Quotes About Westward

The time was right for the exploratory journey Jefferson had long pondered. He wanted to find a route to the Pacific and limn the contours of a West that might well become a theater of contention between the United States and imperial powers.

Call me Sunset. I'm always moving west.

It will take a thousand years for the frontier to reach the Pacific

For every person who died in the westward migration prior to the Civil War from Native Americans attacking, the stuff of American legends, thousands, maybe tens of thousands died from water holes polluted by cholera and typhoid . . . but that doesn't make for a good movie.

The whole westward expansion myth is seen as romantic. But it's a joke, a blot on American history.

The white men in the East are like birds. They are hatching out their eggs every year, and there is not room enough in the East, and they must go elsewhere; and they come out West, as you have seen them coming for the last few years.

The 1836 Whitman-Spalding covered wagon train was the first to go beyond the Rockies and complete the Oregon Trail.

Before the Oregon Trail, America was a loosely coordinated land of emerging industrial centers in the Northeast, and a plantation South, with a frontier of hotly contested soil mutating west. Post–Oregon Trail—with a big assist from the Civil War—America was a continental dynamo connected by railroads and the telegraph from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with certain precedents for settlement, statehood, and quickly establishing large commercial cities.

In addition, I feel a personal connection. In April 1855 my great-granduncle Alexander Carter Jr. and his younger brother, Thomas Marion Carter, left their home in Scioto County, Ohio, and headed west.

American football seems to resemble soccer in that one scores by putting the ball through the opponent's goal; but football, truly is about land. The Settlers want to move the line of scrimmage Westward, the Native Americans want to move it East.

The States which form the northern border of the United States westward from the Great Lakes to the Pacific coast include an area several times larger than France and could contain ten Englands and still have room to spare.

There's an undeniable tradition of sexism in this country that ties into the move westward by people of European descent and different ways of looking at Manifest Destiny on the west side of the Mississippi River.

Now, of course, the great thing about the solar system as a frontier is that there are no Indians, so you can have all the glory of the myth of the American westward expansion without any of the guilt.

Heretofore there has always been in the history of the world a comparatively unoccupied land westward, into which the crowded countries of the East have poured their surplus populations.

I always thought millennials are going westward, and they probably won't understand vernacular poetry.

We are driving by the Gateway Arch—the tallest arch in the world. It's made of stainless steel and manages to glisten even on a cloudy day. We've been to the top of it four times. Every time I see it, I remember the early pioneers who pushed west to see what was beyond Missouri. That's what the arch is for—to help you think about courage. Those people had strong hearts and vision. My heart's not strong, but my vision makes up for it.

There was nothing but prairie and sky, the sun by day and the stars by night, and the cattle moving westward. If I live to be a thousand years old I shall not forget the wonder and the beauty of those big longhorns, the sun glinting on their horns; most of them six or seven feet from tip to tip.

Jeremiah stood there alone, his big hands empty, watching his brother go. Zeb was the last of his family, and when his family went west they never came back. Linus had come back, but that was before Jeremiah's time. None of the others ever had. There must be something out there, he said aloud. There must be something out there that gets 'em. Then, half smiling, he added, Maybe it's the varmint!

All on this side [of] the Mississippi must be ours, including both Floridas," he had already argued to McHenry in early 1798.

Vancouver is the suicide capital of the country. You keep going west until you run out. You come to the edge. Then you fall off.

All of this got me thinking about the history of the westward expansion, and got me to wondering how the exploration of the Solar System would be changed if there were an indigenous presence out there.

The whole westward expansion myth is seen as romantic. But it's a joke, a blot on American history.

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a west as distant and as fair as that into which the Sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays.

We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.