The Colorado River's Help and Hindrance of Settlement in the Western United States
Geographers can tell you that the one thing that most rivers and their
adjacent flood plains in the world have in common is that they have rich
histories associated with human settlement and development. This
especially true in arid regions which are very dependent upon water. Two
excellent examples are the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates rivers which
show use the relationship between rivers and concentrations of people.
However, the Colorado River is not such a good example along most
segments of its course. There is no continuous transportation system
that parallels the rivers course, and settlements are clustered. The
rugged terrain and entrenched river channels are the major reasons for
sparse human settlement. We ask ourselves, did the Colorado River help
or hinder settlement in the Western United States?
As settlers began to move westward, the Southwest was considered
to be a place to avoid. Few considered it a place to traverse, to spread
Christianity, and a possible source of furs or mineral wealth. Finding a
reliable or accessible water source, and timber for building was
difficult to find. There was a lack of land that could be irrigated
easily.
By the turn of the century, most present day cities and towns
were already established. Trails, roads, and railroads linked several
areas with neighboring regions. Although the Colorado River drainage
system was still not integrated. In the mid 1900’s many dams had been
built to harness and use the water. A new phase of development occurred
at the end of the second World War. There was a large emphasis on
recreation, tourism, and environmental preservation.
The terrain of the Colorado River is very unique. It consists of
Wet Upper Slopes, Irregular Transition Plains and Hills, Deep
Canyonlands, and the Dry Lower Plains.
Wet Upper Slopes: Consist of numerous streams that feed into the
Colorado River from stream cut canyons, small flat floored valleys often
occupied by alpine lakes and adjacent steep walled mountain peaks. These
areas are heavily forested and contain swiftly flowing streams, rapids,
and waterfalls. These areas have little commercial value except as
watershed, wildlife habitat, forest land, and destinations for hikers,
fishermen, and mountaineers.
Irregular Transition Plains and Hills: These areas are favorable
for traditional economic development. It consists of river valleys with
adequate flat land to support farms and ranches. Due to the rolling
hills, low plateaus, and mountain slopes, livestock grazing is common.
Christopher Columbus discovered the America’s for Spain in 1492. The explorers and settlers that settled in Central and South America were mostly Spanish and Portuguese. The English took notice of the Spanish success in the America’s, so they decided to explore the upper part of the America’s, North America, in the late 1500’s.
After the Civil War, Americans abandoned the sectional emphasis caused by slavery and developed a national focus. During the period from 1865-1890, Americans completed the settlement of the West. For the farmers and ranchers, the American West was a land of opportunity because land was cheap and the Homestead Act provided land to farmers, including immigrants and blacks, in order to grow crops, raise cattle and make a profit. The American West was also seen as a land of opportunity for miners due to the gold and silver rush in the far west which they believed would make them rich. However, both groups faced many challenges and few achieved great wealth.
Over the years, the United States faced many economic downfalls. There were so many downfalls that a lot of people actually thought that by the end of World War II in 1945, the Great Depression would return. However, it was a completely different story. By the time World War II ended, the United States was booming with success, especially Colorado. Colorado’s growth and economic success had actually passed up the nation as a whole. Colorado’s success would then last for forty years.
The time of westward expansion was filled of hardships and challenges for the citizens of America. They left their homes at their own will to help make life better for themselves, and would letter recognize how they helped our country expand. The people of the Oregon trail risked their lives to help better their lives and expand and improve the country of America. However, no reward comes without work, and the emigrants of the Oregon Trail definitely had it cut out for them. They faced challenges tougher than anyone elses during the time of westward expansion.The Emigrants of the Oregon trail had the the most difficult time surviving and thriving in the west because of environmental difficulties, illness abundance, and accident occurrence.
How do you see progress, as a process that is beneficial or in contrast, that it´s a hurtful process that everyone at one point of their lives has to pass through it? At the time, progress was beneficial for the United States, but those benefits came with a cost, such cost that instead of advancements and developments being advantageous factors for humanity, it also became a harmful process in which numerous people were affected in many facets of life. This all means that progress is awsome to achieve, but when achieved, people have to realize the process they had to do to achieve it, which was stepping on other people to get there.
