5.2 Westward Ho!
In the 1840s, settlers and missionaries traveled the Oregon Trail, Mormons made their pilgrimage to Utah, and would-be prospectors aimed for the California Gold Rush. After the war with Mexico, the vast territory opened for settlement by the Mexican Cession, so-called for all the land that Mexico ceded to the US in the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, led to wave after wave of settlers. Benevolence and largesse soon gave way to greed, racism, and ideals of Manifest Destiny once again when the rights of Mexican citizens in the ceded territory, guaranteed by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, were removed by the US Senate under the influence of men such as John C. Calhoun.
Manifest Destiny and the Gold Rush
California, belonging to Mexico prior to the war, was at least three arduous months’ travel from the nearest American settlements. There was some sparse settlement in the Sacramento Valley, and missionaries made the trip occasionally. The fertile farmland of Oregon, like the black dirt lands of the Mississippi Valley, attracted more settlers than California. Dramatized stories of American Indian attacks filled migrants with a sense of foreboding, although most settlers encountered no violence and often no American Indians at all. The slow progress, disease, human and oxen starvation, poor trails, terrible geographic preparations, lack of guidebooks, threatening wildlife, vagaries of weather, and general confusion were all more formidable and frequent than American Indian attacks. Despite the harshness of the journey, by 1848 approximately twenty thousand Americans were living west of the Rockies, with about three fourths of that number in Oregon.
Many who moved nurtured a romantic vision of life, attracting more Americans who sought more than agricultural life and familial responsibilities. The rugged individualism and military prowess of the West, encapsulated for some by service in the Mexican war, drew a growing new breed west of the Sierra Nevada to meet with the Californians already there: a breed of migrants different from the modest agricultural communities of the near West.
If the great draw of the West served as manifest destiny’s kindling, then the discovery of gold in California was the spark that set the fire ablaze. Most western settlers sought land ownership, but the lure of getting rich quick drew younger single men (with some women) to gold towns throughout the West. These adventurers and fortune-seekers then served as magnets for the arrival of others providing services associated with the gold rush. Towns and cities grew rapidly throughout the West, notably San Francisco, whose population grew from about five hundred in 1848 to almost fifty thousand by 1853. Lawlessness, predictable failure of most fortune seekers, racial conflicts, and the slavery question all threatened manifest destiny’s promises.
On January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall, a contractor hired by John Sutter, discovered gold on Sutter’s sawmill land in the Sacramento Valley area of the California Territory. Throughout the 1850s, Californians beseeched Congress for a transcontinental railroad to provide service for both passengers and goods from the Midwest and the East Coast. The potential economic benefits for communities along proposed railroads made the debate over the route rancorous. Growing dissent over the slavery issue also heightened tensions.
The great influx of diverse people clashed in a combative and aggrandizing atmosphere of individualistic pursuit of fortune.1 Linguistic, cultural, economic, and racial conflict roiled both urban and rural areas. By the end of the 1850s, Chinese and Mexican immigrants made up one fifth of the mining population in California. The ethnic patchwork of these frontier towns belied a clearly defined socioeconomic arrangement that saw whites on top as landowners and managers, with poor whites and ethnic minorities working the mines and assorted jobs. The competition for land, resources, and riches furthered individual and collective abuses, particularly against American Indians and older Mexican communities. California’s towns, as well as those dotting the landscape throughout the West, such as Coeur D’Alene in Idaho and Tombstone in Arizona, struggled to balance security with economic development and the protection of civil rights and liberties.
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Notes
- Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: Norton, 2000).
