Explain the growth of the west form the 1820-1840?

Answer 1

The West was where the Middle of America is Now. The Mississippi marked the frontier and in truth much of the area east of the Mighty Muddy River was sparsely settled. In fact during this twenty year stretch from 1820 to 1840, white European and American settlers poured into Ohio and Illinois as well as Kentucky and Missouri. Along the way they slaughtered what was left of the native population, shoving then further west or onto 'reservations/' The growth was explosive in many ways with an expanding population showing no evidence that it would ever slow down. In fact the Native Americans desperately hoped the Whites would practice birth control and were flabbergasted by the hordes crowding into their lands..

Gonna throw links and words at you..
http://www.chipublib.org/004chicago/timeline/originame.html
"""On August 12, 1833, the Town of Chicago was incorporated with a population of 350. Incorporation was enabled by an act of the legislature, passed February 12, 1831, which provided that any community of over 150 inhabitants was authorized to incorporate as a town, with limits not to exceed one square mile in extent.
The first boundaries of the new town were Kinzie, Desplaines, Madison, and State streets, which included an area of about three-eighths of a square mile.

The name "Chicago" derived from the Indians but it is not known which tribe named the town and many theories have been advanced to explain the origin of the name. One generally accepted is that the name comes from the Indian words for either wild onion or skunk, but some historians believe that the word Chicago denoted "strong" or "great." Dr. William Barry, first secretary of the Chicago Historical Society, wrote, "Whatever may have been the etymological meaning of the word Chicago in its practical use, it probably denoted strong or great. The Indians applied this term to the Mississippi River, to thunder, or to the voice of the great Manitou." M. M. Quaife in his book Checagou asserts that the significance of the name was anything great or powerful. """


http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/H/1954uk/chap4.htm
""-------------By 1800, the Mississippi and Ohio valleys were becoming a great frontier region, "Hi-o, away we go, floating down the river on the O-hi-o," became the song of thousands of emigrants. The tremendous shift of population in the early nineteenth century led to the division of old territories and the drawing of new boundaries with bewildering rapidity. Then, as new states were admitted, the political map was stabilized cast of the Mississippi. Within a half-dozen years, six states were created - Indiana in 1816, Mississippi in 1817, Illinois in 1818, Alabama in 1819, Maine in 1820, and Missouri in 1821. The first frontier had been tied closely to Europe, the second to the coast settlements, but the Mississippi Valley was independent and its people looked west rather than east.

Naturally the frontier settlers were a varied body of men. In the van of emigration marched the hunter and trapper, described by an English traveler named Fordham as "a daring, hardy race of men, who live in miserable cabins.... They are unpolished but hospitable, kind to strangers, honest and trustworthy. They raise a little Indian corn, pumpkins, hogs, and sometimes have a cow or two.... But the rifle is their principal means of support." These men were dexterous with the ax, snare, and fishing line- they blazed the trails, built the first log cabins, and held back the Indians.

As he penetrated the wilderness, the settler became a farmer as well as a hunter. Instead of a cabin, he built a comfortable log house which had glass windows, a good chimney, and partitioned rooms. Instead of using a spring, he dug a well. An industrious man would rapidly clear his land of timber, burning the wood for potash and letting the stumps decay. He grew his own grain, vegetables, and fruit; ranged the woods for venison, wild turkeys, and honey; fished the nearest streams; looked after his cattle and hogs. The more restless bought large tracts of the cheap land and, as land values rose, sold their acres and moved westward, making way for others.

Soon there came -in addition to the farmers - doctors, lawyers, storekeepers, editors, preachers, mechanics, and politicians -all those who form the fabric of a vigorous society. The farmers were the most important. They intended to stay all their lives where they settled and hoped their children would stay after them. They built larger barns than their predecessors and sound brick or frame houses. They brought in improved livestock, plowed the land more skillfully, and sowed more productive seed. Some of them erected flour mills, sawmills, distilleries. They laid out good highways, built churches and schools. So rapidly did the west grow that almost incredible transformations were accomplished in but a few years. In 1830, for instance, Chicago was merely an unpromising trading village with a fort. Long before some of its original settlers died, it was one of the largest and richest cities in the world.

Many different peoples mingled their blood in the new west. Farmers of the upland south were prominent, and from this stock sprang Abraham Lincoln, born in a Kentucky log cabin. Scotch-Irish, Pennsylvania Germans, New Englanders, and men of other origins played their part. By 1830, more than half the people living in America. had been brought up in an environment in which the old world traditions and conventions were absent or very weak. And men in the west were valued not for their family background, for inherited money, or for their years of schooling, but for what they were and could do. Farms could be had for a price well within the reach of any thrifty person, government land after 1820 could be obtained for $1.25 an acre and, after 1862, for merely settling on it. And tools for working the land were easily available too. It was a time when, as the journalist, Horace Greeley said, young men could "go west and grow up with the country." The equality of economic opportunity bred a sense of social and political equality and gave natural leaders a chance to come quickly to the fore. Initiative, courage, individual vigor, and hard sense were indispensable to the good pioneer.

As they went west, the New England settlers carried with them many of the ideals and of the region from which they came. The same was true of the southerners and, in a sense, the whole process of colonizing the west was a race between the two influences. The problem of slavery, which bad thus far received little public attention, suddenly assumed enormous importance "like a fire bell in the night," wrote Jefferson. In the early years of the republic, when the northern states were providing for immediate or gradual emancipation of the slaves, many leaders had supposed that slavery would presently die out everywhere. In 1786, Washington wrote that he devoutly wished some plan might be adopted "by which slavery may be abolished by slow, sure, and imperceptible degrees." And Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and other leading southern statesmen made similar statements. As late as 1808, when the slave trade was abolished, numerous southerners thought that slavery would prove but a temporary evil.

But during the next generation, the south was converted _______________""

http://www.learnnc.org/bestweb/westwardbysea



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