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CHAPTER 5: WESTWARD EXPANSION AND REGIONAL DIFFERENCESOUTLINE OF U.S. HISTORYsold their holdings and moved stillfarther west, making way for others.Doctors, lawyers, storekeepers,editors, preachers, mechanics, andpoliticians soon followed the farmers.The farmers were the sturdybase, however. Where they settled,they intended to stay and hopedtheir children would remain afterthem. They built large barns andbrick or frame houses. They broughtimproved livestock, plowed the landskillfully, and sowed productiveseed. Some erected flour mills, sawmills,and distilleries. They laid outgood highways, and built churchesand schools. Incredible transformationswere accomplished in a fewyears. In 1830, for example, Chicago,Illinois, was merely an unpromisingtrading village with a fort; butlong before some of its original settlershad died, it had become oneof the largest and richest cities inthe nation.Farms were easy to acquire. Governmentland after 1820 could bebought for $1.25 for about half ahectare, and after the 1862 HomesteadAct, could be claimed bymerely occupying and improvingit. In addition, tools for workingthe land were easily available. It wasa time when, in a phrase coined byIndiana newspaperman John Souleand popularized by New York Tribuneeditor Horace Greeley, youngmen could “go west and grow withthe country.”Except for a migration into Mexican-ownedTexas, the westwardmarch of the agricultural frontierdid not pass Missouri into thevast Western territory acquired inthe Louisiana Purchase until after1840. In 1819, in return for assumingthe claims of American citizensto the amount of $5 million, theUnited States obtained from Spainboth Florida and Spain’s rights tothe Oregon country in the Far West.In the meantime, the Far West hadbecome a field of great activity inthe fur trade, which was to havesignificance far beyond the valueof the skins. As in the first days ofFrench exploration in the MississippiValley, the trader was a pathfinderfor the settlers beyond the Mississippi.The French and Scots-Irishtrappers, exploring the great riversand their tributaries and discoveringthe passes through the Rockyand Sierra Mountains, made possiblethe overland migration of the1840s and the later occupation ofthe interior of the nation.Overall, the growth of the nationwas enormous: Population grewfrom 7.25 million to more than 23million from 1812 to 1852, and theland available for settlement increasedby almost the size of WesternEurope — from 4.4 million to7.8 million square kilometers. Stillunresolved, however, were the basicconflicts rooted in sectionaldifferences that, by the decade ofthe 1860s, would explode into civilwar. Inevitably, too, this westwardexpansion brought settlers into conflictwith the original inhabitants ofthe land: the Native Americans.In the first part of the 19th century,the most prominent figureassociated with these conflicts wasAndrew Jackson, the first “Westerner”to occupy the White House. Inthe midst of the War of 1812, Jackson,then in charge of the Tennesseemilitia, was sent into southern Alabama,where he ruthlessly put downan uprising of Creek Indians. TheCreeks soon ceded two-thirds oftheir land to the United States. Jacksonlater routed bands of Seminolesfrom their sanctuaries in SpanishownedFlorida.In the 1820s, President Monroe’ssecretary of war, John C. Calhoun,pursued a policy of removing the remainingtribes from the old Southwestand resettling them beyond theMississippi. Jackson continued thispolicy as president. In 1830 Congresspassed the Indian Removal Act, providingfunds to transport the easterntribes beyond the Mississippi.In 1834 a special Native Americanterritory was set up in what is nowOklahoma. In all, the tribes signed94 treaties during Jackson’s twoterms, ceding millions of hectaresto the federal government and removingdozens of tribes from theirancestral homelands.The most terrible chapter in thisunhappy history concerned theCherokees, whose lands in westernNorth Carolina and Georgia hadbeen guaranteed by treaty since1791. Among the most progressiveof the eastern tribes, the Cherokeesnevertheless were sure to be displacedwhen gold was discovered ontheir land in 1829. Forced to makea long and cruel trek to Oklahomain 1838, the tribe lost many of itsnumbers from disease and privationon what became known as the“Trail of Tears.” 9124125