Western expansion timeline

  • Daniel Boone

    Daniel Boone was an American pioneer, explorer, woodsman, and frontiersman, whose frontier exploits made him one of the first folk heroes of the United States
  • Eli Whitney

    Eli Whitney was an American inventor best known for inventing the cotton gin. This was one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution and shaped the economy of the Antebellum South.
  • Marcus and Narcissa Whitman

    was an American physician and missionary in the Oregon Country. Along with his wife, Narcissa, he started a mission to the Cayuse in what is now southeastern Washington state in 1836. The area later developed as a trading post and stop along the Oregon Trail, and the city of Walla Walla, Washington developed near there.
  • Louisiana Purchase

    The Louisiana Purchase was a land deal between the United States and France, in which the U.S. acquired approximately 827,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River for $15 million.
  • Lewis and Clark Expedition

    was the first American expedition to cross what is now the western portion of the United States. It began near St. Louis, made its way westward, and passed through the continental divide to reach the Pacific coast.
  • War of 1812

    • conflict fought between the United States and Great Britain over British violations of U.S. maritime rights. It ended with the exchange of ratifications of the Treaty of Ghent.
  • Manifest Destiny

    the 19th-century doctrine or belief that the expansion of the US throughout the American continents was both justified and inevitable.
  • Texas Revolution

    The Texas Revolution began when colonists in the Mexican province of Texas rebelled against the increasingly centralist Mexican government
  • Oregon Trail

    The Oregon Trail is a 2,170-mile historic east–west, large-wheeled wagon route and emigrant trail that connected the Missouri River to valleys in Oregon.
  • Indian Removal/Trail of Tears

    Indian removal was a policy of the United States government in the 19th century whereby Native Americans were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands in the eastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi River.In 1838 and 1839, as part of Andrew Jackson's Indian removal policy, the Cherokee nation was forced to give up its lands east of the Mississippi River and to migrate to an area in present-day Oklahoma.
  • The Donner Party

    was a group of American pioneers led by George Donner and James F. Reed who set out for California in a wagon train in May 1846. They were delayed by a series of mishaps and mistakes, and spent the winter of 1846–47 snowbound in the Sierra Nevada.
  • The Mexican War

    The Mexican–American War, also known as the Mexican War, the U.S.–Mexican War or the Invasion of Mexico, was an armed conflict between the United States of America and the United Mexican States
  • The California Gold Rush

    when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Millin Coloma, California.The first to hear confirmed information of the gold rush were the people in Oregon, the Sandwich Island, and Latin America, and they were the first to start flocking to the state.
  • The Battle of Little Bighorn

    known to the Lakota and other Plains Indians as the Battle of the Greasy Grass and commonly referred to as Custer's Last Stand, was an armed engagement between combined forces of the Lakota,Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes and the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army.
  • John Fremont

    John Charles Frémont or Fremont was an American military officer, explorer, and politician who became the first candidate of the anti-slavery Republican Party for the office of President of the United States
  • The Massacre at Wounded Knee

    The Wounded Knee Massacre occurred on December 29, 1890, near Wounded Knee Creek on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the U.S. state of South Dakota.