Early Movers
This famous trail, beginning in Independence, Missouri, was the primary route for settlers heading to the Pacific Northwest.
What is the Oregon Trail?
This purchase from France in 1803 nearly doubled the size of the United States.
What is the Louisiana Purchase?
The forced relocation of Native American tribes from their ancestral lands in the southeastern U.S. to Indian Territory was known as this.
What is the Trail of Tears?
The 1830 Act, signed by President Andrew Jackson, authorized the forced removal of Native American tribes from their lands east of the Mississippi River.
What is the Indian Removal Act?
These groups of prospectors, named for the year of their major discovery, flocked to California, forever changing its landscape.
A Famous football team is named after them
Who were the Forty-Niners?
This treaty with Spain in 1819 ceded Florida to the U.S. and established the western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase.
What is the Adams-Onís Treaty?
This battle in 1876 saw the defeat of General Custer and his troops by Lakota and Cheyenne warriors, a significant Native American victory.
What is the Battle of Little Bighorn?
This policy aimed to break up tribal lands into individual plots for Native Americans, ostensibly to encourage farming but often leading to land loss.
What is the Dawes Act?
This president, known for his belief in Manifest Destiny, oversaw the annexation of Texas and the Mexican-American War.
Who was James K. Polk?
The idea that the United States had a God-given right to expand across the continent was coined by John O'Sullivan as this.
What is Manifest Destiny?
The discovery of this valuable resource in California sparked the massive migration.
What is gold?
These specific areas of land were designated by the U.S. government for Native American tribes, often far from their original homelands.
What are reservations?
Originally known as the "Great American Desert," this vast grassland was initially seen as an obstacle to westward settlement.
What is the Great Plains?
This large territory was acquired by the U.S. from Mexico after the Mexican-American War in 1848.
What is the Mexican Cession?
This system, offering 160 acres of land to settlers who improved it for five years, encouraged westward migration after 1862.
What is the Homestead Act?
This treaty, signed in 1851, attempted to define tribal territories on the Great Plains and allow safe passage for settlers, though it was often broken.
What is the Fort Laramie Treaty?
This religious group, led by Brigham Young, migrated west to Utah to escape persecution and establish their own community.
Who are the Mormons?
This small but strategically important strip of land in present-day Arizona and New Mexico was purchased from Mexico in 1853 for a potential railroad route.
What is the Gadsden Purchase?
The construction of this transportation marvel significantly reduced travel time across the continent, connecting the East and West coasts in 1869.
What is the Transcontinental Railroad?
This tragic massacre in December 1890, often considered the last major conflict of the American Indian Wars, occurred as U.S. troops attempted to disarm a band of Lakota.
What is Wounded Knee?
Mounting tensions over land, cultural clashes, and a devastating measles epidemic, which the Cayuse believed was intentionally caused, culminated in the 1847 killings of Marcus and Narcissa Whitman and others at this mission in present-day Washington.
What is Waiilatpu (or the Whitman Mission)?