The Mexican ( (a)   ) term includes the modern-day states of California, Nevada, and Utah and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Colorado. In exchange for this land, the United States agreed to pay Mexico $15 million.

In 1845, Congress voted to add Texas to the Union. The Texas ( (a)   ) made it the 28th state and the 15th state where slavery was legal.

The United States’s actual annexation of Texas reinforced those suspicions. To make matters worse, many American settlers in another large Mexican ( (a)   ), California, also wanted to become part of the United States.

After citizenship and age requirements were verified, pioneers had to commit to farming the land for five years before being granted the land. The ( (a)   ) was then usually built in an area with lots of fertile farmland.

The emergence of rail transportation, gold rushes in the West, and the availability of cheap land after the relocation of Native Americans made it more attractive and simpler for settlers to ( (a)   ) to new territories.

Some settlers had a religious ( (a)   ) to move West. For example, Mormons who moved to Utah hoped to establish a new society for their believers, away from persecution in the cities where they had once settled.

Many of the western trailblazers left a ( (a)   ) that sounded more like fiction than history. Some of them actually did become the subjects of books and tall tales.

Zebulon Pike (1779–1813) was a soldier who joined the army at age 15. In 1805, the army sent him with a party of explorers to what would become Missouri. Pike’s ( (a)   ) was sent to find the source of the Mississippi River.

The settlers who left their homes in the East hoped to find new economic opportunities and to make a living on their own in the ( (a)   ). New immigrants to the country also sought these expanded opportunities by traveling to the West instead of settling in the cities where they arrived.

The West was different from other parts of the North American continent. It had very little water. The land was dry, brown, and very difficult to farm. Many ( (a)   ) who traveled west in search of a better life were not aware of this.

Jedediah Smith (1798–1831) was born in New York. But his explorations took him all the way to the other side of the continent. Smith was a mountain man, going beyond the flat ( (a)   ) of the Midwest. This means he was a fur trapper, trader, and explorer.

Western settlements tried to use private irrigation companies to solve their water problem. But they all failed. Congress passed the Reclamation Act in 1902. This involved building dams in major rivers and taking the water from there in order to bring ( (a)   ) to the desert-like climate.