Heading West
The Journey and who went
West
The Journey
The journey west to California was 3800 km long.
Main route taken.
Who went west?
The Sagars
• Henry Sagar, moved his family west
• 1844 the Sagars and their six children
were in St Joseph, Missouri. Then he took
his family to Oregon, and joined up with
other pioneers
• Altogether there were 323 people and 72
wagons in the Sagars’ group
• The Sagars shot too many buffalo when
they rested near the Platte river, far too
many for them to use.
• One of Sagars’ daughters had an accident
on 1st August as they passed Scott's Bluff,
she jumped off a moving wagon.
• Many of the Sagar travellers suffered from
‘camp fever’.
• All the children were orphaned before they
completed the Journey.
The Goulds
• The Goulds left for the West in 1862.
• The Goulds passed through an Indian
village and swapped moccasins and
lariats for money, powder and whisky.
• They experienced deaths and had to
bury people on the plains as they
couldn’t take dead bodies with them.
The Donner Party
• 1843 the Donner part started their journey
west.
• The party was organised by Jacob and
George Donner, they were brothers.
• They split into different parties and set off
at different times, they left trails for the
other parties to follow.
Who Else?
• Many other groups of people went West
during 1840 – 1895.
• A few of these were…….
The Mormons
The new leader of the Mormons decided to
go where Joseph Smith refused to go.
He had heard of an area off the Oregon
Trail called the Great Salt Lake which was
isolated and outside the control of the US
government. He agreed with the Illinois
authorities that they would go as long as
they were safe until then.
By now Smith had 27 wives!
In total 16,000 followers were to trek west.
Young led a Pioneer Band of settlers to go
ahead of the others, building shelters and
planting crops for the rest of them. Their
journey was broken up into manageable
chunks. The winter of 1847 was bitter cold
though and over 700 of them died!
The miners – The ‘Gold Rush’
In January 1848, a carpenter by the name
of James Marshall was fixing a watermill
belonging to John Sutter of Sutter's Fort,
near the small town of San Francisco in
California.
He saw something shining in the stream - it
was GOLD!
News of this discovery spread like wildfire
and was another big 'PULL' for people to
head west.
Homesteaders
Look at the house. It is made out of lumps
or sods of earth. The family who proudly
pose for this photograph have built this
home themselves with hardly any building
materials. These people were known as
the homesteaders and their homes called
sodhouses.
Many thousands of them moved west from
the 1850s onwards to begin new lives.
They came from the east and from Europe
- mainly England, Germany and Sweden,
to escape poverty and over-crowding and
sometimes to escape religious persecution.
Many more people went west after the US
Civil War ended in 1865. Thousands of
freed black slaves became homesteaders.
The Map
The Plains is the flat bit in the
centre. As it is thousands of miles
from the sea the temperature
differences between winter and
summer are huge!
There are often droughts in
summer and heavy snowfalls in
winter.
Freak weather conditions like
tornadoes (twisters) and massive
hailstorms with hailstones the size
of golf balls are not uncommon!
The North of the Plains is very
different from the South.
The Route
Manifest Destiny
The idea grew up that white
Americans were superior, and
that it was America's Manifest
Destiny (obvious fate) to
expand and encourage 'the
American way of life' on the
Great Plains.
The writer Horace Greeley,
who popularised this idea,
advised Americans: 'Go West,
young man'.