Twelve states once called simply “the West” now feed a Corn Belt
The Midwestern United States—Heartland, Middle West—is a Census Bureau region of twelve north-central states from Ohio to the Dakotas. The 2020 census counted 68,995,685 residents there, and Chicago, anchor of a 9.4-million metro area, is both the Midwest’s largest city and the third-largest in the country, ahead of Columbus, Indianapolis and Detroit.
Until 1984 the Census Bureau called it the North Central Region, splitting it into East and West North Central halves: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin on one side, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska and the two Dakotas on the other. Most of it lies on the Interior Plain between the Appalachian and Rocky Mountain states, drained by the Ohio, upper Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Factories and Corn Belt farms still anchor the economy, medicine, education and finance are growing, and several swing states make it decisive at the ballot box.
Early Americans simply called this interior the West, and by the early 1800s anything past the Appalachians was frontier. French settlers named the upper Mississippi basin the Illinois Country, and the 1787 Northwest Ordinance carved out a territory framed by the Ohio, the Mississippi and the Great Lakes, which is why Illinois has a Northwestern University. One early use of Midwest cast Kansas and Nebraska as the settled, civilised part of the West.
Paleo-American hunters roamed the plains and lakes from about 12,000 to 8,000 BCE. Mississippian farmers, whose culture probably began near St. Louis, grew maize, beans and squash on river floodplains and raised great mounds between 900 and 1500 CE, then declined sharply around 1400 as the Little Ice Age set in. Around the Great Lakes lived the Ojibwe, Huron, Menominee, Ottawa, Sauk, Potawatomi, Miami and Ho-Chunk; most spoke Algonquian tongues, but the Ho-Chunk speak a Siouan one.
On the plains, nomadic peoples such as the Cheyenne and Crow followed bison and adopted Spanish horses by the early 18th century, while Mandan, Omaha and Pawnee villages also farmed. The Sioux, split into Santee, Yankton-Yanktonai and Lakota branches, became the strongest Plains power and the biggest obstacle to American expansion.
Source: Midwestern United States
