Thus was the whole world invited to go west.
Under the new law, 1,160,000 acres were taken up in 1865.[30] The
settler no longer had to suffer the wearisome, heart-breaking tasks
that confronted the pioneer of earlier years, for the railway and
steamboat had for some time taken the place of the Conestoga wagon and
the fitful sailboat.
But the movement by railway and by steamboat was merely a continuation
on a greater scale of what had been going on ever since the
Revolution. The westward movement was begun, as we have seen, not by
foreigners but by American farmers and settlers from seaboard and back
country, thousands of whom, before the dawn of the nineteenth century,
packed their household goods and families into covered wagons and
followed the sunset trail.
The vanguard of this westward march was American, but foreign
immigrants soon began to mingle with the caravans. At first these
newcomers who heard the far call of the West were nearly all from the
British Isles. Indeed so great was the exodus of these farmers that in
1816 the British journals in alarm asked Parliament to check the
"ruinous drain of the most useful part of the population of the United
Kingdom." Public meetings were held in Great Britain to discuss the
average man's prospect in the new country.
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