Steel Horse Rider
Member
I think it was more the spirit and men behind the westward movement than any individual tool. It was the opportunists and entrepreneurs like the fur trappers, the Bent brothers, William Sublette and Robert Campbell, and the multitude of miners, farmers, lumbermen, ranchers, and shopkeepers who poured into the west as soon as any source of livelihood was discovered. Without the constant improvement in weaponry the "winning" of the west would have taken much longer but the sheer force of numbers of the westward migration all but guaranteed that it would be "won". Conquest is the historical nature of the human race no matter what pigmentation of the skin or ancestry of the clashing cultures. Before the lighter cast Europeans settled the America's the natives were too busy conquering each other than to worry about some strange men men wearing shiny outerwear entering their future. Last fall I picked up a couple of books about the use of steamboats to move people and freight up the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers in the early days of the migration. The numbers of people who migrated to the Dakota's, Oregon, California, and the southwest is astounding considering the hardships and uncertainty of the west, but they continued west either picking up where others had failed or finding new settled territories. I just finished reading a historical report about Ft Robinson in northwestern Nebraska. The fort was staffed with horse cavalry into the 20th Century so I would consider the entire time span from Lewis and Clark until the early 20th Century to be the time encompassed by the "winning."
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