The short answer: The Manifest Destiny. Americans believe that they had the God given right to expand and conquer the land from sea to shining sea, from coast to coast.
This idea of the Manifest Destiny was fueled by the Gold Rush in California in the 1940s. But there were also settlement trails, like the famous (via game playing) Oregon Trail. People are eager to explore and settle new land. Promise of riches and gold enticed people to risk the dangerous journey. This is where we see boomtowns in the West, towns they grow at a rapid rate due to a high influx of people. They are often correlated with finding minerals in the land, such as silver, copper, and lead.
This desire for land was also fueled by the sectionalism debate regarding slavery. The Missouri Compromise (1920) established where slavery could and couldn't be in the United States. Slave states were south of the 36 compromise line, and Free states were north. See the attached map for more detail. As the demand for cotton grew, so did the demand for slavery. Before the Civil War, cotton accounted for over 50% of the nation's exports. Slavery was moving west below the line, but we were running out of land. Land west of Louisiana belonged to Mexico. This demand for land was one of the causes of the Mexican-American War (1946-9148). As a result of this war, the United States acquired land including New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas (which is also a very interesting story).
Westward expansion continued after the time period in question. Contributing factors include the Homestead Act of 1962, the devastation of the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, the impact of Black Codes and the resulting Exoduster, and the continued influence of the Manifest Destiny.
The western expansion of the 1840s and 1850s is often discussed in the same breath as the Gold Rush, but, in fact, there were many other settlers who had already begun moving west before the Gold Rush began. In 1841, the first wagon trails began to move along the Oregon Trail into the West, the beginning of many similar journeys made by those who had heard tell of the cheap land and opportunities in the West for people to make something of themselves, free from the confinement and expense of the growing cities on the Eastern seaboard. While the Oregon Trail was long and dangerous, and many died of sickness and conflict with Native Americans along the way, stories continued to be told of the opportunities the unsettled West offered.
It was indeed the discovery of gold, however, which turned the steady trickle of westward settlers into a deluge. Gold was found in California in 1848; tens of thousands of would-be miners had arrived in California by the following year. These men were known as forty-niners, and many of them did make a fortune from gold. This sparked the root of the American Dream: any man, people came to think, could make his fortune if he would only put in the work. The miners soon sent for their wives and children, settled and intermarried, and the mining settlements became towns of some significance. By 1850, California had been set up with a governor as a state of the Union (it had to reach a population of 60,000 to do this, so a publicity campaign had helped encourage westward expansion until this point was reached).
Westward expansion continued well into the 1860s and 70s, after the Homestead Act was established to offer 160 acres of land in the West to anyone willing to work it for five years. Meanwhile, the establishment and spread of the railroads meant that the journey west was no longer the terrifying prospect it had once been when it had to be made by wagon trail. However, it was the Gold Rush which truly turned westward expansion into the dream of fortune and opportunity which continued to drive movement in that direction for decades afterwards.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/subjects/zj26n39
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