Complete Idiot’s Guide to American History

by Alan Axelrod

  Trails West

  During the 1830s and well into the 1840s, before the McCormick reaper and the Deere plow had worked their act of transformation, the western plains were known as the Great Desert, and they remained largely unsettled. Instead, settlers first set their sights on the Far West. By the early 1830s, Americans were beginning to settle in California, many of them “mountain men”—fur trappers—who turned from that profession to ranching and mercantile pursuits.

  These pioneers made their way into the territory by way of the southwestern deserts until 1, 833, when Joe Walker, a mountain man from Tennessee, marched due west from Missouri. Walker took the so-called South Pass through the Great Divide, went east to west across the Great Basin, climbed the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and entered California. This path became the California fork of what would be called the Overland Trail. Walker had opened California to the rest of the nation. By 1840, 117 mountain men were settled in Mexican California, bringing the American population to about 400.

  Overland Trail

  The mountain men and other explorers carried back to the East tales of the wondrous and potentially bountiful lands that lay toward the sunset. Through the decade of the 1830s, America’s westering dreams simmered. At last, on February 1, 1841, 58 men—settlers living in Jackson County, Missouri—met at the town of Independence to plan the first fully organized emigrant wagon train to California. Assembling across the Missouri River, at Sapling Grove, the party had grown to 69—including more than 20 women and children—under the leadership of John Bartleson. The prominent Catholic missionary Father Pierre-Jean deSmet and the mountain man Thomas Fitzpatrick also joined the train of 15 wagons and four carts.

  The trek consumed five months, three weeks, and four days. It was marked by a single death, a single birth, and a single marriage. The following year, some 20 wagons carrying well over 100 persons made the trip. Other journeys followed each year thereafter until the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 made the Overland Trail and the other trans-West routes obsolete.

  Surviving the three-to seven-month journey across an often brutal and always unforgiving landscape took discipline, strength, and luck, Yet most who undertook the trek survived—albeit transformed by the ordeal: haggard, even reduced to skin and bones. Such hardship was sufficient to convince many emigrants to make an expensive and often stormy journey by sea—either all the way around Cape Horn at the tip of South America or to the Isthmus of Panama. No such thing as a Panama Canal existed in the 19th century (the canal would not be completed and opened to traffic until 1914). Therefore, travelers bound for the West Coast had to disembark on the Atlantic side, make a disease-ridden overland journey across the steaming jungles of the Isthmus, then board a California-bound ship on the Pacific side.

  Oregon Fever

  Until gold was discovered in California in 1848-49, Oregon was the strongest of the magnets drawing emigrants westward. In 1843, a zealous missionary named Marcus Whitman led 120 wagons with 200 families in what was called the Great Migration to Oregon. Soon, stories of a lush agricultural paradise touched off “Oregon fever,” which brought many more settlers into the Northwest.

  Oregon was a hard “paradise.” The elements could be brutal, and disease ranged from endemic to epidemic. Whitman worked tirelessly as a missionary and physician to the Cayuse Indians in the vicinity of Walla Walla (in present-day Washington state). An overbearing man who insisted that the Indians accept none other but the Christian God (and his version of that God), Whitman fell afoul of the Cayuse during a measles epidemic that killed half their number. Blamed for the epidemic, he and his pretty blonde wife, Narcissa, were massacred on November 29, 1847.

  “What Hath God Wrought?”

  Historians often refer to the emigrant trails as “avenues” of civilization—as if they were neatly constructed highways. In fact, the trails were often nothing more than a pair of wheel ruts worn by one wagon after another. Yet, even as ox hooves and iron-rimmed wheels crunched through the dust of rudimentary trails, a very different, very modern means of linking the continent emerged.

  In 1819, the Danish scientist Hans C. Oersted (1777-1851) discovered the principle of “induction” when he noticed that a wire carrying an electric current deflected a magnetic needle. After this discovery, a number of scientists and inventors began experimenting with deflecting needle telegraphs. Two scientists, William F. Cooke and Charles Wheatstone, installed a practical deflecting needle telegraph along a railway line in England in 1837. In 1825, William Sturgeon invented the electromagnet, and the experiments of Michael Faraday and Joseph Henry on electromagnetic phenomena in 1831 excited an American painter, Samuel F. B. Morse, to begin working on a telegraph receiver.

