Many people have owned and occupied western lands. All have migrated there. Indeed some have migrated several times within their lifespan, while others have seen their families migrate to another part of the west. Mobility has been a major phenomenon in western settlement and development. Early peoples moved into the west by walking or making some use of animal power to carry either their possessions or themselves, initially on path-breaking routes and then on trails and soft-topped roads. Where natural watercourses were available most people preferred to build a boat – whether, canoe, raft, flatboat, keelboat or barge – for ease and to speed up their passage west. Following technological change steam-driven vehicles were constructed to further accelerate movement. In areas beside navigable water steamboats facilitated settlement, while railroads both enabled land-locked areas to participate more intensively in the market economy and opened up land that otherwise might not have become agrarian. The pace of this human process was relatively slow prior to the advent of steam power. From the early nineteenth century, however, the west witnessed mass migrations as diverse peoples moved in or around its vast dimensions.

Native peoples pre- and post-contact (1492)

Archaeologists and anthropologists are still uncertain about when the first peoples arrived on the North American continent and how they got there. The most common proposition suggests a migration from northeastern Asia during the prehistoric age and then a gradual dispersion throughout the New World which may have begun some 50,000 years ago.