Best Answer: pretend that you are walking down the street and you see a real big pit bull laying in the sidewalk, do you walk over to it and wake it up or do you ...
Now, with territory up to the Mississippi River claimed and settled and the Louisiana Purchase explored, Americans headed west in droves. Newspaper editor John O'Sullivan coined the term  manifest destiny  in 1845 to describe the essence of this mindset. A symbol of Manifest Destiny, the figure Columbia moves across the land in advance of settlers, replacing darkness with light and ignorance with civilization. The religious fervor spawned by the Second Great Awakening created another incentive for the drive west.
1841: Oregon Trail-People begin to travel west in wagon trains on the Oregon Trail. Around 300,000 people would take the trail over the next 20 years. 1845: Manifest Destiny-Journalist John O'Sullivan first uses the term Manifest Destiny to describe the westward expansion of the United States.