Coming to America was often a one-way trip. Explorers, colonists, indentured servants, and slaves left friends, extended families, and familiar surroundings behind, never to be seen again. In search of religious freedom, opportunities, wealth, or adventure, many set out voluntarily to explore and settle an unknown land. Others were forced to leave their homes to survive as best they could.

Hundreds of thousands from Africa came to America by force—as slaves.  Slavery became a crucial part of the economies of most American colonies, north and south. Slaves endured harrowing journeys and were treated as trade goods rather than human beings.  Many died on the Atlantic crossing.

As the population on the East Coast increased, Americans pushed at the western boundaries of the colonies and then of the new nation. Trappers and settlers followed existing Indian trails and were often surprised to find well-established Indian towns, with cultivated fields.  As settlers arrived, they wanted new roads, bridges, ferry crossings, and—by 1800—canals.  Many wanted these “internal improvements,” as they were called, to be financed by the government. Until the 1860s, slaves and new immigrants provided much of the labor to construct these new, essential connections.

The first great ‘highways’ west of the Appalachians were the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers. The Ohio and the Mississippi together linked the states and territories from the western Appalachians to the Great Plains; the Missouri provided a navigable pathway west for flat-bottomed steamboats to the territories of the upper Great Plains as far as Montana. Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi, and Illinois became our 15th through 21st states. Cincinnati grew into what people called, “The Queen City of the West,” while St. Louis became the hub for development even farther west.

By the end of America’s Civil War, a great national project was already underway—constructing the world’s first transcontinental railroad.  Irish immigrants and war veterans built westward from the nation’s existing rail network at Council Bluffs, Iowa. Chinese laborers built eastward from Sacramento, California.  Eventually, they met in Promontory, Utah, after spanning some 1,776 miles. Later on, in the 1880s, other Asian immigrants came to the Pacific Northwest to build new railroads.