The American Old West (often referred to as the Old West , Wild West or Far West ) comprises the history, geography, peoples, lore, and cultural expression of life in the Western United States, most often referring to the period of the latter half of the 19th century, between the American Civil War and the end of the century. After the eighteenth century and the push beyond the Appalachian Mountains, the term is generally applied to anywhere west of the Mississippi River in earlier periods and westward from the frontier strip toward the latter part of the 19th century. More broadly, the period stretches from the early 19th century to the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1920.
Through treaties with foreign nations and native peoples, political compromise, technological innovation, military conquest, establishment of law and order, and the great migrations of foreigners, the United States expanded from coast to coast (Atlantic Ocean-to-Pacific Ocean), fulfilling its belief in Manifest Destiny. In securing and managing the West, the U.S. federal government greatly expanded its powers, as the nation grew from an agrarian society to an industrialized nation. First promoting settlement and exploitation of the land, by the end of the 19th century the federal government became a steward of the remaining open spaces. As the American Old West passed into history, the myths of the West took firm hold in the imagination of Americans and foreigners alike.
The term "Old West"
The American frontier moved gradually westward decades after the settlement of the first white immigrants on the Eastern seaboard in the 1600s. The "West" was always the area beyond that boundary. Scholars, however, sometimes refer to the "Old West" as the region of the Ohio and Tennessee valleys during the 18th century, when the frontier was being contested by England, France, and the American colonies. Most often, however, the "American Old West", the "Old West" or "the Great West" is used to describe the area west of the Mississippi River during the 19th century.
Acquiring the Frontier
Advancing frontier and the Louisiana Purchase
During European settlement of North America in the seventeenth century, the western frontier was the crest of the Appalachian Mountains, the initial geographical impediment to expansion. While the eastern seaboard was being tamed, the area west of these mountains received little concern and speculation. After the Revolutionary War, the conflict among European powers over the vast American continent and its riches gave way to the new nation of the United States. With peace came an impetus for westward expansion, as veterans returned to areas seen during the war, and land hungry settlers traveled to newly available lands in New York and across the Appalachians.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the American frontier was approximately along the Mississippi River, which bisects the continental United States north-to-south from just west of the Great Lakes to the delta near New Orleans. St. Louis, Missouri was the largest town on the frontier, the gateway for travel westward, and a principal trading center for Mississippi River traffic and inland commerce.
The new nation began to exercise some power in domestic and foreign affairs. The British had been driven out of the East after the American Revolutionary War but remained in Canada and threatened to expand into the Northwest. The French had left the Ohio Valley but still owned the Louisiana Territory from the Mississippi River west to the Rockies, including the strategic port of New Orleans. Spain's dominion (New Spain) included Florida and the territories from present-day Texas to California along the southern tier and up to what later would be Utah and Colorado.
With a stroke of the pen, Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States (elected in 1801), more than doubled the size of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 which was comprised of land France had acquired from Spain just three years earlier. Napoleon Bonaparte had begun to consider it a liability, since the slave rebellion in Haiti and tropical disease undermined his Caribbean adventures. Robert R. Livingston, American ambassador to France, negotiated the sale with French foreign minister Talleyrand, who stated, "You have made a noble bargain for yourselves, and I suppose you will make the most of it".
The price was $23 million (about $0.04 per acre), including the cost of settling all claims against France by American citizens. The purchase was controversial. Many of the Federalist Party, the dominant political party in New England, thought that the territory was "a vast wilderness world which will... prove worse than useless to us" and spread the population across an ungovernable land, weakening federal power to the detriment of New England and the Northeast. But the Jeffersonians thought the territory would help maintain their vision of the ideal republican society, based on agricultural commerce, governed lightly and promoting self-reliance and virtue.
Jefferson quickly ordered exploration and documentation of the vast territory. He charged Lewis and Clark to lead an expedition, starting in 1804, to "explore the Missouri river, and such principal stream of it, as, by its course and communication with the waters of the Pacific ocean; whether the Columbia, Oregon, Colorado or any other river may offer the most direct and practicable communication across the continent for the purposes of commerce". Jefferson also instructed the expedition to study the region's native tribes, weather, soil, rivers, commercial trading, and animal and plant life.
The principal commercial goal was to find an efficient route to connect American goods and natural resources with Asian markets, and perhaps to find a means of blocking the growth of British fur trading companies into the Oregon Country. Asian merchants were already buying sea otter pelts from Pacific coast traders for Chinese customers. An expansion of inland fur trading was also anticipated. With news spreading of the expedition's findings, entrepreneurs like John Jacob Astor immediately seized the opportunity and expanded fur trading operations into the Pacific Northwest. Astor's "Fort Astoria" (later Fort George), at the mouth of the Columbia River, became the first permanent white settlement in that area. However, during the War of 1812, the rival North West Company (a British-Canadian company) bought the camp from Astor's agents as they feared the British would destroy an American camp. For a while, Astor's fur business suffered. But he rebounded by 1820, took over independent traders to create a powerful monopoly, and left the business as a multi-millionaire in 1834, reinvesting his money in Manhattan real estate.
