The American West
The American West has always held a powerful place in the nation’s imagination—a sweeping, untamed landscape shaped by ambition, struggle and the promise of opportunity. From the diverse Indigenous nations who first called it home to the settlers, outlaws and industrialists who transformed its terrain, the West exists as both a real place and a powerful myth. Its history is a tapestry of resilience and injustice, bold innovation and profound upheaval.
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In 1804, Lewis and Clark set off on a journey filled with harrowing confrontations, harsh weather and fateful decisions.
They've had to fight continually to maintain their way of life.
The country, from its commerce to the environment to even its concept of time, was profoundly altered after the completion of the railroad's 1,776 miles of track.
Yellowstone's stunning natural beauty inspired the 19th-century push to set aside the land, where Indigenous people had been present for millennia.
Migrants Travel West on the Oregon Trail
Migrants Travel West on the Oregon Trail
Over 400,000 people travel West to start a new life and claim new land along the Oregon Trail, including Lucinda Brown. One-hundred seventy years later, one of her descendants sees a kettle from her journey for the first time.
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Guides like Daniel Boone and Kit Carson used hard-won knowledge of the land to lead explorers, settlers and soldiers into unfamiliar territory.
By the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 Indigenous people remained of the estimated 5 million-plus living in North America before European contact.
Up to 16,000 Native Americans were murdered in cold blood after California became a state.
Severe exposure, starvation and disease ravaged tribes during their forced migration to present-day Oklahoma.
Sitting Bull (1831-1890) was the Native American chief under whom the Lakota tribes united in their struggle for survival on the North American Great Plains.
George Armstrong Custer rose to fame as a young Union commander in the Civil War before his death at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.
As Europeans sought to control newly settled American land, wars raged between Native Americans and the frontiersmen who encroached on their territory, resources and trade.
The Trail of Tears was the deadly journey Native Americans were forced to undergo after being removed from their ancestral lands.
Indian reservations were created by the 1851 Indian Appropriations Act as a means for minimizing conflict and encouraging cultural change among Native tribes.
The construction of the interstate highway system in the mid-1950s forever changed the road once known as “America’s Main Street.”
Yellowstone's stunning natural beauty inspired the 19th-century push to set aside the land, where Indigenous people had been present for millennia.
Laura Ingalls Wilder had a secret collaborator with Libertarian Party connections.
Traveling the Oregon Trail wasn’t the romanticized journey of popular imagination.
Before inspiring a well-known computer game, the Oregon Trail led hundreds of thousands of settlers west during the 19th century.
The Oregon Trail led hundreds of thousands of pioneers west from Missouri to Oregon in the 19th century.
The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 introduced about 828,000,000 square miles of territory from France into the United States, thereby doubling the size of the young republic. Explore the facts about this important acquisition and its lasting legacy on Thomas Jefferson’s presidency.
