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In the 1880s the question of votes for women was reframed in the context of congressional efforts to bring the western territories in as new states and to resolve the political status of Indians and Mormons in the territories. These federal efforts helped suffragists keep the woman question alive in Congress. Specifically, Congressional solutions to the Indian and Mormon problem made voting a federal issue and challenged the constitutional settlement of Minor v. Happersett that had sent the question of votes for women back to the states.

The chapter scrutinizes the efforts of the DAR in the Midwest and West to commemorate western expansion during the antebellum period. It reveals that the organization used the memory of Western pioneers and explorers to maintain strict racial boundaries of national inclusion, while simultaneously upholding traditional gender binaries within white America. Most of the DAR’s activism in the Midwest and West revolved around marking the trails that pioneer families and explorers had used to reach the region prior to the Civil War. But in stark contrast to the remembrance of the American Revolution, women were conspicuously absent from the tales the Daughters offered prior to the 1920s. Western Daughters highlighted primarily the heroic accomplishments of pioneer men, whom they regarded as masculine warriors for their violent resistance against Native Americans. Only the organization’s post-World War I Madonna of the Trail campaign focused on the memory of pioneer mothers, but as in the case of the Revolution, female pioneers’ heroic determination was interpreted as part and parcel of women’s natural instincts as wives and mothers.

Kinship ties were important to the French of the Creole Corridor. Creole merchant capitalists, as a primarily urban group with commercial aspirations and genteel cultural practices, valued continuity and reputation more than spontaneity and democracy. The historiography of the fur trade demonstrates the difficulty of finding an appropriate framework in which to place the activities of these Creole merchants. This chapter examines the expansion of the Chouteau family businesses and the family itself over three generations, focusing on family structure and marriage strategy over time. It looks at the education or apprenticeship of younger family members and the problem of continuity, the problem of profligate sons and the stress arising from such a close relationship between family and business, and the role of women within the family. Finally, the chapter suggests how focusing on families on the frontier can alter our traditional view of western expansion.

Weeks before Thomas Jefferson learned he had successfully purchased Louisiana, his secretary wrote William Clark to invite him to cocaptain an exploration of the territory. The preparations for the adventure, the selection of Louisville-area young men accustomed to hard living, and the gathering of supplies consumed Clark and the area until the two captains shoved away from the Falls in a driving October rain. The Lewis and Clark Expedition is a seminal moment in the development of the United States of America, and it was Clark’s brothers and brothers-in-law who received steady, if erratic, news of the uncharted continent between 1803 and 1806. The explorers, along with their Native entourage, arrived at the homes of Jonathan Clark and William Croghan before beginning their separate treks to Washington City, where they reported their stunning findings to Thomas Jefferson.

This chapter discusses the discovery of the South Pass through the Rocky Mountains and its impact on western expansion. It also looks at the growing sectional divisions over slavery’s expansion, the congressional debate over the route for the first transcontinental railroad, and Stephen Douglas’ efforts to organize the Nebraska territory. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the political feud between Missouri’s two senators, David Rice Atchison and Thomas Hart Benton, and its impact on the future organization of Nebraska.

This chapter explores some of the most important Indian illustrations of Theodore Davis, one of the first illustrators to travel west following the Civil War. His pictures of a Kansas stage attack and arrow-pierced skeletons of soldiers helped popularize images of Indian violence as an important—and sensational—visual trope in an era of Western expansion. The stage attack came to represent something more than a few moments of terror on the plains of western Kansas; it became a vivid and useful symbol of the taming of the West. Meanwhile, Davis's illustrations of arrow-pierced skeletons on the plains became immediately infamous and provided powerful evidence that the Indians deserved to be punished.

This chapter begins with biographical sketches of David Rice Atchison of Missouri and Andrew Pickens Butler of South Carolina. The chapter also discusses the elections of Atchison, Butler, Hunter and Mason to the United States Senate, their political allegiance to Calhoun and advocacy of slavery’s expansion westward. It concludes with Calhoun’s opposition to the Compromise package of 1850 and his death one month before its passage.

This chapter looks at racial imagery in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper in the final years of the nineteenth century, comparing the illustrations of Indians and African Americans as a way of explaining the shifting nature of race and representation as Western expansion ran its course. Native Americans were usually portrayed more sympathetically than African Americans. Indians were also depicted as more progressive than blacks. Moreover, Indians in the early 1890s were seen predominately as nonthreatening, both militarily and culturally. African Americans, by contrast, were closer and more familiar to whites and often perceived as less interesting to illustrators and more threatening to the status quo. Unlike Indians, whose apparent strangeness could be presented as exotic, black strangeness was ridiculed.

This chapter discusses Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, a case on which modern Indian law remains contingent on. It looks into Lone Wolf's background by considering federal law's expansion and allotment into Indian reservations for settlement. It describes how the western expansion placed enormous pressure on Indian territories and considers its motives. It discusses the provisions of the General Allotment Act or Dawes Severalty Act, which spurred Lone Wolf into going into court. The chapter also describes the effects of the Allotment Act, including the loss of millions of acres by the Indian tribes to the settlers.

This chapter focuses on one of the new theoretical approaches to history which had developed in reaction to nationalist and Marxist views of history that had taken hold in the wake of Western colonial expansion. In order to counter the state-led modernization paradigm, which some elites in the colonies had adopted from the colonizing powers, post-colonialists attacked assumptions of progress, causality, and state-led nation-building, allegedly typical of the modern West. Promoting a bottom-up understanding of history, they emphasized ‘subaltern’ non-elite perspectives and criticized Eurocentric normativity without, however, denying the influence of the modern West—an influence seen by many recent postcolonial writers as both socially and epistemologically oppressive and marginalizing.