The Donner Party Starves 25 Virginia Reed Murphy Survives a Terrible Ordeal 25 Mark Twain Rides the Overland Stage 28 A Memorable Account of Stagecoach Travel from _Roughing It_ 28 The Coming of the Railroad 31 Walt Whitman Writes of the Continental Railroad 31 Samuel Bowles Travels on the Union Pacific 32 III The Mining Frontier The Discovery of Gold 35 Walter Colton Describes the Effect of the Discovery 36 Eldorado: Bayard Taylor Visits the Mining Camps 37 Mark Twain Doesn’t Strike It Rich 40 IV The Ranching Frontier The Long Drive 44 Andy Adams Encounters Rustlers 44 V The Farming Frontier Homesteading in the Dakotas 50 O. E. Rölvaag Pictures the Norwegian Settlers 50 The Land Rush in Oklahoma 55 Hamilton Wicks Races to Guthrie 55 The picture on page 1, George Catlin’s “Buffalo Hunt on Snow Shoes,” was reprinted through the courtesy of the Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art. The picture on page 19, “The Meeting of the Rails,” was reprinted through the courtesy of the United States Bureau of Public Roads. The picture on the cover; the picture on page 35, of gold mining in California; the picture on page 44, of Texas cattle being driven to the cattle rendezvous; and the picture on page 50, of plowing on the prairies west of the Mississippi, were reprinted through the courtesy of the Library of Congress. Preface It is hard to fix a beginning date for the Westward Movement, unless we start with 1492 and Columbus’ first voyage of discovery. In reality the entire history of the New World is a movement of Europeans to the Western Hemisphere. In earlier booklets in this series we have dealt with the migrations of pioneers from the Atlantic Coast to the land beyond the Appalachian Mountains. We also have covered the expedition of Lewis and Clark to the Pacific Coast in 1805 and the annexation of Texas in 1845. This booklet is primarily concerned with the region beyond the Midwest, the high plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevadas, the deserts, and the fertile Pacific Coast.