Ensayo De Ingles

Carlo Leon

Karen Winkle

AMH 2010 U. S. History to 1865

03/25/2014

Migration is the moving of people to a specific place to another one. Some people might migrate for a different job, safety, free land, freedom of religion or many others reasons. This is how all started, people migrating west to expand their country by acquiring land and looking for the best. Everything started when the President Thomas Jefferson purchased the territory of Louisiana in 1803, a large amount of land west of the original 13 states and the Northwest Territory was acquired, from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to New Orleans. Jefferson believed that this was the key to the nation’s health.

All this open land, many benefits and other existing problems encouraged Americans to expand to the west. The American people began to realize that the future of the country lay in the expansion of its own western resources.

Westward expansion helped encourage the American economy. There were many reasons that made the people face the difficult and dangerous movement west, but the primary reason was economy.

Here is how the U.S. migrated west to expand their country from coast -to-coast by acquiring land and how migration impacted the Native Americans already there as well as their point of view of migration.

Settlers of the west, called pioneers, usually migrated as families and settled along the rivers of the West in order to facilitate trade and be able to get food. Life on the Great Plains was not easy however. Food was not easily available and settlers depended on hunting animals or planting crops of corn. Housing and shelter was usually built with grass. To gain access to the western part of the country the white settlers had to pass through the Native Americans. While pushing westward the white culture fought with the plain Indians. As a result of this clash bloody battles surged and the white settlers were victorious and the government restricted the Native American lands to small portions. The government supported assimilation, which was the plan to unite the Native American culture with the white one.

White settlers started moving westward to settle the land gained by the victory over the Native Americans. A major factor that caused this major movement, other than by the victory of the war, was the Homestead Act. This act provided and granted 160 acres of free land to any citizen who was the head of a house or family.

Despite this sectional conflict, Americans kept on migrating west in the years after the Missouri Compromise was adopted. Thousands of people crossed the Rockies to the Oregon Territory, which belonged to Great Britain, and thousands more moved into the Mexican territories of California, New Mexico and Texas. The settlers of the West, who in settling opened the west up to further settlement,

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