<span>In the early 1840s, thousands of families sold their land and began the nearly 2,000-mile trek west to Oregon and California. Most headed out from Independence or St. Louis, Missouri in Conestoga wagons. Americans nicknamed these wagons “prairie schooners” because they moved like cargo ships across the endless plains.
</span><span>The Conestoga wagon was large enough for families to carry all of their furniture and supplies for the trip, as well as some livestock and seed for their first crop. On their journey, families passed through territory claimed by three nations—the United States, Mexico, and Britain. At the time, both the United States and Great Britain claimed Oregon, and Mexico controlled California. The goal for these families was to journey through the Great American Desert, reaching the fertile river valleys of Oregon and California beyond it.
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Emigrants Crossing the Plains, 1867. Painting by Albert Bierstadt. Painting located in the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
While many individuals journeyed west because of cheap land, others made the trip in hopes of striking it rich. In 1848, workers building Sutter’s mill near Sacramento, California, discovered small pieces of gold in the riverbed. Within a year, rumors of the discovery of gold had spread to the east coast and thousands of Americans began the journey west believing they were going to strike it rich. The first prospectors to arrive were called “forty-niners,” and they used a simple panning technique to find gold. Later, these prospectors were replaced by large-scale mining operations that made use of steam-powered machines to find the ore. The discovery of gold in the west represented another impetus for westward migration and villages like San Francisco were transformed from small towns to boomtowns overnight, luring even more individuals to California.
