Westward Expansion

Westward expansion affected the US and surrounding countries a lot. There were many causes of westward expansion and the consequences where big. Either way the american west was significant for many reasons even though the expansion started a war against mexico, but at least it lead to people starting to debate about slavery.

Firstly, There were many causes of people moving to the american west. Causes like the California Gold Rush which was a major factor in expansion west of Mississippi. Also westward expansion was greatly aided by the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, and passage of the Homestead Act in 1862. The completion of the railroads to the West following the Civil War opened up vast areas of the region for
The US government wrote treaties as one way to get rid of the Indians from their tribal lands this process was made easier by Removal Act of 1830. In cases where the treaty failed, the government sometimes violated both treaties and Supreme Court rulings to aid the spread of European Americans westward across the continent. The huge herds of American bison that once roamed the plains that were basically wiped out and growth of white settlement exceedingly affected the lives of the Native Americans living in the West. In the conflicts that resulted, the American Indians, although having occasional victories, seemed doomed to be defeated by the greater numbers of settlers and the military force of the U.S. government. By the 1880s, most American Indians had been confined to reservations, which were often in areas of the West that appeared least desirable to white
Americans kept on migrating west after the Missouri Compromise was adopted. Thousands of people crossed the Rockies to the Oregon Territory and thousands more moved into the Mexican territories of California, New Mexico and Texas. In 1837, American settlers in Texas joined with their neighboring Texans of Spanish origin and won independence from Mexico. Texas petitioned to join the United States as a slave state and joined the union as a slave state in February 1846 and in June, after negotiations with Great Britain, Oregon joined as a free state. Polk declared war against Mexico, claiming falsely that the Mexican army had invaded their territory and shed American blood on American soil. The war proved to be unpopular, in part because many Northerners objected to what they saw as a war to expand the slavocracy. In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican American War and added more than 1 million square miles, an area larger than the Louisiana Purchase, to the United