Why americans traveled west

The first white Americans to move west were the mountain men , who went to the Rockies to hunt beaver, bear and elk in the s and s. Then, in , a wagon train pioneered the 3,km-long Oregon Trail to the woodland areas of the north-west coast of America. In , 1, settlers made the dangerous journey westwards. There were reasons why moving west sounded better to the pioneer settler than staying in the east. Pioneer settlers were sometimes pushed west because they couldn't find good jobs that paid enough.

Others had trouble finding land to farm. With more and more people from Europe moving into the eastern states, crowding was sometimes a problem. Still others wanted to move from their homes in the east because they didn't like the new industries and the developing cities. In , the Missouri Compromise had attempted to resolve this question: It had admitted Missouri to the union as a slave state and Maine as a free state, preserving the fragile balance in Congress.

However, the Missouri Compromise did not apply to new territories that were not part of the Louisiana Purchase, and so the issue of slavery continued to fester as the nation expanded.

Meanwhile, more and more Northerners came to believed that the expansion of slavery impinged upon their own liberty, both as citizens—the pro-slavery majority in Congress did not seem to represent their interests—and as yeoman farmers. They did not necessarily object to slavery itself, but they resented the way its expansion seemed to interfere with their own economic opportunity. Despite this sectional conflict, Americans kept on migrating West in the years after the Missouri Compromise was adopted.

Thousands of people crossed the Rockies to the Oregon Territory, which belonged to Great Britain, and thousands more moved into the Mexican territories of California , New Mexico and Texas. In , American settlers in Texas joined with their Tejano neighbors Texans of Spanish origin and won independence from Mexico. They petitioned to join the United States as a slave state. This promised to upset the careful balance that the Missouri Compromise had achieved, and the annexation of Texas and other Mexican territories did not become a political priority until the enthusiastically expansionist cotton planter James K.

Polk was elected to the presidency in Thanks to the maneuvering of Polk and his allies, Texas joined the union as a slave state in February ; in June, after negotiations with Great Britain, Oregon joined as a free state. In , the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican War and added more than 1 million square miles, an area larger than the Louisiana Purchase, to the United States. The acquisition of this land re-opened the question that the Missouri Compromise had ostensibly settled: What would be the status of slavery in new American territories?

After two years of increasingly volatile debate over the issue, Kentucky Senator Henry Clay proposed another compromise. It had four parts: first, California would enter the Union as a free state; second, the status of slavery in the rest of the Mexican territory would be decided by the people who lived there; third, the slave trade but not slavery would be abolished in Washington , D. But the larger question remained unanswered.

In , Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas proposed that two new states, Kansas and Nebraska , be established in the Louisiana Purchase west of Iowa and Missouri. The battle for Kansas and Nebraska became a battle for the soul of the nation.

Emigrants from Northern and Southern states tried to influence the vote.