What did settlers want moving west?

Settlers moving west wanted land for farming and economic opportunity, along with religious freedom, escape from poverty or debt, mineral wealth, and access to the trade routes that opened with each new territorial acquisition. Land was the central magnet. Most American families were farmers in the early to mid nineteenth century, and a 160 acre farm in the Midwest or West offered better odds than a tenancy in the East or even a small farm on the worn out soils of the Appalachian foothills. Land in the Ohio Valley was selling for one dollar to two dollars per acre in the early nineteenth century, less than a tenth of comparable land in Pennsylvania or New York.

The Homestead Act of May 20, 1862 made the deal even better by offering 160 acres free to any settler who lived on the land for five years and made improvements. By 1900 about 600,000 homestead claims had been finalized, and the program ultimately distributed about 270 million acres.

Economic opportunity in other forms drove migration as well. The California Gold Rush of 1848 to 1855 attracted about 300,000 people to California, of whom a few struck it rich and most went home or settled to other work. The Comstock Lode of silver was discovered in Nevada in 1859. Colorado gold and silver booms followed through the 1860s and 1870s. The cattle industry attracted thousands of cowhands and ranchers to Texas, Kansas, Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas after the Civil War. The wheat boom on the northern Great Plains attracted settlers especially from Scandinavia and Germany after 1870. Cotton expansion in Texas and Arkansas attracted southern planters with enslaved or, after 1865, sharecropping labor.

Religious motivations drove the Mormon migration to Utah after Joseph Smith's death in 1844. Brigham Young led roughly 70,000 Latter Day Saints to the Great Salt Lake Valley between 1847 and 1869, building Salt Lake City and an extensive irrigation-based agriculture. Other religious communities including the Amana Colonies in Iowa, Bishop Hill in Illinois, and various Mennonite settlements moved west.

Escape from urban industrial conditions in the East drew some settlers, and federal pension and bounty land grants for veterans of various wars supported others. Immigrants poured directly into the West. Norwegians and Swedes settled the upper Midwest. Germans went to Wisconsin, Texas, and Missouri. Czechs and Bohemians settled Nebraska and Kansas. Chinese laborers came to California to work on the Transcontinental Railroad and the gold fields, then suffered the Chinese Exclusion Act of May 6, 1882.

The opportunity to start over, with land, work, or a faith community, made the West a destination for many millions over a century.