Trace the beginnings of the westward movement.

The Westward movement was a process that began shortly after the first colonial settlements were established along the Atlantic coast.

The first British settlers stayed close to the Atlantic, their life line to needed supplies from England. By the 1630s, however, Massachusetts Bay colonies were pushing into the Connecticut River Valley. Resistance from the French and the Indians slowed the  westward movement, yet by the 1750s northern American colonist had occupied most of New England.

By 1700 the Virginia frontier had been pushed as far west as the fall line, the point upstream at which the rivers emptying into the Atlantic became unnavigable.

Germans and Scots1Irish from Pensilvania moved down the Shenandoah Valley, largely between 1730 and 1750, to populate the western portions of Virginia and the Carolinas. The British Proclamation of 1763 ordered a stop to the westward movement at the Appalachians, but the decree was disregarded. Settlers rushed into Ohio, Tennessee and Kentucky; by 1810 these regions had been transformed from wilderness into a region of farms and towns.

Despite those decades of continuous westward pushing of the frontier line, it was not until the conclusion of the War of 1812 that the westward movement became  a significant flood of people across the continent.

By 1780 only a few hundred Americans had moved west and they were mostly moving to the north. In 1775 the Transylvania Company hired Daniel Boone to cut the Wilderness Road for people to move from Tennessee to Kentucky. By 1830 there were hundreds of thousands of Americans in the Michigan Territory, which later became known as Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The population in the west steadily growing.