< high-pitched, smarmy liberal voice >Everyone knows that it was caused by the imperialist caucasians of European extraction and their desire to rape Mother Gaia and to subjugate and murder the peaceful, non-confrontational Native Americans who only wanted to coexist with their neighbors and live in harmony with the biosphere!< /voice>
Civil war vets were offered land out West. That is how some of my people wound up in the Washington Territory.
In the 1970s it was color television images of the warmth and sunshine at the Rose Parade every January 1st.
New York.
Too many furriners from Europe invading the East coast pushing us out!
Clearly, if you didn't have a growing population you wouldn't have seen that kind of rapid expansion.
And if you didn't have open land, there also wouldn't have been anywhere to expand to.
So it doesn't seem like the most productive question to ask.
Perhaps more interesting after all these years is the Fogel thesis:
Fogel's first major study involving cliometrics was Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (1964). This tract sought to quantify railroads' contribution to U.S. economic growth in the nineteenth century. Its argument and method were each rebuttals to a long line of non-numeric historical arguments that had ascribed much to railroads without rigorous reference to economic data. Examining transportation costs for primary and secondary goods, Fogel compared the actual 1890 economy to a hypothetical 1890 economy in which transportation infrastructure was limited to wagons, canals and rivers. The difference in cost (or "social savings") attributable to railroads was negligible - about 1%.
Wish that damned ocean weren't there so we could do the same thing today.
My family stayed in the South. We had no ambition.
“What caused westward expansion in the United States?”
Because going east was pretty much a non-starter.
Duh.
This has got to be one of the more understated analysis I’ve seen in a long time. For example, East of the Mississippi, movement by water had long be the fastest practical means of transport. West of the Mississippi, forget it, you have to go overland.
To further complicate things, westward expansion might have been through wilderness, but it often had a destination: the West Coast. Between the British and the Spanish, what is now Texas, the southwest, California and the Pacific northwest were places, destinations, to travel to.
A lot more people wanted to go there than stop in the Great Plains. The degree of difficulty for starting fresh was very high, evidenced by the Mormon settlement of Utah—they almost starved. They probably survived by being able to provide supplies, at a price, to settlers passing through, eventually being able to support themselves.
Only technology such as the railroads and the windmill allowed for much of the Great Plains to be occupied at all. The windmill to get water to grow crops, and the railroads to transport those crops once grown.
While certainly life by today’s standards was utterly awful on the eastern seaboard, by the standards of the day it was luxurious compared to setting out on your own across the frontier.
Much of the West only opened up after the post-Civil War, Indian Wars forced the deployment of much of the Union Army West. Once the Army was there, settlers finally had an interior place to go.
Texas was an “odd man out” for much of this, as were the Oklahoma Indian territories. They had their own paradigms of expansion and growth. The great rush to occupy them as home stakes, granted by the US government, could only happen in due course.
Texas, especially, for a while was carved up by enormous ranches like the XIT (for “Ten (Counties) in Texas”), who engaged in shameless land grabbing and exploitation. But the great cattle drives to Kansas City only lasted a short while before being ended by barbed wire fences.
As more infill happened, the primary concern of the settlers was creating a civilized town for themselves and their children. This ended many of the antics surrounding frontier settlement, culminating in the Census of 1890, which was no longer able to determine a “line” of settlement. This meant that westward expansion and the frontier were finished. It all was settled. From there it was just a matter of growth.
Settlement of “the West” was much faster than popularly imagined. Indiana University (oldest university West of the Alleghenies) was founded, for the most part, by a crew from Harvard, who also founded what’s now called Bloomington Normal University (in Illinois), several others on the way, and when they were done some of them were still youthful enough to be professors at Stanford.
Neo Conservatives
Ping
It was Benjamin Franklin and his Ohio Company.
The Society of Cincinnati had a hand in westward expansion.
Under the Homestead Act, the price of land was free. How is that “not important”?