8 - Onwards to the Pacific Shore

Summary

St John’s, Newfoundland, to Vancouver is about 3,000 miles; Plymouth, Massachusetts, to San Francisco is about 2,700 miles, the distances which English covered on its westward expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific between 1700 and the late 1800s. Revolution, purchase, negotiation, violent conquest, slavery and genocide brought the continental USA finally to its modern geographical limits. English-speaking powers controlled the east coast of North America from Labrador to Florida, and the west coast from the Arctic Ocean to the USA–Mexico border between San Diego and Tijuana. The 250 years of spread of native English speakers occurred at the expense of indigenous North American languages, and to a lesser extent Spanish, French and the other languages of other European colonists.