Turn your face to the Great West and there build up a home and fortune. --Horace Greeley, quoted in James Parton, The Life of Horace Greeley: Editor of the New York Tribune (1855)

Image Gallery--Settling the West

By fits and starts, beginning with the colonial settlers, the eastern population moved west. Despite George III's Proclamation of 1763, which prohibited settlement west of the Alleghenies [Appalachians], the inevitable push away from the East Coast could not be stopped. No longer a paradisiacal land of fable, dream and imagination, the West was to become for the settlers a workaday world of farms, cities, transportation grids and national parks, with people drawn there by the promise of a new life.

	Thinking Points
	The maps sometimes refer to "ceded" lands. Who ceded what? Was this a gift? An exchange between equals? How did the Civil War impact Western settlement?

However, the land in the West was not empty. Native Americans had occupied the continent for centuries. One value of early maps of this territory is the record they provide of groups no longer extant; maps also reveal the patterns of displacement that the Native Americans faced as they settled around US military forts and were rounded up into "reservations." The reorganization of their monumental, unbounded open space into small, gridded, controlled places defines the "reservation" program of the federal government.

Also evident on these maps is the "township and line survey," established by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia with the Ordinance of 1785, which divided lands into new territories and future states beyond the Appalachians. Very rational and orderly, the grid marches over mountains and down river valleys, maintaining its viselike grasp on the land through the ever-present grid of 36-square-mile "towns." While the overall township grid clearly defined property lines, it also, and even more importantly, gave the federal government control over the land from a distance.