The Overland Trail also known as the Overland Stage Line was a stagecoach and wagon trail in the American west during the 19th century. While explorers and trappers had used portions of the route since the s, the Overland Trail was most heavily used in the s as an alternative route to the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails through central Wyoming. Starting from Atchison, Kansas, the trail descended into Colorado before looping back up to southern Wyoming and rejoining the Oregon Trail at Fort Bridger.
The stage line operated until , when completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad eliminated the need for mail service via stagecoach. Ruts on the Oregon Trail : So many wagons traveled the Oregon Trail that ruts are still visible along some sections. This photograph was taken in in Wyoming. In the 19th century, as today, relocating and starting a new life took money. Because of the initial cost of relocation, land, and supplies, as well as months of preparing the soil, planting, and subsequent harvesting before any produce was ready for market, the original wave of western settler-invaders along the Oregon Trail in the s and s consisted of moderately prosperous, white, native-born farming families from the east.
More recent immigrants also migrated west, with the largest numbers coming from Northern Europe and Canada. Germans, Scandinavians, and Irish were among the most common. Compared with European immigrants, those from China were much less numerous, yet still significant.
In addition to a significant European migration westward, several thousand African Americans migrated west following the Civil War, as much to escape the racism and violence of the Old South as to find new economic opportunities. The latter were were known as exodusters, referencing the biblical flight from Egypt, because they fled the racism of the South, with most headed to Kansas from Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.
By , over , African Americans lived west of the Mississippi River. While the motivation for private profit dominated much of the movement westward, the federal government played a supporting role in securing land and maintaining law and order. Despite the Jeffersonian aversion to, and mistrust of, federal power, the government bore more heavily into the West than any other region, fueled by the ideas of manifest destiny.
Because local governments in western frontier towns were often nonexistent or weak, westerners depended on the federal government to protect them and their rights. The federal government established a sequence of actions related to control over western lands.
First, it sent surveyors and explorers to map and document the land and ultimately acquire western territory from other nations or American Indian tribes by treaty or force. Next, it ordered federal troops to clear out and subdue any resistance from American Indians. It subsidized the construction of railroad lines to facilitate westward migration, and finally, it established bureaucracies to manage the land such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Land Office, US Geological Survey, and Forest Service.
By the end of the 19th century, the federal government had amassed great size, power, and influence in national affairs. Transportation was a key issue in westward expansion. The Army especially the Army Corps of Engineers was given full responsibility for facilitating navigation on the rivers. The steamboat, first used on the Ohio River in , made inexpensive travel using the river systems possible. The Mississippi and Missouri Rivers and their tributaries were especially used for this purpose.
Army expeditions up the Missouri River from to allowed engineers to improve the technology. During this period, Colonel Henry Atkinson developed keelboats with hand-powered paddle wheels. In addition to river travel, the Oregon and Overland Trails allowed for increased travel and migration to the West. The completion of the first transcontinental railroad in dramatically changed the pace of travel in the country, as people were able to complete in a week a route that had previously taken months.
The rigors of life in the West presented many challenges and difficulties to homesteaders. The land was dry and barren, and homesteaders lost crops to hail, droughts, insect swarms, and other challenges. There were few materials with which to build, and early homes were made of mud, which did not stand up to the elements.
Money was a constant concern, as the cost of railroad freight was exorbitant, and banks were unforgiving of bad harvests. For women, life was especially difficult; farm wives worked at least 11 hours a day on chores and had limited access to doctors or midwives.
Still, many women were more independent than their eastern counterparts and worked in partnership with their husbands. As the railroad expanded and better farm equipment became available, by the s, large farms began to succeed through economies of scale.
Yet small farms still struggled to stay afloat, leading to rising discontent among the farmers, who worked so hard for so little success. Although homestead farming was the primary goal of most western settlers in the latter half of the 19th century, a small minority sought to make their fortunes quickly through other means.
Specifically, gold and subsequently silver and copper prospecting attracted thousands of miners looking to get rich quickly before returning East. In addition, ranchers capitalized on newly available railroad lines to move longhorn steers that populated southern and western Texas.
This meat was highly sought after in eastern markets, and the demand created not only wealthy ranchers but an era of cowboys and cattle drives that in many ways defines how we think of the West today. Although neither miners nor ranchers intended to remain permanently in the West, many individuals from both groups ultimately stayed and settled there.
