I’m not American so not savvy on American history, I just pick up bits and pieces from TV, pop culture and such, so maybe I’ve just got the wrong impression. But even after reading some Wikipedia pages and other sites I’m still confused.
So you have the American Colonial period starting from way back, until you get the 13 Colonies in the late 1700’s.
Then there’s some expansion along the east coast until you get the “southern” states.
Then it seems like all of a sudden people are trying to get all the way across what is now the Middle and Midwest (?) states to California. Like, even before the Gold Rush (which I know was in the mid 1800’s) people were dead keen to get over there and not stop along the way.
I guess basically I’m wondering why people travelling the Oregon Trail and equivalent paths were crossing over so much “undeveloped” (*!!) land to get to the West Coast, rather than steadily developing towns and cities that would slowly craw across what is now the Continental United States.
California became a state in 1850 but Oklahoma didn’t until 1907, and it just doesn’t make sense to me!
*VERY IMPORTANT FOOTNOTE: I want to be sensitive and respectful and acknowledge that ALL of the land I’m talking about was inhabited and “civilised” by the indigenous people LONG before “Americans” began “developing” it. In fact I’m even aware that not all “Native Americans” were nomadic like some of the “plains Indians” we so often see depicted, that there were whole cities established by indigenous people. I discounted them – perhaps in ignorant error – because they are almost never referred to in the historical documentaries or fictions I’ve been exposed. I would be very happy to learn more about settler/Native relations in the course of responses to this post!
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The reason everyone beelined for Cali is quite straightforward. Gold. Simple as. First one to go and get it cashes out.
The reason why the stuff in the middle was ignored for so long (and even today, why it remains so sparsely populated) is because there’s not really much of value out there. Or at least, that’s what they thought at the time. Maps dating back to at least 1820 had the area labeled as the “[Great American Desert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Desert)”, where in this context “desert” is meaning something less like the sandy dunes you’re probably picturing and moreso “bad for farming”. There aren’t a lot of trees in the Great Plains, and the common knowledge of the era was that treeless land was terrible farming land. I mean, if it can’t support trees, why would it support crops? Clearly, there must be something wrong with all this land, right?
Nowadays we know that to be false; the Great Plains of North America contain some of the most arable land in the world. Settlers didn’t really figure that out until some of the more desperate ones who landed there started phoning home and reporting bumper crops. This attracted bonanza farms, massive scale operations that drew in hundreds of able-bodied men and their families. At the same-ish time, the newly constructed transcontinental railroads more or less went bankrupt the moment they were operational. To get some quick cash flow, they chunked up the enormous tracts of land granted to them by US Congress and started selling the parcels at ludicrously cheap prices to anyone who would move out there to take them, which created a lot of small family homesteads.
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