railroad expansion
Laying more rails
Railroad expansion is the extension of rail networks into new territories or regions.
The term most often refers to the rapid growth of railways across the American West in the nineteenth century, a period that transformed commerce, settlement patterns, and the displacement of Indigenous peoples.
Railroad expansion opened the frontier to homesteaders.
- locomotivesPowered rail vehicles
- golden spikeCompletion marker for railroads
- manifest destinyObvious, inescapable fate
- land grantsGovernment-awarded real estate parcels
- right of wayLegal passage privilege
Chinese laborers · work gangs · train stations · early settlers · industrial hubs · Native American tribes · steam engines · smoke stacks · freight yards · transcontinental railroads · coast to coast · Industrial Revolution · grain elevators · cattle drives · trade routes · pioneer settlements · boom towns · bridges
- frontierfrontier, pioneer, pioneers, settlers, settler
- economic historystock market crash, Industrial Revolution, trade routes, Great Depression, gold standard
- 1840s-1850sOregon Trail, California Gold Rush, Mexican-American War, Manifest Destiny, Underground Railroad
- Appalachian economycoal barons, company towns, scrip, black lung, strip mining
- California historystatehood, Spanish colonization, Spanish mission, gold rush, Sutter's Mill
- Florida HistorySt. Augustine, Ponce de Leon, Everglades, Spanish exploration, Seminole
railroad expansionwilderness preservation
Protecting wild areas permanently
land conservation · environmental conservation · nature preservation · pastoral landscape