  Morse developed a device in which an electromagnet, when energized by a pulse of current from the line—that is, when the remote operator pressed a switch (“telegraph key”)—attracted a soft iron armature. The armature was designed to inscribe, on a piece of moving paper, dot and dash symbols, depending on the duration of the impulse. Morse developed “Morse Code” to translate the alphabet into combinations of dots and dashes. On March 4, 1844, Morse demonstrated his magnetic telegraph by sending the message “What hath God wrought?” from Baltimore to Washington.

  Morse’s receiver, as well as his code system, were widely adopted—although the cumbersome graphic device was soon abandoned. The difference between the dot and dash signals was quite audible, and a well-trained operator could translate them more quickly and reliably than any mechanical printing device. Within the span of only ten years, the single line from Baltimore to Washington had multiplied into 23,000 miles of line connecting the far-flung corners of the nation. In a burst of keystrokes, Morse compressed vast distance and gave the nation a technology that would help bind East to West.

  The Least You Need to Know

  Vast spaces were always America’s greatest resource as well as heaviest burden; a large nation was difficult to unify and govern.

  Technology played a key role in westward expansion. The McCormick reaper and Deere plow made farming the plains practical, and Morse’s telegraph made the vastness of the West less daunting.

  Word for the Day

  The dictionary will tell you that an emigrant is one who emigrates—that is, leaves one place to settle in another whereas an immigrant immigrates: he or she comes into a place. The emphasis is on arrival rather than departure. Be that as it may, those who made the westward trek were almost always called emigrants by their contemporaries.

  Stats

  Before the advent of the reaper, it took 20 hours to harvest an acre of wheat. By the time the McCormick device was fully perfected, about 1895, the same task consumed less than an hour.

  Word for the Day

  Telegraph literally means “distant writing,” or writing over distance. Morse’s earliest telegraph receiver actually traced out—wrote—the dots and dashes of Morse Code.

  Destiny

  (1846-1860)

  In This Chapter

  War with Mexico

  The Mormon Trek

  The Gold Rush of 1849

  Phrases enter and exit the American language as if it were a revolving door. But one phrase, used in 1845 by New York Post editor John L. O’Sullivan to describe America’s passion for the new lands of the West, rang out loudly and in tones that echoed through-out the entire century. “It is our manifest destiny,” O’Sullivan wrote, “to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.” Under the banner of “manifest destiny,” the American West would be won—the obstinacy of prairie soil, the harshness of the elements, the lives and life-ways of the Indians, and the rights of Mexico notwithstanding.

  After Texas gained its independence, the United States was reluctant to accept the new-born republic’s bid for annexation. Not only would the Union be adding a slave state, but it would su
rely ignite war with Mexico. However, when France and England made overtures of alliance to Texas, outgoing President John Tyler urged Congress to adopt an annexation resolution. Tyler’s successor, James K. Polk, admitted Texas to the Union on December 29, 1845. In the meantime, England and France also seemed to be eyeing California, held so feebly by Mexico that it looked to be ripe and ready to fall into the hands of whomever was there to catch it.

  “Mr. Polk’s War”

  Polk was moved to action. He offered Mexico $40 million for the California territory. The Mexican president not only turned down the offer, but he refused even to see President Polk’s emissary. Thus rudely rebuffed, Polk commissioned the U.S. consul at Monterey (California), Thomas O. Larkin, to organize California’s small but powerful American community into a separatist movement sympathetic to annexation by the U.S. In the meantime, John Charles Fremont, an intrepid western explorer surveying potential transcontinental railroad routes for the U.S. Bureau of Topographical Engineers, marched onto the stage with the so-called Bear Flag Rebellion. California’s independence from Mexico was proclaimed.

