In 1845, the term "Manifest Destiny" was first used to describe the belief that the United States should control all the land from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific Coast. "Manifest" means obvious, or clearly true. U.S. citizens thought it was obvious—manifest—that God had given the land to the settlers and not to the Native Americans who were already there.

Just before and after the Civil War, many settlers moved west into the Great Plains region. For them, landownership was important because they could work for themselves and earn their own money. They cleared forests, dammed rivers, and plowed grasslands to plant crops and transform the land into farms and towns .

Click the image on the left to see the 1872 painting by John Gast, called American Progress. Then write two to three sentences explaining how this painting tells the story of what happened when the settlers moved into the Great Plains.

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