Few people even know the true definition of the term 'West'; and where is its location? - phantomlike it flies before us as we travel. . . . --George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (1859)

Image Gallery--Imagining the West

America was in the way. It was not made up of islands, as the sixteenth-century German cosmographer Sebastian Münster would have had the world believe, nor was there a clear sailing passageway to Asia. America, with its mysterious Western shore, was a continent to be reckoned with. Still, Europeans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wanted easy access to Asia and its wealth. Might there be a way to get across the pesky new continent? If such a route was drawn on a map, perhaps it could eventually be found. The fantasy of an easy passage from Europe to Asia, by going west and bypassing Dutch-, Spanish-, and Portuguese-controlled areas and the Ottoman East, lasted into the nineteenth century, becoming somewhat of a reality by mid-century as the railroads crossed the American continent.

	Thinking Point
	What European desires are reflected in the maps in this session? Examine a French map and an English map of the same area (east of the Mississippi, for example) and evaluate the different information they deliver.

The maps in this session display both an imaginary West that never was and, bit by bit, an increasingly sure awareness of the actual width and solidity of the North American continent which was, at different times (and sometimes even at the same time), under the control of France, England, Spain, Russia and the Netherlands. As power shifted across the continent of Europe, tremors were felt in North America: Napoleon acquired the Louisiana Territory from Spain, and the French threatened to chokehold the young United States from New Orleans to Hudson's Bay. The Louisiana Purchase by Thomas Jefferson ended that threat in 1803, and expanded US options westward into unknown lands.