It is ... our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty." John L. O'Sullivan, columnist, New York Morning News, December 1845

Today Americans take for granted that their nation stretches "from sea to shining sea." But when editor John O'Sullivan first coined the phrase manifest destiny in 1845 the States ended abruptly at mid-continent — in Missouri.
Those two words - manifest destiny - captured the tumultuous times of 1840s America. Many argued it was inevitable that the same civilization republican democracy that had developed in the eastern states would keep expanding west to the Pacific. This set in motion events that changed and redefined the "ownership' of half of North America and the lives of all its native inhabitants.
Here on the Oregon Trail, over 400,000 emigrants went west in less than a single generation. Without question, the idea of manifest destiny impacted the lives of all people who lived from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

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