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Stephen F. Austin
The most successful of the Texan empresarios, Stephen Austin became an influential political leader in Texas. He did not support independence at first, and his misgivings restrained any major move towards independence among the Texan people. However, once he threw his support behind the Texas Rebellion in 1835, it benefited greatly from his leadership and support.
George Armstrong Custer
Custer, a Civil War hero, was dispatched to the hills of South Dakota in 1874. When gold was discovered in the region, the federal government announced that Custer’s forces would hunt down all Sioux not in reservations after January 31, 1876. Many Sioux refused to comply, and Custer began to mobilize his troops. At the battle of Little Bighorn, in June 1876, Custer unwisely divided his troops, and a numerically superior force of Native Americans wiped out him and all his men. This battle, known as “Custer's Last Stand,” convinced the army that the Sioux were a powerful force, after which a war of attrition, rather than direct confrontation, was begun.
Robert Fulton
Fulton is credited with the invention of the first effective steamboat, which he unveiled with his business partner, Robert Livingston, in New York in 1807. The Steamboat revolutionized river travel because it could move rapidly upstream, a feat no other type of watercraft could match.
Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson was President of the United States from 1829 to 1837, and thus oversaw much of the nation’s expansion. Jackson’s most prominent role in westward expansion was his continuing struggle to eject the Native Americans East of the Mississippi from their lands to free up the space for American settlers. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 granted Jackson the funding and authority to accomplish this goal, which he pursued determinedly throughout his presidency.
James K. Polk
Polk was President of the United States from 1845 to 1849, having run on a platform of westward expansion in the election of 1844. Highly efficient in achieving his goals, Polk oversaw the annexation of Oregon and of Texas and is pursued and began the Mexican War. He was a firm believer in expansion and pursued his goals with vigor. However, many northerners saw Polk, a Tennessean, as an agent of southern will, expanding the nation as part of a plan to extend slavery into the West.
Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna
Santa Anna was the off-and-on president of Mexico and dominant figure in the Mexican government over a period from 1832 to 1854. After he organized a mass purge of liberals from his government in 1834, he began to place restrictions on the governments of the Mexican territories to the North. Fearing tyrannical rule, Stephen F. Austin and other American settlers in Texas sparked the Texas Rebellion to win independence. Santa Anna was captured during the rebellion and forced to sign a treaty giving Texas its independence. Santa Anna returned to the presidency of Mexico in 1846 and oversaw his nation’s defeat to the United States in the Mexican War of 1848 resulting a huge cession of land in the (now) American West. Remarkably, Santa Anna returned to office once again in 1853, where he would oversee the Gadsden Purchase of 1854, in which Mexico sold valuable land in southern Arizona and New Mexico to the United States at a low price.
John Tyler
Tyler became President of the United States in 1841, when William Henry Harrison died after just a month in office. Tyler and his secretary of state, John C. Calhoun, a fierce advocate for slavery, tried by manipulative means to gain support for the annexation of Texas. The treaty they presented to the Senate for annexation was voted down, but the issue of annexation had risen to the fore of American politics.
