A history of the English Language

241.
The Far West.
The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 opened up the first of the vast territories beyond the 
Mississippi. From here fur traders, missionaries, and settlers followed the Oregon trail 
into the Pacific Northwest, and the Santa Fe trail into the sparsely populated Spanish 
territory in the Southwest. After the Mexican War and the treaty with Great Britain 
(1846) establishing the forty-ninth parallel as the northern boundary of the United States 
to the Pacific, when the territory of this country extended to the ocean, it was only a 
question of time before the Far West would be more fully occupied. Oregon in 1860 had 
a population of 30,000 pioneers. About half of them had come up from Missouri and 
farther south, from Kentucky and Tennessee; the other half were largely of New England 
stock. The discovery of gold in California in 1848 resulted in such a rush to the gold 
fields that in 1849 the 2,000 Americans that constituted the population in February had 
become 53,000 by
3 
“A good illustration of this migration is Daniel Boone, himself of English stock, who was born on 
the Delaware only a few miles above Philadelphia. The Boone family soon moved to Reading. 
Thence drifting southwestward with his compatriots, Daniel Boone settled in the North Carolina 
uplands, along the valley of the Yadkin, then passed beyond into Kentucky, and, after that location 
began to be civilized, went on as a pioneer to Missouri. His son appears a little later as one of the 
early settlers of Kansas, his grandson as a pioneer in Colorado.” (Madison Grant, 
The Conquest of 
a Continent
[New York, 1933], pp. 122–23.) 
The english language in america 335

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December. When the territory was admitted to the Union as a state in September 1851, its 
population was at least 150,000, and in not much more than another twelve months it had 
become a quarter of a million. Every part of America was represented in it.