In the time period of 1840-1895, commonly known as the American west, pioneers set off to the west of America to set up homes there

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The Problems of Living in a Newly set up Town in the West

In the time period of 1840-1895, commonly known as the American west, pioneers set off to the west of America to set up homes there, with the promise of free land, and the image of ‘streets paved with gold’ in their minds; Americans were more than willing to pack up and find their fortune. However, moving west was not as easy as most had anticipated, and many families perished on the journey over alone, not to mention the living conditions when they arrived. As more and more families began migrating west, the discoveries of gold brought along many big businesses, and a mass increase in people hoping to make money. This meant that towns needed to be set up to accommodate all of these people. As well as ordinary living towns, ranchers and miners needed to set up cow towns and mining towns for there workers. New laws were continuously being passed to encourage this, as U.S government wanted to make the west a part of the U.S.A as quickly as possible. Homesteaders had a right to claim land if they moved to the west, and land to build a town could be bought cheaply, resulting in towns being set up literally overnight. The mass amount of people migrating to set up towns would cause some inevitable problems.

               One of the problems with setting up a town in such a small amount of time was that there was a serious lack of law and order; there was rarely any kind of law enforcement until a long time after the towns were set up. Gang rule was often adopted, and almost all men in these towns had a gun and would use it readily if necessary. Of those who had gone to find there fortune in gold, the lack of law and order was a very severe problem. The towns were relying on vigilantes to keep law and order, but there methods of keeping the peace were as bad as the criminals. They would not need sufficient proof to kill a suspect, and once someone was suspected of a crime, they would immediately be taken to the nearest tree and hung without trial.

Even with this dangerous threat to the criminals, very serious crimes were still committed without precaution. In fact, the sheer amount that law and order was disregarded and disobeyed in the American west is beyond imaginable capabilities. These could range from common crimes such as petty theft to terrible accounts of prejudice and murder. The defiance of law was greatly affected by which type of town that it occurred in. There were various types of towns set up in the American west, as there were so many reasons for travelling to the west; some would go to try and uncover the fabled gold which had been reported to the east with such appeal, so they would need to set up a town in a specific location, and in a particular way that would benefit them the most. Others would set up towns to keep cattle in and would need to accommodate cowboys. Some were even set up for religious reasons, and needed to accommodate a specific religious group, and would need to meet their needs effectively. Despite being set up for specific reasons, each type of town had many setbacks, and there were many problems that they would need to overcome if they were to fulfil the American dream of uniting the east and the west in manifest destiny.

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Of the new towns that were being set up, many were done so solely to mine gold. The sheer amount of Americans that were travelling west to become rich by finding the gold that was promised to them was almost incomprehensible; by 1849 alone there was 90,000 men digging for gold, but they would soon discover that getting their fortune would be a hard, and very slow process, needing a lot of planning, far from the idea that ‘the streets would be paved with gold’ as some believed. The gold miners soon became known as the ‘forty-niners’. One ...

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