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The Lewis and Clark Expedition
Captain Meriwether Lewis leaves Pittsburgh aboard a specially designed keelboat, the Discovery, on the first leg of his transcontinental expedition. At Louisville he is joined by Captain William Clark, an experienced frontier soldier who is the youngest brother of William Rogers Clark, the hero of the Revolutionary War in the West. Together Lewis and Clark proceed up the Mississippi to Wood River, Illinois, opposite the mouth of the Missouri, where they establish a winter camp to make final prep -
Russia finds Fort Ross
Russian settlers found Fort Ross at Bodega Bay just north of San Francisco. -
US and Britian Battle
The United States and Great Britain clash in the War of 1812. -
Erie Canal Construction
Construction of the Erie Canal began in July 1817. The canal, designed to connect the Great Lakes to Albany, officially opened in 1825. -
Land Act of 1820
The Land Act of 1820 reduced the price of land to $1.25 an acre for a minimum of 80 acres (down from $1.64 per acre for a minimum of 160 acres). -
Santa Fe Trail
William Becknell was setting off to do the impossible and become the first white person to cross from Missouri to California through the desert. n 1821, Becknell and 4 companions headed west from Missouri on a trading expedition. Their goal was to trade with the Indians but luck wasn't on their side and instead they kept going on to the Mexican town of Santa Fe where they managed to strike a deal. -
Indian Removal Act
President Jackson signed the Indian Removal Acts, which authorized aggressive efforts to open Indian lands to whites and promised financial compensation to Indian tribes that agreed to resettle on lands west of the Mississippi River. -
Black Hawk War
The Black Hawk War began when Black Hawk, chief of the Sauk Indians, crossed the Mississippi River to plant corn on the tribe's old fields in Illinois. Capt. Abraham Lincoln and Lieut. Jefferson Davis took part in the conflict. The Sauk surrendered in August, after many older men, women, and children were massacred in Wisconsin while carrying white flags. -
Fall of the Alamo
After thirteen days of fighting Mexican troops defeated the Texans at the Alamo, a former San Antonio mission defended by both Texans, including the frontier heroes David Crockett and James Bowie, and a number of Tejanos. Almost all of the Alamo’s defenders were killed in battle or executed immediately afterward. The battle inspired the motto “Remember the Alamo!” which Texan troops invoked in the Battle of San Jacinto, the deciding battle of the Texas Revolution. -
Manifest Destiny
The Belief held by many Americans in 1840s, combing nationalsm and expansionism. Americans moved westward. -
The Oregon Trail
Sometimes the trail out of town might be backed up for days before everyone got underway.
The pioneers followed a set course first along the Platte River, over the Rocky Mountains, and then follow the Snake and Columbia Rivers into the fertile Willamette Valley. The first settlers made their way west in 1841. By 1845, 5,000 people were making the trek to Oregon. Once gold was discovered in California this numbered surged to 55,000 people annually in 1850. However, not everyone made it. -
Annexation of Texas
Texas was admitted to the Union as a slave state. The annexation soon led to the Mexican-American War. -
The Donner Party
One of the most tragic stories of the Oregon Trail was the Donner Party led by George Donner- an Illinois farmer who took his family west in 1846 .The Donners made every mistake possible. They started too late in the year, they overloaded their wagons, and they took an untried shortcut that would put them in the history books for all of the wrong reasons. The Donner family teamed up with the Reed family in Illinois. They started their journey in 1846, which was very late in the jumping season. -
Compromise of 1850
Congress adopted the Compromise of 1850, which admitted California to the Union as a free state without forbidding slavery in other territories acquired from Mexico. The law prohibited the sale of slaves in Washington, DC, but included a strict law requiring the return of runaway slaves to slaveholders. -
Gadsden Purchase
In the Gadsden Purchase, Mexico sold the United States 29,640 square miles of territory south of the Gila River (in what is now southern Arizona and New Mexico) for $10 million.
