The ___ing of the American West by bdunn02

Addressing the ongoing dispute with Great Britain regarding territory rights in the Oregon country, John O’Sullivan wrote in the December 27, 1845 New York Morning News that America’s Oregon claim “is by the right of our ____ ____ to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty....”

One of the oldest continuous settlements in the USA, the city of ____ ____ was first settled by Europeans in 1607, the same year Jamestown was established. Today, it’s known as a creative city (UNESCO says so!) of about 68,000 residents.

The 1992 movie ____ delves into the uneasy tension between frontier justice and civil law during the <blank>ing of the West. In it, a struggling single father and former outlaw joins his old partner and a younger man to try to claim the bounty on two cowboys, one of whom assaulted a prostitute in the town of Big Whiskey, Wyoming.

Though it survived as a going concern for only 19 months, the company best known as the ____ ____, which counted among its employees a 15-year-old William Cody, nevertheless represents an impressive feat of logistics, and one that helped bridge a gap in needed services for commercial interests during their western development before being supplanted by a more technologically advanced solution.

In the spring of 1848, their first in the Salt Lake valley, Mormon settlers’ crops were attacked by swarms of insects. According to Mormon folklore, the crops were saved when seagulls (miraculously?) appeared, eating the insect threat. Ever since then, those insects, Anabrus simplex, have been commonly known as ____ ____ (even though they’re actually a type of katydid). Seagulls are still just called seagulls.

The Golden Spike was driven on May 10, 1869 by a former state governor, ____ ____, who was then president of the Southern Pacific Railroad. He would later become a US senator and, with his wife, co-founder of a university whose campus was built on a horse farm he owned.

The ____ ____, transacted in 1853 and known in Mexico as the Venta de La Mesilla, helped clear up some of the ambiguities left over from the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which had occurred just five years earlier.

____ ____ ____ was not a man of European descent with a permanent leg injury, as his name might have suggested, but, rather, a Cheyenne battle chief, the only tribal chief to be killed at the Battle of Little Bighorn.

Widely considered among the great novels of the American West, Wallace Stegner’s ____ ____ ____ explores the relationship between an eastern socialite painter and her mining engineer husband, who relocate to many places across the American (and Mexican) west over the course of their marriage. The title, a materials science term, refers to the steepest slope relative to horizontal at which a particular descended granular material can be stable.

In order: San Diego de Alcalá (1769), San Luis Rey de Francia (1798), San Juan Capistrano (1776), San Gabriel Arcángel (1771), San Fernando Rey de España (1797), San Buenaventura (1782), ____ ____ (1786), Santa Inés (1804), La Purísima Concepción (1787), etc.

Toussaint Charbonneau signed over legal custody of his eight-year-old son, Jean Baptiste, to ____ ____ in St. Louis in 1813. The boy’s new guardian had known Jean Baptiste since his birth at Fort Mandan and had given the baby the nickname “Pompy”.

Having out-maneuvered the US cavalry for almost 1,200 miles through Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, and only 40 miles short of their goal of asylum in Canada with Sitting Bull’s Lakota, Hinmatóowyalahtq̓it and his Wallowa band of Nez Perce were forced to surrender after a five-day battle. At the time of surrender, Hinmatóowyalahtq̓it is famously said to have said, “From where the sun now stands, I ____ ____ ____ ____ forever.” (edited at 8:42 am, May 25, 2016 (PDT))