The American West became notorious for its hard mining towns. Deadwood, South Dakota, in the Black Hills, was an archetypal late gold town founded in Although the town was far from any railroad, 20, people lived there as of Tombstone, Arizona was a notorious mining town that flourished longer than most, from to Silver was discovered there in , and by the town had a population of over 10, Entrepreneurs in these and other towns set up stores and businesses to cater to the miners.
The popular image of the Wild West portrayed in books, television, and film has been one of violence and mayhem. The lure of quick riches through mining or driving cattle meant that much of the West indeed consisted of rough men living a rough life, although the violence was exaggerated and even glorified in the dime-store novels of the day. The exploits of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and others made for good stories, but the reality was that western violence was more isolated than the stories might suggest.
These clashes often occurred as people struggled for the scarce resources that could make or break their chance at riches, or as they dealt with the sudden wealth or poverty that prospecting provided. As wealthy men brought their families west, the lawless landscape slowly began to change. Abilene, Kansas is one example of a lawless town, replete with prostitutes, gambling, and other vices, that transformed when middle-class women arrived in the s with their husbands.
These women began to organize churches, schools, civic clubs, and other community programs to promote family values. Western mining towns : The first gold prospectors in the s and s worked with easily portable tools that allowed them to follow their dream and try to strike it rich a. It did not take long for the most accessible minerals to be stripped, making way for large mining operations, including hydraulic mining, where high-pressure water jets removed sediment and rocks b.
During the early years of settlement on the Great Plains, women played an integral role in ensuring family survival by working the fields alongside their husbands and children. This was in addition to their handling of many other responsibilities, such as child-rearing, feeding and clothing the family and hired hands, and managing the housework.
As late as , a typical farm wife could expect to devote 9 hours per day to chores such as cleaning, sewing, laundering, and preparing food. Two additional hours were spent cleaning the barn and chicken coop, milking the cows, caring for the chickens, and tending the family garden. While some women could find employment in the newly settled towns as teachers, cooks, or seamstresses, they originally were deprived of many rights. Women were not permitted to sell property, sue for divorce, serve on juries, or vote.
For the vast majority of women, work was not in towns for money, but on the farm. Despite these obstacles, the challenges of farm life eventually empowered women to break through certain legal and social barriers. Many lived more equitably as partners with their husbands than did their eastern US counterparts.
If widowed, a wife typically took over responsibility for the farm, a level of management very rare back east, where the farm would fall to a son or another male relation. Pioneer women made important decisions and were considered by their husbands to be more equal partners in the success of the homestead. Lawrence, Nicholas. Examines Typee in the context of US expansion. Identifies Typee as anti-imperialist. Lawson, Andrew.
Leverages the performative speech act theory of J. Matthiessen, F. Included here because the careers of these authors dovetail with the expansionist era. Menard, Andrew. Rowe, John Carlos. New York: Columbia University Press, Suggests rereading canonical works of the 19th and early 20th centuries with special attention to issues of race, class, and gender. Suggests centering formerly marginalized works deemed too political. Art historians and critics contribute a great deal to our understanding of the place of the West in American culture.
Sandweiss and Anderson both consider the role of the commercial market. Boime discusses a specific perspective characteristic of western landscape paintings. Neff and Daniels analyze the relationship between art, culture, and identity.
Hausdoerffer and Truettner analyze how art creates and promotes myths and stereotypes. Alternately, Miller demonstrates how landscape painting actually counters notions of manifest destiny. Anderson, Nancy. Edited by Marianne Doezema and Elizabeth Milroy, — Discusses the commercial market for landscape paintings. Draws an analogy between the mining of the West for aesthetic and material resources. Boime, Albert.
Landscape Painting, c. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, Discusses works by Bierstadt, Cole, Church, Moran, and others. Notes a shared, elevated perspective, offering a view from the heights to a scenic area below. This perspective, Boime contents, connects 19th-century landscape painting with the social and political doctrine of manifest destiny.
Contains forty-five black-and-white and eight color illustrations. Daniels, Stephen. Demonstrates how painters, architects, and landscape designers have expressed national identities in the United States and England from the late 18th century onward. Examines relationship between colonizer and colonized in art. Discusses J. Turner, Thomas Cole, and Frances Palmer, among others. Hausdoerffer, John. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, Despite a commitment to preservation, Catlin promoted stereotypes that reveal his partial complicity in 19th-century ideology.
