Manifest Destiny: Settlement of the American West

In 1851, newspaper editor John Soule wrote an editorial containing the famous quotation, "Go West young man, and grow with your country." Soule and others saw the West as a wild place that could be tamed by resourceful American settlers. His words gave the West a mythic status in the minds of many. Less than a decade later, the American government would give citizens an incentive to follow Soule's instructions. The passage of the Homestead Act gave settlers 160 free acres of land in the frontier. The white population in Western areas exploded in the next few decades. Between 1865 and 1890, the number of residents in the Western territories increased nearly 400%. With such a large shift, stories and myths about the settlement of the West became a lasting part of American culture. These myths did not fully reflect the realities of western expansion. America's growth into the frontier did not wholly result from the efforts of white settlers. Instead, it relied on the contributions of a variety of races and peoples.

The body of myth surrounding the American West portrays Western expansion as a simple matter of cowboys versus Indians, where white settlers bring civilization to a wild frontier populated by savages. Only a decade after the Homestead Act, Buffalo Bill Cody's "Wild West" show toured the country. Cody and his performers acted out the settlement of the West in basic terms with white cowboys chasing Native Americans on horseback. The same story r

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Category: History - M