Why did the settlers settle where they did in the US?

You know how the settlers first landed on the east coast and slowly migrated to the west coast - with various ones setting up and settling anywhere in between? Well, I’m curious about why certain settlers chose to stop where they did. Some reasons I’ve heard so far have been:

  1. Stronger ones made it to the widely accepted goal: the west coast
  2. Different settlers were from different places and found their preferred climates

It’s likely a mix of reasons, but I would love to hear your data-driven answers :slight_smile:

The west coast was not the “widely accepted goal” until there was a good reason to make the dangerous, long trek to those distant lands, so far from the settled and politically secured regions of the east. Even when a good economic motive presented itself — most notably, gold mining starting in 1848 — only some folks would (understandably) want to make that leap.

If you could generalize a “widely accepted goal” over a large expanse or time and space, I’d say it was something like “buy and/or homestead, then improve, the closest available plot of arable land to the currently settled ones, preferably near an existing or planned access route (river or road, later railroad)”. Avoid hostile Indians. If possible, settle near people who share some cultural affinity to you (chain migration, broadly speaking — hence, Scandinavians in Minnesota, etc.).

I disagree with both of your reasons.

People followed water and settled near water. Most if not all major cities are on large rivers, sometimes the confluence of more than one.

People moved to where they thought they could make a living. Farmers needed land and most of the land on the East coast of America was already spoken for. So they moved westward.
Hunting / trapping required little in the way of capital but did require wilderness, westward again.
Prospecting also required free land, once again westward.

People were moving West because the West wasn’t already owned.

I have never heard that the West Coast was the “widely accepted goal”.

Ninja’d. I was disagreeing with the OP.

They mostly settled wherever there was free or cheap land at the time they were looking for a place. Not all the land was available at once; it had to be surveyed first. Yes, there were some squatters who moved in before the surveying was done. They either adjusted (and paid, if necessary) after the survey, or they moved on to somewhere else and squatted there.

First part of this video gives a good summary

Plus the soil in New England was full of rocks.

And the harsh winters gave the Puritans something to openly suffer for. They loved that sort of thing.

Some of Mrs. FtG and my ancestors were “serial homesteaders”. Started off in places like PA/MD/NY and moved west every generation or so. To OH -> IL/IN ->MO/NE and then the big leap to the west coast.

(There was also the Southern route: VA -> NC/SC -> AL/MS -> AK/TX/OK -> west coast. Lots of variations.)

Once you had a good working farm up and running, time to sell it and head west for hopefully even better land. Some people are just wired up for this way of living.

There is a lot of reasonable farmland in the PNW but the Willamette Valley was the overwhelming first draw. Good climate, soil, moisture, etc. The Hudson Bay Company tried to lure British settlers to north of the Columbia hoping to hold onto that area. But their pioneers saw the Willamette Valley and headed there, into likely future US territory. Ended up seeing no point in fighting for the area south of the 49th parallel.

Those areas in present W. WA were settled, but only after most of the Willamette Valley’s best spots were taken.

One thing that affected settlement patterns on was transport. Farmers were growing surplus grain and needed to be able to ship it cheaply to markets. So areas close to navigable rivers in the Mississippi basin were prime. The Willamette/Columbia rivers likewise. Then the railroads came. Land that hadn’t been settled quickly got grabbed once there was a railroad passing near it.

Of course it went the other way a bit. Railroads liked to lay down tracks thru areas that were reasonable for future farming.

Two factors:

  1. They settled wherever good land was available.
  2. They settled in areas where those of their own ethnic group were settling.

New immigrants naturally settled on the edge of the frontier. Wherever it happened to be, at that moment.

No one wanted to settle too far from the closest settlement. Settlers needed to buy supplies. There was danger of Indian raids. They often took food and livestock.

I’ve heard a days wagon ride was the limit to live from a settlement. That provided unclaimed land and supplies could still be purchased when needed. I haven’t found a cite, and I’m sure it was only a general guideline.

Some always looked for greener pastures and moved westward. Always following the edge of the frontier.

I’m hoping that you actually meant “AR/TX/OK” – Alaska was (and still is) pretty seriously out of the way on that route. :wink:

Yes, it’s a mix of reasons, and ones that changed over time as the world changed. Very large books are needed to cover this in any detail.

In the colonial period, settlers stayed on the eastern seaboard. Their numbers were small, they could fish and travelon the ocean, there was plenty of land, and Indians were living just to the west. It took 200 years for these conditions to markedly change. This general explanation also works for Spanish settlers in the west, especially California. Small settlements moved up north from Mexico, but no good reason existed to penetrate the interior.

