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Regardless of their place of origin, Europeans came from temperate midlatitude lands in which subtropical crops could not be grown. The American South, in contrast, offered a humid subtropical climate with ample year-round moisture and a long, hot growing season. Conditions were ideal for the growing of plantation crops such as cotton, indigo, tobacco, and rice. During the eighteenth century, a plantation-based economy boomed in the South.

Northwestern Europeans （primarily from the British Isles） were unaccustomed to sweltering heat and humidity. As a result, they were unable （or unwilling） to perform hard physical labor on the plantations. At first, they turned to Amerindians as a labor source. From the very beginning of settlement, however, some Europeans had brought African slaves to America. The Africans were well adapted to working in hot, humid weather conditions and proved to be excellent laborers in the plantation fields. Sadly, for more than 150 years, the Southern plantation economy depended on and thrived because of African slave labor. Ultimately, slavery was a key issue in the bloody conflict between the Northern and Southern states—a war that sharply divided the country and took 600 000 to 700 000 lives. In the United States, the slave trade was outlawed in 1808, although the practice itself continued until 1865. An estimated 400 000 Africans were unwillingly brought to British Colonial America. Certainly the institution of slavery and the devastating war to which it contributed ranks as the lowest point in U.S. history.

The growth of the U.S. had continued pretty much unabated since Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1802. The West came to represent an important element in the American psyche, taking on mythical proportions, and seemingly symbolising some sort of American ethos. Walt Whitman called it “the real genuine America”, a place where democracy and equality thrived against a backdrop of harsh weather conditions and the threat from hostile Indians. Erasmus Beadle’s Western dime novels, which were churned out from 1860 onwards, glorified the image of the West as did the paintings of Russell and Remington, emphasising rugged individualism and self-reliance, virtues which many wanted to be a reflection ofAmerican society as a whole. In the 1890s Frederick Jackson Turner, then a young historian, argued that the advancement of American settlement westwards explained American development, and that democracy was born on the frontier, confirming for many a belief that in some way the frontier had contributed to the values of liberty and equality held so dear by many Americans. Although no historian since has successfully argued that the frontier had no impact on American development, Turner’s views have pretty much been discredited by those who have pointed to the importance of the east, the influence of European thinking on democracy, the roles of government and business in settling the West, the parts played by women, blacks, Native Americans, Chinese and Hispanics, and so on.

Although the pioneers and settlers travelled from east to west, the mining frontier advanced from west to east, following the discovery of gold in California in 1848. The image of 49er prospectors staking their claims and panning for gold was slowly replaced by that of the machinery of big business, as it came to appreciate the potential that certain minerals had. By the 1870s silver had taken over from gold as the main mineral mined, while copper mines provided the copper wire for light bulbs and telephones. In 1867, 35 000 cattle were shipped from the railhead of Abilene, Kansas; by 1871, 700 000 were passing through that same route, and other railheads had been established by the cattlemen and cowboys at Dodge City, Wichita and Laramie, while the development of the refrigerator car had also made a significant contribution. Cattle fattened on the Great Plains led to the end of the open range, as did the development of ranching and the railroads, and even the fencing-in of land by ranchers came to resemble the large-scale corporatism of American industry, and contributed to the destruction of the Plains Indians.