Westward movement, the populating by Europeans of the land within the continental boundaries of the mainland United States, a process that began shortly after the first colonial settlements were established along the Atlantic coast. There were many trails leading to the Far West. Pioneers faced many challenges on farming the Great Plains. In 1844, 1,500 settlers made the dangerous journey westwards. Read more about its history and outcome. In 1862, Congress passed the Homestead Act to help settle the western territories. Pioneer settlers were sometimes pushed west because they couldn't find good jobs that paid enough. These pioneers, like the Ingalls family of Little House on the Prairie book and television fame (see inset below), were seeking land and opportunity. Americans could obtain full title to a piece of land by living on it and farming it for five years. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management estimates that roughly 10 percent of all travelers making the trip died en route. Of the hundreds of thousands of settlers who moved west, the vast majority were homesteaders. Life in a log cabin was not easy.Every family member was responsible for helping to maintain the household. Popularly known as “sodbusters,” these men and women in the Midwest faced a difficult life on the frontier. In 1842, a slightly larger group of 100 pioneers made the 2,000-mile journey to Oregon. This amounts to somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 people. The typical 160-acre farm cost about $18. The pioneers who flocked to the West, all had their own set of reasons for taking on the long, treacherous journey to settle there. Others had trouble finding land to farm. Routes to the Northwest varied, but the Oregon Trail became the best known and most often followed pathway to the northwest. *The pioneers faced many hardships as they moved westward, and sadly many died because of the difficulties they faced. They were Russian Protestant groups. Mennonites were some of the first to move West and to begin farming on the Great Plains. As farming was very important to pioneers, they had to overcome the challenges. Homesteaders rushed to claim this "free land." The western expansion of the 1840s and 1850s is often discussed in the same breath as the Gold Rush, but, in fact, there were many other settlers who had already begun moving west … There was a vast amount of land that could be obtained cheaply; Great reports were continually sent back East about how fruitful and wonderful the West is, sparking a lot of interest. THE DIFFICULT LIFE OF THE PIONEER FARMER. They were paid little for their hard work farming and they fell into debt. Southwestern travelers more often than not used the Santa Fe Trail to move westward. Pioneers traveling the 2,000-mile Oregon Trail, which ran from Missouri through Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon, faced many dangers. Then, in 1841, a wagon train pioneered the 3,200km-long Oregon Trail to the woodland areas of the north-west coast of America. *The prairie fire, as described in a letter by prairie farmers, John and Sarah Kenyon, was one of the big problems that pioneers feared. In the years to come, pioneers came to call the route the Oregon Trail. Others had trouble finding land to farm. With more and more people from Europe moving into the eastern states, crowding was sometimes a problem. In particular, they had to find solutions to farming problems such as ploughing the land, growing crops, lack of water, protecting the crops, fire, insects, farming machinery, and extreme weather. Reasons for Moving West. For the most part, problems pioneers faced when moving west were: - starvation - diseases - being attacked by someone(s)/something(s) - some people drowned in rivers - … Exodusters moved West to escape sharecropping and own land for themselves. Though it was commonly traveled, settlers still faced difficult journeys westward.

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