Why Would You Have Gone West In The 1800s?

Your family ran out of land for farming back east, so you went west to forge your own way. You were a pioneer in the land rush, and you won such a nice spot that, after a lot of hard work, you built a nicer life for yourself than you would have had back home.

When they said, 'There's gold in them thar hills!' you could practically smell it, and it smelled a whole lot better than the mill you were working in. You said goodbye to what family you still talked to, threw a pack on your back, and made your way to Californy.

You'd run afoul of the law back home, so when you heard they were rounding up people to work on the railroad, you signed up. But trouble followed you, and you had a time of fights and near scrapes while you were working on the railroad, so you opened a dry-goods store as soon as you could. Staying put worked out and made the rest of your life comfortable.

You were loving working the forests of the Midwest, but people just kept moving in and crowding you. You made a smart bet that the fur was better in the Northwest, and you made your way there to trap and live in peace and quiet.

Sure, Lewis and Clark had already done that, but much of the West was hard for the folks back home to imagine. You photographed the Civil War, but you were weary from documenting the harsh realities of war, so you went along with the surveyors to capture the beauty of landscape on film.

You lost your husband, your father, and your home in the war, and everyone you knew was headed west. A widower in the party had his eye on you, but you knew him to be a mean man, and you didn't want to be under his thumb. When the wagon train stopped at camp in Arkansas, you took up with a bunch headed to Colorado Territory, where you'd start life over as a soiled dove in charge of her own money and fate. You did well, became rich, and were beloved as a philanthropist and community builder. You even opened a school and an orphanage when you retired.