The geography of North America

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Source A shows the belief that the United States had a right to spread across and possess the whole continent, and that this was God's will, because Providence had given the land to Americans so that they could spread their 'great experiment' of liberty and self-government.

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One feature was the Great Plains, a vast, flat grassland stretching west from about the Missouri River for hundreds of miles to the foot of the Rocky Mountains. It had little rain (often under 20 inches a year), almost no trees and an extreme climate of scorching summers and freezing winters, so Americans called it the Great American Desert and crossed it rather than settling there.

A second feature was the high mountain ranges of the West. The Rocky Mountains, with peaks over 14,000 feet such as Pikes Peak, ran from Canada to New Mexico, and wagons could only cross them easily at South Pass in Wyoming. Further west, beyond the dry Great Basin around the Great Salt Lake, the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade mountains blocked the way to the fertile valleys of the Pacific coast. Deep snow fell early there, as the Donner Party found when it was trapped in the Sierra Nevada in the winter of 1846-1847 and nearly half its members died.

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In the 1820s and 1830s most Americans saw the Great Plains as a worthless desert. Stephen Long's expedition of 1820 called the region almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and maps and school books labelled it the Great American Desert. As the timeline shows, in 1834 the government made the land west of the Permanent Indian Frontier into Indian Country: the Plains were seen as a barrier and a place for Native Americans, not for white farmers.

In the 1840s the Plains came to be seen as an obstacle to cross. From the Great Migration of 1843 thousands of emigrants travelled the Oregon Trail, but their goal was the fertile land of Oregon and California, and guidebooks told them to cross the Plains as quickly as possible.

In the 1850s and 1860s attitudes began to change, because Americans now wanted the land for settlement and for railroads to the Pacific. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 opened the eastern Plains to settlers, and the Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres free to settlers who lived on and farmed the land for five years. The government now actively encouraged settlement, and after the first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869 railroad companies advertised the Plains as a 'garden'.

By the 1870s and 1880s new technology, such as barbed wire (patented in 1874), wind pumps and hardy Turkey Red wheat, made farming possible, and some people even claimed that 'rain follows the plough'. However, there was some continuity: in 1878 John Wesley Powell warned that the land west of the 100th meridian was arid and could only be farmed with irrigation and larger farms, and droughts in the late 1880s ruined many homesteaders.

So attitudes changed from seeing the Plains as a desert for Native Americans, to an obstacle, to a land of opportunity for farmers - and in 1890 the Census Bureau declared that the frontier of settlement had closed.

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The belief that the Plains were a desert led the government to treat them as land for Native Americans. If white farmers would never want the land, it seemed a convenient place to send eastern nations who stood in the way of settlement. Under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, nations such as the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole were forced to move to Indian Territory; thousands died, especially on the Cherokee 'Trail of Tears' of 1838-1839. In 1834 the Indian Intercourse Act declared the land west of Missouri and Arkansas to be Indian Country behind the Permanent Indian Frontier, guarded by forts such as Fort Leavenworth. For a time this left the Plains nations largely free to follow their buffalo-hunting way of life.

The same belief led emigrants to cross the Plains to Oregon and California instead of settling on them. From the Great Migration of 1843 thousands of farming families travelled the Oregon Trail to the fertile Willamette Valley, and after gold was found in 1848 hundreds of thousands went to California. This had huge effects: American settlers in Oregon strengthened the US claim against Britain, leading to the Oregon Treaty of 1846, and California's population grew so fast that it became a state in 1850. The traffic along the trails also disturbed the buffalo and spread disease among the Plains nations, which led to conflict and the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851.

The emigration across the Plains was the more important consequence because it transformed the nation and in the end destroyed the government's policy. By settling on the Pacific coast, emigrants helped make the USA a nation stretching from sea to sea within a few years, as believers in Manifest Destiny wanted. Their crossings also showed that Indian Country could not stay closed: the government soon needed safe routes, forts and eventually a railroad across the Plains, so it gave up the idea of a permanent frontier, moving towards concentration in 1851 and opening Kansas and Nebraska in 1854. The removal policy was devastating for the eastern nations and shaped relations for years, but it rested on an assumption - that the Plains would always be left alone - that the emigrants themselves helped to overturn. In that sense the emigrants' journeys mattered more, because they set off the chain of events that drew American settlement back onto the Plains and ended the Plains nations' independence.