Fur trade
The quest for furs was the primary commercial reason for the exploration and colonizing of North America by the Dutch, French, and English. The Hudson's Bay Company, promoting British interests, often competed with French traders who had arrived earlier and had been already trading with indigenous tribes in the northern border region of the colonies. This competition was one of the contributing factors to the French and Indian War in 1763. British victory in the war led to the expulsion of the French from the American colonies. French trading continued, however, based in Montreal. Astor's move into the Northwest was a major American attempt to compete with the established French and English traders.
As the frontier moved westward, trappers and hunters moved ahead of settlers, searching out new supplies of beaver and other skins for shipment to Europe. The hunters preceded and followed Lewis and Clark to the Upper Missouri and the Oregon territory; they formed the first working relationships with the Native Americans in the West. They also added extensive knowledge of the Northwest terrain, including the important South Pass through the central Rocky Mountains. Discovered about 1812, it later became a major route for settlers to Oregon and Washington.
The War of 1812 did little to change the boundaries of the United States and British territories, but its conclusion led to the nations' agreement to make the Great Lakes neutral waters to both navies. Furthermore, competing commercial claims by England and the U.S. led to the Anglo-American Convention of 1818. This resulted in their sharing the Oregon territory until a decades later resolution. By 1820, with the fur trade depressed, distances to supply increasing, and conflicts with native tribes rising, the trading system was overhauled by Donald Mackenzie of the North West Company and by William H. Ashley. Previously, Indians caught the animals, skinned them, and brought the furs to trading posts such as Fort Lisa and Fontenelle's Post, where trappers sent the goods down river to St. Louis. In exchange for the furs, Indians typically received calico cloth, knives, tomahawks, awls, beads, rifles, ammunition, animal traps, rum, whiskey, and salt pork.
Amazon.com: The Fur Trade on the Upper Missouri, 1840-1865 ...
Amazon.com: The Fur Trade on the Upper Missouri, 1840-1865 (9780806125664): John E Sunder, Paul L. Hedren: Books
Fur Trade Reference Books
Fur Trade on the Upper Missouri, 1840-1865 Reprint. By JE Sunder. Published by University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. Paperback, 295 pages. Fur Trade Revisited: Selected Papers of the ...
Missouri River Fur Trade: Information from Answers.com
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Sunder, John E. The Fur Trade on the Upper Missouri, 1840–1865. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965, 1993.
fur trade definition of fur trade in the Free Online Encyclopedia.
... Sandoz, The Beaver Men (1964); L. O. Saum, The Fur Trader and the Indian (1965); J. E. Sunder, The Fur Trade on the Upper Missouri 1840–1865 (1965); E. E. Rich, The Fur Trade and ...
Amazon.com: "Lower Missouri": Key Phrase page
The Fur Trade on the Upper Missouri, 1840-1865 by John E. Sunder
NPS Historical Handbook: Upper Missouri Fur Trade
The Upper Missouri Fur Trade Its Methods of Operation ... Laidlaw, Jan. 10, 1840; See also H ... II, Record for Sept. 15, 1865. 93 Kurz's Journal, 104; Coues, Forty Years a Fur Trader, 131 ...
fur trade: Bibliography — FactMonster.com
... Sandoz, The Beaver Men (1964); L. O. Saum, The Fur Trader and the Indian (1965); J. E. Sunder, The Fur Trade on the Upper Missouri 1840–1865 (1965); E. E. Rich, The Fur Trade and ...
fur trade Facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles ...
The Fur Trade on the Upper Missouri: 1840-1865.(Brief Article) Magazine article from: The Historian; 9/22/1994: A Son of the Fur Trade.(A Son of the Fur Trade: The Memoirs of Johnny Grant ...
fur trade: Information from Answers.com
The Fur Trade on the Upper Missouri, 1840–1865. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press ... E. Sunder, The Fur Trade on the Upper Missouri 1840-1865 (1965); E. E. Rich, The Fur Trade and ...
Fur trading definition of Fur trading in the Free Online Encyclopedia.
... Sandoz, The Beaver Men (1964); L. O. Saum, The Fur Trader and the Indian (1965); J. E. Sunder, The Fur Trade on the Upper Missouri 1840–1865 (1965); E. E. Rich, The Fur Trade and ...