United States » U.S. History » Heading West

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• CA-GOLDRUSH Mailing List (Archived on RootsWeb)

  For anyone who is interested in early California miners and settlers, especially in northern California, 1848-1880.

• Early California Population Project

  Provides public access to all the information contained in California's historic mission registers, records that are of unique and vital importance to the study of California, the American Southwest, and colonial America. From the Huntington Library.

  • Search the Database

    Online searchable database of baptism, marriage, and burial records of each of the California missions from 1769-1850. An extraordinary wealth of unique information on the Indians, soldiers, & settlers of Alta California.

  • User Guide

• Fort Robinson History Center

  Crawford, Nebraska.

• Frontier Living: An Illustrated Guide to Pioneer Life in America

  A book by Edwin Tunis.

• Hudson's Bay Company Archives (HBCA)

  A division of the Archives of Manitoba, is home to one of Canada's national treasures - the records of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC).

• Indiana Historical Bureau - Northwest Ordinance of 1787

• Milestone Historic Documents - The Northwest Ordinance

  An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States, North-West of the River Ohio. As it appears in the Supplement to the First Volume of the Columbian Magazine, Philadelphia, 1787. Explains the Northwest Ordinance and its significance, full text online and scanned copy of original document.

• Mountain Men and the Fur Trade

  Sources of the History of the Fur Trade in the Rocky Mountain West.

• National Pony Express Association (NPEA)

  Ranked among the most remarkable feats to come out of the 1860 American West, the Pony Express was in service from April 1860 to November 1861. Its primary mission was to deliver mail and news between St. Joseph, Missouri, and San Francisco, California.

• Pioneer Homes- sod houses, dugouts, soddies (Pinterest)

• Pioneer Women: The Lives of Women on the Frontier

  A book by Linda Peavy.

• Prairie Settlement: Nebraska Photographs and Family Letters

  Digital collection integrates two collections from the holdings of the Nebraska State Historical Society, the Solomon D. Butcher photographs and the letters of the Uriah W. Oblinger family. Together they illustrate the story of settlement on the Great Plains.

• Sod Walls

  A book by Roger Welcsh.

• The First American West: The Ohio River Valley, 1750-1820

  Consists of 15,000 pages of original historical material documenting the land, peoples, exploration, and transformation of the trans-Appalachian West including Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky & West Virginia from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century.

• The Frontier in American Culture

  From the The University of Washington Libraries.

• The Old Army in Texas: A Research Guide to the U.S. Army in Nineteenth-Century Texas

  A book by Thomas T. Smith.

• Trails West: A Map of Early Western Migration Trails

• Trans-Mississippi International Exposition

  "The far-reaching success of the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 inspired community leaders in Omaha, Nebraska, to hold their own version of that historic event—the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition. The Expo spread across 184 acres at the northern edge of Omaha, near the Missouri River, from June 1 to October 31, 1898. The photographs, newspaper articles, documents, and souvenirs featured in this digital archive—a partnership of the Omaha Public Library and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln—captures the ambitions, controversies, criticisms, cultural attitudes, and technologies of the time, while also depicting the grandeur of the architecture and celebration of the region."

• Valdez Gold Rush Centennial

  • Valdez Museum & Historical Archive - Rush Participants Database

    Valdez Gold Rush 1898-1899, Names Database.

• Websteader: Pioneer Sod Houses, c. 1880-1999

  Pictures and descriptions of how sod houses are constructed.