For four hundred years, settlers swarmed over the continent, following waterways and trails they carved into mountains. They burned across the prairie like a wildfire consuming the deep-rooted grasses and leaving thirsty crops like wheat and corn in their wake. Creative and innovative, they used whatever strategies they could to push us aside. The missionaries often came first, then traders and settlers, all with the protection of the military and laws that justified theft and displacement. By the late nineteenth century, the West was won. Manifest Destiny rested on Enlightenment beliefs about
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