By the 1820s the expansion of settlers moving westward had increased dramatically. Once they had crossed the mountains it was comparatively easy to go on. Many built rafts and floated with the current down the Ohio River to the Mississippi; others penetrated the Lake country farther north into Canada. They pushed up tributary streams, avoiding the unbroken forests, and made their way across Indiana and Illinois. The evangelization of the new West was not accomplished with a great deal of unity or planning. Missionaries went out to where the need seemed greatest. The country was so vast that the administration was largely in the hands of the individual missionaries. There were four stages in the missionary march toward the West. The first was in the lake and river country east of the Mississippi where close to a million had settled by 1835. The second was a ministry to the Native Americans on the prairies. After the Civil War, many soldiers and other Americans settled on the prairie along with recent European immigrants. These groups, along with Indians that had unfairly and cruelly been forced onto reservations, were touched by the Gospel message brought by earnest and devoted missionaries. The third stage carried the missionaries to the open ranges and the mountains where ranchers, cowboys, and miners constituted a rough and somewhat lawless element. The fourth stage to the Pacific had already been reached before the country was much settled.
Impact: Without the tireless efforts of Christian missionaries, the young nation would have had no moral compass and many of the important social programs that helped protect immigrants, women, children, Native Americans, and newly freed slaves would have never existed.