  As far as Mexico was concerned, the independence of California merely added insult to injury. Mexico disputed with the United States the boundary of the new state of Texas. President Polk dispatched troops to Texas and, on May 13, 1846, declared war on Mexico. But even before the official declaration, Mexican forces laid siege against Fort Texas—present-day Brownsville—on May 1.

  General Zachary Taylor, marching to the relief of the fort, faced 6,000 Mexican troops with a mere 2,000 Americans, but he nevertheless emerged victorious in the May 8 Battle of Palo Alto. The battle set the pattern for the rest of the conflict. Usually outnumbered, the Americans almost always outmatched the poorly led Mexican forces.

  In the meantime, early in June, official U.S. action commenced against the Mexicans in California as Stephen Watts Kearny led the “Army of the West” from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to California via New Mexico. Near Santa Fe, at steep-walled Apache Canyon, New Mexico’s Governor Manuel Armijo set up an ambush to destroy Kearny’s column, but the governor’s ill-disciplined and ill-equipped troops panicked and dispersed. Kearny passed through the canyon unopposed, Santa Fe was taken, and on August 15, New Mexico was annexed to the United States, all without firing a shot.

  General Taylor attacked Monterrey (Mexico) on September 20, 1846, taking the city after a four-day siege. Taylor declined to capitalize on what he had gained and allowed Mexican forces to withdraw. In the meantime, the remarkably resilient Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who had been living as an exile in Cuba after a rebellion had ended his dictatorship of Mexico, made a proposal to the government of the United States. He pledged to help the U.S. win the war, to secure a Rio Grande boundary for Texas, and to secure a California boundary through San Francisco Bay. In return, Santa Anna asked for $30 million and safe passage to Mexico. American officials were prudent enough not to pay him, but Santa Anna was allowed to return to his homeland—whereupon he began assembling an army to defeat Zachary Taylor.

  By January 1847, Santa Anna had gathered 18,000 men, about 15,000 of whom he hurled against Taylor’s 4,800-man force at Buena Vista. After two days of bloody battle, Taylor—incredibly—forced Santa Anna’s withdrawal on February 23. Despite this signal victory, President Polk was distressed by Taylor’s repeated reluctance to capitalize on his victories and also worried lest he make a military celebrity out of a potential political rival. So Polk replaced Taylor with General Winfield Scott, hero of the War of 1812. On March 9, Scott launched an invasion of Veracruz, beginning with the first amphibious assault in U.S. military history. He laid siege against the fortress at Veracruz for 18 days, forcing Santa Anna to withdraw to the steep Cerro Gordo canyon with 8,000 of his best troops.

  Scott declined the frontal attack the Mexicans expected. Instead, he sent part of his force to cut paths up either side of Cerro Gordo and attacked in a pincers movement, sending Santa Anna’s troops into headlong retreat all the way to Mexico City. Scott took the kind of gamble Taylor would not have taken and boldly severed his rapidly pursuing army from its slower-moving supply lines. On September 13, Chapultepec Palace, the seemingly impregnable fortress guarding Mexico City, fell to Scott. (The Palace had been defended by a force that included teenage cadets from the Mexican Military College. These cadets are celebrated in Mexican history as “Los Ninos,” the children.) On September 17, Santa Anna surrendered.

  The Mexican War ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which was ratified by the Senate on March 10, 1848. Mexico ceded to the United States New Mexico (which also included parts of the present states of Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado) and California. The Mexicans also renounced claims to Texas above the Rio Grande.

  God and Gold

  The Mexican War was controversial. Citizens in the Northeast, especially in New England, saw the war as an unfair—somehow un-American—war of aggression, and they protested it. Southerners and Westerners, however, thrilled to the cause, volunteering to fight in such numbers that recruiting offices were overwhelmed and had to turn eager men away. Right, wrong, or somewhere in between, the war vastly expanded the territory of the United States.

