About the conflicts of Native Americans, African American slaves, Mexicans, and Chinese immigrants from westward expansion, and whether expansion built coalitions btw these groups or created more conflict and division.

The desire to expand westward dates back to the American Revolution. The government advocated colonization while defending Native Americans beginning with the Ordinances of 1785 and 1787, which encouraged the survey and selling of lands west of what had been British colonies.

As white people traveled west in search of land and wealth, they came into contact with Native American tribes, Mexican Americans, African American slaves, and Chinese refugees. At the conclusion of the Mexican-American War, Mexican Americans in the Southwest were granted the right to become American citizens, but their rank remained clearly second-class. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants arrived after the California Gold Rush, and by the late 1800s, they numbered in the hundreds of thousands; the rest remained in California, doing menial labor.

Chinese immigrants faced harsh racism and persecution from Native Americans in the West after a statute prohibiting them from gaining US citizenship by naturalization was enacted in 1790. Despite barriers such as a special tax levied on Chinese miners engaged in the Gold Rush and their eventual forced resettlement into Chinese districts, these immigrants began to settle in the United States in search of a better life for their families.

Despite assurances made in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which concluded the Mexican-American War in 1848 and granted US citizenship to nearly 75,000 Mexicans residing in what was then the American Southwest, Mexican Americans soon lost their land to white settlers who replaced the legitimate landowners—by force if possible. Mexican Americans in California, also known as Californios, found that their requests for judicial action were largely ignored. In certain cases, judges and lawyers would allow civil cases to go into a costly legal procedure only to leave Mexican American landowners who insisted on defending their land penniless as a result of their efforts.

African Americans, wanted a better future in the Westward Expansion, but battling the ideal of slavery at any point made it impossible. They were leaving a tough life in the South, where Jim Crow laws were in place and African Americans were denied their new civil rights. The Promised Land offers people the opportunity to succeed or fail on their own terms. Since the Westward Expansion, African Americans, like whites, were looking for a healthier lifestyle.

African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Chinese immigrants were assigned to the lowest-paying jobs with the poorest working conditions. They worked as manual laborers, cattle herders, and cartmen on white landowners' cattle ranches, delivering grain and provisions, or they took on the most dangerous mining jobs as discrimination and racism became the law.

In 1889 and 1890, the White Caps, a Mexican-American resistance group, burned farms, homes, and crops in response to white settlers' appropriation of their territory.
These diverse cultural and ethnic groups struggled to protect their rights and way of life in the face of widespread bigotry, but the overwhelming number of white settlers and government-sanctioned land seizures placed them at a major disadvantage. These peoples eventually withdrew into more homogeneous cultures, where their language and culture could flourish.