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The American West, c1835–c1895

Migration and early settlement

  • 3 things to know
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Overview

The Oregon Trail, the push from the east after 1837, Manifest Destiny, the forty-niners and California, the Donner Party, the Mormons from Nauvoo to Salt Lake under Brigham Young, sod houses, water and mining camps.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

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Numbers

What conditions in the eastern states pushed families to set out for the far west in the late 1830s and 1840s?

Numbers

What set off the rush of the forty-niners to California in 1849?

Key term

What happened to the Donner Party over the winter of 1846–47?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    Where did the Oregon Trail run, and when did wagons first follow it?

    Model answer

    About 2,000 miles from Independence in Missouri to the Willamette Valley in Oregon, first taken by wagons in 1836.

  2. 2

    What conditions in the eastern states pushed families to set out for the far west in the late 1830s and 1840s?

    Model answer

    The financial collapse of 1837 brought unemployment, bank failures and falling crop prices, while land in the east was expensive.

  3. 3

    What did believers in Manifest Destiny claim?

    Model answer

    That God intended white Americans to spread across the continent to the Pacific and bring civilisation to it.

  4. 4

    What set off the rush of the forty-niners to California in 1849?

    Model answer

    Gold was found at Sutter's Mill in 1848, and news of it drew about 80,000 hopeful miners the following year.

  5. 5

    What did the Gold Rush do to California?

    Model answer

    Its population grew so fast that San Francisco became a city within a few years and California entered the Union as a state in 1850.

  6. 6

    What mistake trapped the Donner Party in 1846?

    Model answer

    They took an untried short cut across the Great Salt Lake Desert, lost weeks, and reached the Sierra Nevada as the snows closed the passes.

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