Braxton McCoy

So that's kind of where this stuff starts.

And then, of course, eventually they make it back.

plenty of adventures along the way and report back to Jefferson.

Like, Hey, this is what we found.

There is no Northwest passage, but there's all this other stuff.

And in the meantime, that land that had been ceded to the federal government, they were using some of it to pay off soldiers.

If you were a private, I think you could get 100 acres.

If you were an enlistment, you could get like 100 acres.

And then if you were, I think, a colonel or above, you could do as many as 500 acres.

And they were kind of starting to expand in that way.

Another thing Jefferson realized, I think, was one of the most intelligent or wise parts

of the idea of Manifest Destiny is he understood that we did not have a military that could conquer the amount of terrain that we had.

He knew it was not gonna be possible.

So the next best resource is your American people.

The average person's pretty brave and durable too.

So we're trying to move them out west and establish new states, provinces, towns, villages, all this kind of thing, farms.

And that, so that happens for, you know, another little while.

And then just to kind of give a really broad overview of how the lands ended up in the situations they're in.

Then we do things like homestead acts and timber acts and mineral acts and these kinds of things.

And we put them in place and say, go out and conquer more.