After the U.S. became a country, population pressures in the east encouraged people to move. They went to the far west. I.e. Ohio. The Northwest Territory was Ohio and the area just northwest of it bordering on the Great Lakes. They had plenty of Indian problems so settlements were sparse and endangered until a series of small wars pushed them out of their lands. The government owned the land, and, as mentioned above, surveyed it, and sold the pieces in bite-sized chunks at low prices to anybody who was willing to stay on the land and improve it. Remember that 95% of Americans lived on farms. The idea of America was that it would be the opposite of Europe, where all land belonged to the aristocracy. Each American family could have a freehold, its own land to do with as they pleased. That was powerful and one major reason why European immigration kept increasing and adding to the need for more settled land.

Growing populations kept pushing the frontier out and out. Almost all the growth was in what is now the Midwest. As the railroads pushed westward, the government rewarded them with land along their right-of-way, which they then sold off. Mostly to entrepreneurs who sent out phony ads about the paradise of the prairies and got the railroads to sell immigrants one-way tickets. Some did look for similar climates - many Scandinavians went to Minnesota - but many got fooled. Lots went to the growing industrial cities instead. Only the gold strike in California and other strikes in various other western states brought in large numbers. Wagon trains are mythologized but realistically they only moved a hundred people at a time and took forever doing so.

The population numbers tell everything. 5 million in 1800. 76 million in 1900. That’s staggering. England had 8 million in 1800 and 30 million in 1900. Cities did grow huge but they also needed millions to grow their food and a supply system of railroads made it as easy to get beef from Texas and corn from Nebraska and pork from Iowa, requiring ever more farms and farmers. Railroads again. The railroads explain more about 19th century America than anything else, except for the South and slavery.

The census declared that the frontier - the mythical end of settlement between the coasts - ended in 1890. After that people just filled in places. Until after WWII when air conditioning made the south and west livable and their low and scattered populations boomed from in-migration. We’ve seen a change in population density in localities in our lifetimes as major as the historical one in the 1800s. We haven’t mythologized it yet. We will someday.

Certainly for those settlers who wanted to make it big in the movies.

People pretty much covered it. The West Coast wasn’t a goal in most settler’s minds. The population really only took off after the gold rush. In 1850, California had 90 thousand people. West Virginia had 300 thousand for comparison. By 1860, the gold rush had brought their populations on par with each other. Settlement happened then for the same reason it happens now. Economic opportunities and population pressures. After the Revolutionary War, the US government gave veterans and others who served land grants on the western frontier, i.e. the Appalachian Mountain areas, so soldiers saw this as an opportunity to make a better life for themselves than they would have along the coasts, particularly after the Panic of 1785 when credit collapsed and many found themselves in serious debt. There were also landgrants given out prior to the Revolution and people would essentially find nice land within these grants and then act as developers. They would build stores, parcel out their grants and then go back east and sell those parcels to people wanting to get out of the cities for whatever reason. Sometimes they were less than scrupulous and sold settlers on ‘magical opportunities’ that turned out to be exaggerated. The pattern repeated itself as population rose. It was still largely an agrarian society, so if you didn’t have land, you needed to get it and you’d go where the land was.

Minor nitpick – the western part of Virginia, no?

I really enjoy reading the articles detailing westword expansion at this link. I typically read one or two articles a day. Then Google for more information on the topic.

There are also lots of specific landscape and infrastructure features which encouraged settlement. Farmers settled the land around the Missisippi because it allowed them to stick their crops on boats and save on the high cost of overland shipping. Later, the Erie Canal did the same thing (and not incidentally, made NYC the economic capital of the US).

A lot of people got as far until their wagons broke down. Well Bertha, this looks as good as any place, I’ll start building the cabin.

I have little to add to the excellent accounts already posted and just wanted to emphasize that settlement west of the Mississippi was not a continuous east-to-west process but skipped over the High Plains, which were viewed as inhospitable to farming. The Homestead Act of 1909 doubled the amount of free land from 160 to 320 acres, and that plus a period of increased rainfall led to non-indigenous people settling some of the more remote regions in Montana, Wyoming, and the like. When I lived on the Hi Line in northern Montana in the Eighties, an older lady told me she’d been born in a soddie in the early Twenties. She did not wax nostalgic.

There was a steady east to west movement until people got to more-or-less to the Missouri River. The discovery of gold in CA, plus the inhospitability of the interior west induced people to go all the way to the Pacific coast. The last states in the lower 48 were New Mexico and Arizona, in 1912.

There was at least some tendency for immigrants to settle in regions with a similar climate, like Finns in northern Michigan, for example.