Challege/WI: 500 Years to Settle the American West

So it was estimated back when, and don't ask me where this came from, that to settle the American west would take centuries, and perhaps around the figure I mentioned in the title. I believe the big reason for this was the lack of understanding just how much industrialization could speed things up (and maybe underestimating California as a lynch pin of western movement).

The challenge is to make it so that settling the American west really does take centuries upon centuries. And also, what if that did happen?
 
*Bump*

I find the AIDS idea an odd way to achieve this scenario, but I will say, in the age of colonialism and imperial empires that was the 19th century, it could spread pretty well.
 
So it was estimated back when, and don't ask me where this came from, that to settle the American west would take centuries, and perhaps around the figure I mentioned in the title. I believe the big reason for this was the lack of understanding just how much industrialization could speed things up (and maybe underestimating California as a lynch pin of western movement).

The challenge is to make it so that settling the American west really does take centuries upon centuries. And also, what if that did happen?

I wonder if the estimate considered the population density of Europe to be "settled," rather than OTL's states like Wyoming. I am certainly not an expert, but I imagine then, as now, Europe was more densely populated than the Americas.
 
I wonder if the estimate considered the population density of Europe to be "settled," rather than OTL's states like Wyoming. I am certainly not an expert, but I imagine then, as now, Europe was more densely populated than the Americas.

I would consider that correct. I think they were expecting areas to fill up to a much higher population density, moving westward, until the region was settled, rather than what I label the "3 people and a horse" way it is now where these states were settled with very low population densities, spread out over great distances, and with few people in these states.

I do think California may have been a major factor in speeding up settlement in the west. And certainly there are those historians who believe that if California had not discovered gold and turned into what it did, then the US would have lost the Southwest.
 
Lost it to whom? Mexico?

Anyway, the reason the west was settled was because industrial development made it feasible to ship goods from the West to Europe (and the East Coast). Earlier North American settlement would delay the conquest of the Plains, and make it less worthwhile.
 

DISSIDENT

Banned
Have any of the standard or otherwise AH New World colonization understudies get there before 1492 with a lesser technological level and less population base to start with.

It would probably take Vikings from Vinland who managed to convince the Skraelings that the milk wasn't intended to make them sick and then plundered their villages once their guard was down anyway, stranded Malian boatmen who came with Abu Bakr, Polynesian mariners who end up on the California coast, an expedition from a surviving Ummayad state in Cordoba, merchants from Venice, Florence or Pisa, Chinese emmisaries who took a wrong turn somewhere near Taiwan or Japanese who fled Kublai Khan tramping the Yamato emperor and the Ashikaga shogun in a sack at least a few centuries at their lower level of weapons technology, fewer numbers, and less scientific understanding of their environment to settle inland from wherever they start colonizing from. Most of the scenarios stemming from that lead to a balkanized, culturally heterogenous New World, even if the Natives don't survive any better.
 
How do you define "American West"? The area west of the Mississippi, the Appalachians, or what?
I think it referred to the area beyond the Mississippi as part of the Louisiana Purchase and the west beyond that. But, as even the area immediately west of the Appalachians was being settled back in the day, it could encompass that too.
 
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