American Settlement Quotes

The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement, explain American development.

You want to know why there's a Texas Rangers? Well, here's the answer. You know how the six-gun came around? Well, here's the answer. You want to know why Mexicans allowed Americans to settle Texas in the first place? It was fear of Comanches.

Today, I honor the memory of those brave settlers of Oregon …. Some instinct drew them here, a fate a pulling, a desire for deep and lasting change in their lives. They embraced that change. They sought it out. Theirs was a quest for new horizons, for new beginnings. For a new homeland. They rode. They walked. They starved. They foraged. And they died. But they kept their eyes westward. They gave us Oregon.

Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

The sanctity of private property is so fundamental a part of the American settlement that the country's conservatives look with suspicion on any policy that seems to prevent people from doing what they will with what is theirs.

The English did not come to America from a mere love of adventure, nor to truck with or convert the savages, nor to hold offices under the crown, as the French to a great extent did, but to live in earnest and with freedom.

It is presumed that humanity dictated the original policy of the removal and concentration of the Indians in the West to save them from threatened extinction. But today, by reason of the immense augmentation of the American population, and the extension of their settlements throughout the entire West, covering both slopes of the Rocky Mountains, the Indian races are more seriously threatened with a speedy extermination than ever before in the history of the country

Great number of My Subjects have been and are every year transported to those parts of America … and there settle themselves … amongst which numbers there so many idle and refractory humours whose only or principal end is to live as much as they can without the reach of authority.

The America to which these Swedish settlers came was a land that needed the hardy qualities they brought. It was not a land that was particularly softhearted towards newcomers, but everyone believed that each should have a fair chance regardless of his origin.

Let the emigrants go on; and carry their rifles. We want 30 thousand rifles in the valley of the Oregon; they will make all quiet there ... will annihilate the Hudson's Bay Company, drive them off our continent, quiet their Indians, and protect the American interests.