Westward We Go!
Back toward home, the eastern horizon is flat and even. To the distant west, the blue Rocky Mountains loom like wolf’s teeth. Tall, dry grasses wave in the wind. And of course, there is the sky, seeming bigger and emptier than ever before. This is the scenery that greeted settlers as they traveled west.
In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson purchased 530 million acres of land from France for just four cents an acre. This territory stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, doubling the size of the United States.
Moving West
After 1803, settlers from the eastern United States began flowing west. To these people, cheap land was more than just a square of dirt. Whether in the Great Plains or beyond the Rockies in California, land provided a promise of a new start.
However, farmland was not the only reason Americans were looking westward. Some were chasing the promise of gold. Others were chasing Manifest Destiny, believing it was their patriotic duty to settle and conquer the whole continent.
The push to move west grew after the Indian Removal Act. Congress forced Indigenous peoples to leave their ancestral homes and move to reservations.
Some people moved west to escape crowded cities, racism, and religious persecution in the East. In the West, the question of slavery was being heavily debated. New states, like California, banned it, while others, like Texas, made slavery legal. Newspaper stories about these lands sparked people’s curiosity. During the Gilded Age, many took advantage of the new railroads, which meant that going west wouldn’t take weeks or months of travel on a bumpy, dusty trail.
Those moving west included white settlers from the East, Black settlers from the South, and Chinese immigrants who worked on the railroads.
The Cowboy
For a few, the West’s bumpy, dusty trails would become all too familiar. Cowboys were mostly young men with no family who were looking to earn money. They found jobs herding cattle and often learned these skills from the best—the vaqueros, the original cowboys.
The first vaqueros were Indigenous Mexican men. Their skill with lassoes, horses, and cattle made them famous among the ranchers who hired them. The American cowboys watched and learned; and slowly, they started getting used to their new life: 15-hour days on horseback and sleeping on the stony ground under a starry black sky.
Then came the cattle drives. There were millions of longhorn cattle grazing across the southwest, and ranchers wanted to get them north. Ranchers could make a lot of money selling beef in northern markets, but they needed help getting the cattle there. Cowboys drove herds of thousands across open plains toward Kansas on a nonstop trek that lasted for months. Once they got them to the railroads, the cattle could be shipped further north. It only took 12 to 15 cowboys to get the job done.
At one time, there were 40,000 cowboys in the West. They weren’t like the white, fashionable cowboys of books and movies. A third of them were Black, Mexican, and Native. All of them were covered in dust from long rides through the deserts. They sat on horseback, squinting in the sun, watching the streams of settlers going west.