For a long time after the arrival of the first colonists, seven centuries ago, most people lived within 50 miles of the eastern seaboard in cities, towns and villages that resembled the Europe they had left. For these people, the great inland wilderness – the frontier as it became called – was a huge area of unknown dangers and mysterious landscape.

The story of America is the story of people moving into this frontier land, in search of new opportunity, and of how they met the challenges they found there.

As people moved west, so the frontier also moved further west, until at last there were cities and towns stretching from east coast to west coast, ‘from Sea to Shining Sea’. But the story of the frontier is more than a simple journey. It is also a story of how America came to own the land – including fighting wars for it, buying it, and taking it from the native Americans.

All of this did not happen all at once, and it did not happen quickly. Often, it moved in fits and starts – people would hear about an opportunity in a part of the west, such as free land for farming, gold for mining, or a new town springing up along a railway line, and they would head out to see if they could earn a good living there. The story of the American frontier is the story of how Americans developed a culture of initiative as they moved westward and what happened along the way.