In the decades following the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, waves of settlers ventured into the vast and often unforgiving wilderness of the American West. With grit and ambition, they chased fortunes as fur trappers, gold-seekers, homesteaders, cattle ranchers and more—reshaping the frontier as they forged new lives beyond the Mississippi River.

Motivated by dreams of wealth and reinvention—and enabled by federal land policies like the Homestead Act of 1862—many settlers endured arduous journeys. They ferried their life’s belongings in wagon trains pulled by mules, horses or oxen, often with no clear roads. Lacking bridges, they crossed mighty rivers like the Mississippi and Missouri on boats or in canoes. Suffice it to say, there were no convenience stores along the way to pick up provisions.

Fortune-seekers braved harsh landscapes, fickle weather and fraught, often uneasy relations with the Native peoples who had called the land home for generations. And they journeyed into a realm of uncertainty—where accidents or disease loomed, the terrain proved strange and harsh and the chances of attaining wealth were iffy at best.

“The dream is powerful, and it is obviously something that lures millions of people onto these lands in the American West,” says Stephen Aron, president and CEO of the Autry Museum of the American West and professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The reality oftentimes does not meet the expectation.” 

The trade in animal furs provided one of the earliest and most important industries in America. By the early 1800s, many young men, mostly European Americans, ventured into the mountains of the West to hunt beavers and wild animals for their prized furs and skins, often to be crafted into fashionable felt hats. They followed in the footsteps of Native hunters and trappers who had long bartered animal pelts to white fur traders, in exchange for manufactured goods like tools, metalware, firearms, alcohol and tobacco. 

In 1807, fur trader Manuel Lisa constructed Fort Lisa in what is now Nebraska, considered one of the first major fur trade hubs in what would become a network throughout the western territory. A trapper as well as a trader, he made repeated expeditions up and down the Missouri River to exploit less-tapped regions. Like some other early white men in the fur trade, he adopted Indigenous cultural practices and married an Indigenous woman to help foster alliances and secure trade. 

While rugged “free trappers” roamed the wilderness on their own terms, many others signed on to work for major fur companies. Among them was Jedidiah Smith, who in 1822 joined William Ashley, co-founder of the highly successful Rocky Mountain Fur Company, on a trip up the Missouri River. Smith went on to famously map new territories, take over Ashley’s business with two business partners and emerge as one of the most storied frontiersmen of his time.

Beginning in the 1830s, the fur trade in the American West began to decline, mainly from overhunting and evolving fashion trends. Many of the “mountain men” stayed on the frontier, using their deep knowledge of the territory to become guides or small merchants.

Even before the mid-century California Gold Rush, other mineral strikes had begun to lure settlers westward. In the 1840s, miners and speculators flocked to Michigan after Douglass Houghton, the first state geologist of Michigan, published a report on rich copper deposits in the state’s Upper Peninsula. But it was carpenter James W. Marshall’s discovery of gold in 1848 at Sutter’s Mill in California that launched the largest mining rush in U.S. history. As historian Stephen Aron notes, it opened up the “possibility of getting rich beyond imagination and escaping from physical labor.” 

Prospectors—nearly all of them men—poured into California from the eastern United States and across the globe—including thousands from China—abandoning their homes and families to pursue the chance of fortune. When the initial gold fever waned, many turned their sights to other mineral-rich regions including Alaska, the Yukon and Colorado. By the late 19th century, the search had expanded to include coal, fueling the next wave of western resource extraction.

“Most people didn’t strike it rich,” says H.W. Brands, author of Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West and history professor and chair at the University of Texas, Austin. “But most people did have an adventure. They had stories they would tell for the rest of their lives.”

As America’s footprint expanded westward, 19th-century federal land policies helped open the frontier to farmers and settlers. Chief among them, the Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres of surveyed public land to any adult citizen, or aspiring citizen, willing to pay a small filing fee and continuously occupy and “improve” their plot over the next five years. 

According to the National Archives, Daniel Freeman made the first claim under the act and settled in Nebraska by way of Illinois. He married, raised eight children and developed his land with a log cabin, two-story brick house, barn and several outbuildings. His family and his tenant farmers planted wheat, corn, oats and orchards of fruit trees, protected by a hedgerow. 

The Homestead Act also drew many formerly enslaved people fleeing the South in a large-scale migration known as the “The Great Exodus.” These newly freed “exodusters” journeyed west in hopes of acquiring land of their own in Kansas, Oklahoma and Colorado. In 1879, a formerly enslaved man named Benjamin “Pap” Singleton helped encourage some 20,000 such migrants to Kansas alone.

“The wonder of being able to claim and own land was really something that just was deeply meaningful,” says Patricia Limerick, history professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder and author of The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West.

Securing the land was the easy part, Limerick says. Many farmers weren’t prepared for the dry, arid conditions and unpredictable weather in many regions of the West. They learned to adapt, in part, by harnessing innovations like windmills, irrigation systems and drought-resistant crops.

But the great government land giveaway came with a steep cost: the displacement of America’s Indigenous peoples from ancestral territory they had inhabited for centuries. While some land was acquired through treaties or purchases, much of it was not. For Native communities, the arrival of homesteaders—along with railroads, fences and a widespread disregard for their deep connection to the land—led to most being forced onto remote, often barren reservations by the close of the 19th century. 

With its abundant grasslands and favorable climate, Texas had long been the center of the American cattle industry. When Texans went to fight in the Civil War, their cattle were left to roam and breed freely. By the time soldiers returned, they faced a massive surplus of livestock—and a new opportunity for profit. 

America’s supply of beef was abundant—and so was demand, fueled by the rapid population growth of eastern cities. American men in their 20s, often white, Hispanic or African American, seized the moment by becoming cattle ranchers. The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad revolutionized the industry, making it easier to drive cattle north to slaughter and efficiently transport beef to markets across the East. 

The rugged lifestyle and distinctive skills of 19th-century ranchers helped shape the iconic image of the American cowboy—a cultural symbol deeply rooted in the traditions of Mexican ranchers, or vaqueros, who had long worked the land. In mid-19th-century Texas, vaqueros passed down their expertise to the Anglo settlers, influencing everything from roping skills to cattle drives. One such settler, Richard King, hired vaqueros to run his growing operation and eventually built a cattle empire spanning approximately 614,000 acres by the time of his death in 1885.

Like farmers, ranchers contended with harsh terrain and unpredictable weather. They faced conflict with cattle rustlers and the Indigenous people of the Great Plains, whose vital source of food, shelter and clothing—the bison—was driven to near extinction by both mass buffalo hunting and the rapid spread of cattle herds.

The heyday of open-range cattle ranching began to fade in the 1880s, as tick-borne cattle disease, overgrazing and environmental degradation took their toll on the land. The introduction of barbed wire in the 1870s—and the enforcement of federal land policies—accelerated the enclosure of once-open prairies, bringing an end to the era of the free-range cowboy. Still, agriculture remained a pillar of the western economy, even as the industrialized East forged ahead with manufacturing and urban growth.

Tied together by the expanding railroad network, the East and West adopted the system of rural-urban interdependence that continues to underpin the U.S. economy today.