4. Settling the west
Many of the early Americans were adventurous people. They crossed mountains and made homes in the wilderness. In 1790 the United States was a small country of 13 states on the Atlantic coast. By 1850 the nation had grown until it stretched all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
As the nation expanded, Americans kept trying to make their life better. Many new inventions changed the American way of work and life.
Settling the frontier. In the middle of the 18th century much of the land west of the Appalachian Mountains was a rich wilderness. It was a hunting ground for the American Indians. Bear, buffalo, deer and wild turkey were plentiful. Many colonists wanted to claim some of this land for themselves.
Daniel Boone. The first settlers in new areas, people who opened the way west for others, were called pioneers. One of the pioneers was Daniel Boone.
Daniel Boone grew up in Pennsylvania. Later his family moved to North Carolina on the frontier. A frontier is the very edge of a settled area that borders on an unsettled area.
As a young man, Boone heard stories about the Kentucky wilderness beyond the Appalachians. In 1769 Boone and a few friends decided to explore Kentucky.
They spent many months on their way. They folded mountain paths and finally came to an open-between the mountains called Cumberland Gap. When Boone finally saw Kentucky for the first he thought it i0oked like a paradise. Much of the land was covered with trees. Buffalo, bears and deer ran through the fields.
Daniel Boone spent more than two years in Kentucky, exploring the beautiful land and hunting. He returned to the East with tales of the beauty of the land he had seen.
In 1775 Richard Henderson, a businessman, hired Boone to build a road through the Cumberland Gap to Kentucky. With a group of strong men armed with axes and guns, Boone went west again.
The road which Boone and his men built was called the Wilderness Road.
The
way west. The
Wilderness Road was steep and narrow. The trip to Kentucky was
difficult. People loaded their goods on farm animals and walked
alongside the animals as they made their way up and down the steep
mountain road.
But walking was not the only way of getting over the mountains. Thousands of pioneers travelled by land to Pittsburgh. There they bought or built boats, loaded their belongings and sailed down the Ohio River to the Ohio Territory. Travelling by boat was easier and quicker than travelling by land. And settlers could bring more belongings with them on a boat than they could carry over the Wilderness Road.
But river travel also had its problems. In spring the rivers flooded. Dangerous rapids and waterfalls could break a boat. Besides, bandits, pirates and American Indians often attacked and sank the boats and stole the pioneers' goods.
Flatboats and keelboats. The pioneers used many different kinds of boats. The most popular was the flatboat. It was built of wood and it had a large deck with a small cabin at one end. The pioneer family stayed in the small cabin. The farm animals and most of the family belongings were kept on the deck. The flat bottom of the boat made it possible to travel in shallow parts of the river.
Flatboats had one disadvantage. They could travel in only one direction - downstream. When pioneer families reached their destination, they usually took their boats apart and used the timber to build houses.
Keelboats were smaller than flatboats, but they could travel both downstream and upstream.
By the 1790's many boats sailed along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers carrying pioneers and their belongings. From Pittsburgh the boats followed the Ohio River west to where it joined the Mississippi River. On the Mississippi boats could sail south as far as New Orleans.
New states. In 1791 Vermont became the fourteenth state in the United States. Kentucky became the fifteenth state in 1792. A few years later, in 1796, Tennessee became a state. The frontier was quickly becoming settled.