  A Trek

  The force of war was not the only engine that drove “manifest destiny.” The West likewise lured seekers of God and those who lusted after gold. In March 1830, a young Joseph Smith, Jr. published something he called The Book of Mormon. One month later, he started a religion based on the book, which relates how, in 1820, the 15-year-old Smith was visited by God the Father and Jesus Christ near his family’s farm in upstate New York. Three years after this, young Smith was visited by an angel named Moroni, who instructed him to dig in a certain place on a nearby hill. There Smith unearthed a book consisting of beaten gold plates engraved with the words of Moroni’s father, Mormon. The book told of a struggle between two tribes, one good, the other evil, which took place in the New World long before the arrival of Columbus. Moroni emerged as the sole survivor of the tribe of the good. Whoever dug up The Book of Mormon would be charged with restoring to the world the true Church of Christ.

  The church Smith founded in April 1830 consisted of six members. By 1844, 15,000 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—popularly called Mormons—were settled in Nauvoo, Illinois, the separatist community they had built. Persecuted wherever they went, the Mormons always lived apart. Particularly distasteful to “gentiles” (as Mormons called those outside of the faith) was the Mormon practice of polygamy (multiple wives).

  Opposition to the Mormons often grew violent. On June 27, 1844, a “gentile” mob murdered Joseph Smith and his brother. Smith’s second-in-command, the dynamic Brigham Young, realized that the Mormons would have to move somewhere so remote that no one would ever bother them again. Over the next two years, under his direction, a great migration was organized. The destination, which Young had read about in an account by John C. Fremont was near the Great Salt Lake in the present-day state of Utah.

  Young planned and executed the Mormon Trek with the precision and genius of a great general in time of war. Hundreds of wagons were built, and a staging area, called Camp of Israel, was set up in Iowa. Emigrant parties were deployed in groups of a few hundred at a time and sent 1,400 miles across some of the most inhospitable land on the face of the planet. During the 1840s and 1850s, Saints—as Mormons called themselves—poured into the Salt Lake region. Young oversaw the planning and construction of a magnificent town, replete with public squares, broad boulevards, and well-constructed houses, all centered around a great Temple Square. In addition, Young and his followers introduced into the arid Salt Lake Valley irrigation on a scale unprecedented in American agriculture. By 1865, 277 irrigation canals watered 154,000 square miles of what had been desert.

  All That Glitters

  Johann Augustus Sutter had bad luck with money. Born in Kandern, Germany, in 1803, he went bankrupt there and, to escape his many creditors, fled to the Mexican
Southwest, where he tried his fortune in the Santa Fe trade. Twice more Sutter went bust, before finally settling in Mexican California in 1838, where he managed to build a vast ranch in the region’s central valley.

  Presumably, January 24, 1848, started like any other day on the ranch. James Wilson Marshall, an employee of Sutter’s, went out to inspect the race of a new mill on the property. He was attracted by something shiny in the sediment collected at the bottom of the mill race. It was gold.

  Within a month and a half of the discovery, all of Sutter’s employees had deserted him, in search of gold. Without a staff, Sutter’s ranch faltered. Worse, his claims to the land around the mill were ultimately judged invalid. While everyone around Sutter (it seemed) grew instantly rich, Sutter himself was, yet again, financially ruined and would die, bitter and bankrupt, in 1880.

  It was not Marshall or Sutter, but a Mormon entrepreneur who did the most to stir up the great Gold Rush of 1849. Sam Brannon was one of a very few Mormon men brash enough to challenge the authority of Brigham Young. In defiance of Young, Brannon had set up his own Mormon community in the vicinity of San Francisco—then called Yerba Buena (good herb). Brannon saw in the discovery of gold a chance to profit from serving the needs of hopeful prospectors and other settlers. Fresh from a trip to Salt Lake City, where Young had excommunicated him from the church, Brannon took a quinine bottle, filled it with gold dust, and ran out into the streets of his town. “Gold!” he yelled. “Gold! Gold from the American River!” For good measure, he covered the gold story in The California Star, a newspaper he owned. Within two weeks, the population of Yerba Buena plummeted from a few thousand to a few dozen, as men dropped their tools and left their jobs to prospect on the south fork of the American River.