America was expanding at such a rapid pace that those who were in America before us had no time to anticipate what was happening. This change in lifestyle affected not only Americans but everyone who lived in the land. Changing traditions, the get rich quick idea and other things were the leading causes of westward expansion. But whatever happened to those who were caught in the middle, those who were here before us?
There were many people responsible for the westward expansion of the US. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were one of the first Americans to precisely explore and map the western Territories. During their expeditions they were aided by a Shoshone woman named Sacagawea and her French-Canadian husband Toussaint Charbonneau, during which they served as translators. Their expedition helped path a way for thousands of settlers to move west.
The Oregon Trail had an extensive impact on early America. It spread the population with approximately 50,000 people moving 2,000 miles west. The trail conceded of a group of paths. The route started in Missouri and finished in Oregon. The journey was 2,000 miles long and last about 5 months. With about 10 grave per mile by the end of a 30 year rage it was the longest graveyard in America. What was so bad with where they were at that they were willing to risk it all? Why was the rush to go west so vast? Every day the people were in fear that death was close by. What was so important to risk their lives and the lives of others for this odyssey?
The period from 1800 to 1865 marked a time of immerse sectionalism in American history. Sectionalism grew more intense due to the added conflict of how to embrace new territories gained during Western Expansion. Westward Expansion began with the Louisiana Purchase made by President Thomas Jefferson. The Louisiana Purchase stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico (Give Me Liberty! 304). The most controversial issue was whether slavery would be allowed in the new territories acquired by the United States. As the philosophy of Manifest Destiny spread among the whole country, the South wanted new slave territories while the North wanted to stop the spread of slavery. According to John O’Sullivan,
...lves the confirmation of the boundaries of the social world through the sorting of things into good and bad categories. They enter the unconscious through the process of socialisation.’ Then, “the articulation of space and its conception is a reminder that time boundaries are inextricably connected to exclusionary practises which are defined in refusing to adhere to the separation of black experience.”
When the Europeans Colonization America it changed not only the lives of the Native American people but their cultures as well. Looking at the history of the population of American Indigenous peoples, we can see a catastrophic drop off when the Europeans arrive. When the Europeans came, they forced the natives to pack up their camps and move into other tribes' territories or into infertile grounds, and introduced major disease like smallpox, influenza, measles, and even some minor disease like the common cold and chicken pox’s, which killed more than half of the native population. The natives had no immunity’s to the new European diseases, so the outbreak was almost 100% effective. This is not to say that all of the Europeans influence was negative the Europeans did introduce modern medicines, new animals, exotic plants and new technology to the Native Americans.
The ways in which people are placed within “time space compression” as highly complicated and extremely varied. For instance, in the book Nickel and Dimed, Barbara said, “ Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You do not need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high”(127). Barbara has a car so that she can drive to her workplace and save the time from waiting public transportation, and she also can go to different cities whenever she is free. Therefore, she has more control of her mobility. The social relations would change when she went to another city. Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway differentiated mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others, like Barbara; some initiate flows and movement, others do not; some are more more on the receiving-end of it than others. Instead of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imaged as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are structed ona far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, or a region or even a continent. We can see that from her different work experiences in different places. And this in turn allows a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates ina apositive way the global and the
...s of the journey were of such extremes that they made the travels skip something that they were forced to believe was a very important ritual.
Space is something everyone experiences. However Eliade points out that different people have different reactions to the spatial aspect of the world. A profane man may experience space/spaces homogenously, “ no break qualitatively differentiates the various parts of its mass.” (pg. 22). For an example a profane man might classify a mall and church in the same way because he sees no religious value within them, but he then could regard a hospital sacred because that may be the place of his birth (in page 24 Eliade such sacredness is worthless). A religious man, on the other hand, could look at that same space, a mall and a church, and differentiate the sacred space, also known as the cosmos, from the profane space, also known as the chaos. In this case the religious man would classify the church as sacred place because it has some holy value and the mall as the profane space because it has no holy value at all. In clearer terms the the profane space is h...
‘Through identifying places and organizing them, we make sense of the world we inhibit’ (Unwin,