missionaries had settled in the West since colonial times, and small parties of "mountain men" came from the 1810s, larger settler expeditions came with the Oregon Trail from the 1830s. The 1840s Mexican-American War allowed the United States to annex the southwestern territories, which saw a new wave of settlers with the 1849 gold rush in California.

Completion of the Transcontinental Railroad.

Until the mid-19th century, very few settlers reached the Great Plains, partly because Southern politicians opposed settlement policies.

While many settlers went west via wagon train (and more often than not parts of their party died en route) people with more money and/or less cargo usually opted for a ship down to either Nicaragua (see Ruta del Tránsito) or Panama and a short overland trip in one of these countries before heading North on the Pacific side. Illustrious figures of the 19th century traveled these routes, among them Mark Twain (Nicaragua) and Ulysses S. Grant (Panama), who both wrote about their respective trips.

By the 1850s, railroads and telegraph lines had been drawn across the settled lands in the east and along the Pacific coast, with a gap between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi river. From 1859 to 1861, the Pony Express connected eastern and western telegraph systems.

See also: In the footsteps of explorers §North American fur traders, and Voyageurs

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