Miller, Angela. Gorgeously illustrated study counters the popular view that 19th-century landscape paintings merely reflected manifest destiny ideology. Miller analyzes art in the context of its political, cultural, and institutional history. Neff, Emily. The Modern West: American Landscapes — Places these works into conversation with American Indian ledger drawings and Dineh sand paintings. Opening essay by Barry Lopez considers the relationship between culture and the landscape. Richly illustrated.
Sandweiss, Martha A. Edited by William Cronon, George A. Miles, and Jay Gitlin, — Notes that Anglo-American western art changed around to become more imaginary than factual.
Calls for an expanded definition of western art to accommodate differences between realism, romanticism, and modernism. Examines the impact of the art marketplace. Truettner, William H. Seven scholars consider the role of art in creating and perpetuating stereotypes and myths involving western conquest.
Contains over illustrations and biographies of eighty-six artists. Manifest destiny drove territorial acquisition and expansion, moving borders and changing maps. The works included here share a common interest in how Americans perceived space through maps and depictions of the landscape. Snow and Kastor examine the Early American period. Hyde and Baker look at language; the former analyzes the effect of new landscapes on language, and the latter locates anxiety over national expansion in a variety of print and visual sources.
In a theoretical argument informed by Foucault, Harley regards maps as sites of ideological power. The author of Winlow furnishes the most recent example of scholarship included here with her study of the social and geographic marginalization of Native Americans. Baker, Anne. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Examines the anxiety accompanying expansion through letters, speeches, editorials, textbooks, as well as in literature and visual culture.
Surmises two main sources of anxiety: concern that the largeness of the country threatened democracy and fear over the addition of racial and religious Others. Considers 19th-century linguistic strategies for imagining the nation. Hsu, eds.
Newark: University of Delaware Press, This interdisciplinary essay collection traces convergences between American literary history and geography. This collection favors a spatial, rather than a temporal, approach to American literature. See especially essays by Alex Hunt and Anne Baker. Harley, J. Edited by Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, — London: Cambridge University Press, Approaches maps as social constructions with ideological power.
Explores symbolic dimensions of maps through iconology. Examines the relationship between maps and nationalism, and their contributions to conquest and colonization. Hyde, Anna Farrrar. Social and cultural history demonstrating how prideful responses to the western landscape necessitated the development of new words and forms of description. Traces changing conceptions of western resorts as first offering protection against the landscape and then as extending the scenery.
Kastor, Peter J. Examines how opposing attitudes toward expansion influenced US cultural production using pamphlets from — debating the Louisiana Purchase, travel narratives and maps from veteran explorers published in the following decade. Notes an ambivalent vision of western lands in these documents that the author contrasts with later manifest destiny rhetoric. Snow, Spencer. Winlow, Heather. Analyzes the increasing social and geographic marginalization of Native Americans over the 19th and early 20th centuries through three lenses: dominant US ideologies, federal policies, and the mapping of national space including a case study of Oklahoma in In a Marxist tradition, these works examine the workings of a hegemonic national ideology within American literature and culture.
They remind us of the imperialist dimensions of manifest destiny ideology as it justified not only the taking of the North American continent but also more distant lands. Together Williams and Kaplan provide an excellent entry point into the subject matter. Jehlen is a groundbreaking work in the field.
Streeby is an invaluable resource for studies of 19th-century popular culture. Steinmetz furnishes a comparative sociological approach. Ramirez applies the racial logic of manifest destiny to a novel about a Mexican American protagonist.
Jehlen, Myra. Maintains that Europeans understood America in material rather than conceptual terms, as a land without history. The ideology of liberal individualism projected onto the New World, Jehlen argues, both empowered individuals and limited social change. Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.
Landmark essay collection focusing on the intertwined discourses of domesticity, romance, and imperialism in lateth-century culture and literature. Ramirez, Pablo A. Steinmetz, George. Imperialism in Comparative Historical Perspective. US westward expansion is included as a subtype of the territorial type of imperialist practices.
Examines cultural, psychic, and economic forces influencing and affected by empire. Employs Marxist and postcolonial theory. Streeby, Shelley. Berkeley: University of California Press, Contends that dime novels and other sensational working-class literature of late s show the deep influence of US-Mexican War and other 19th-century imperial projects on US culture and politics.
Indispensable resource for articulating connections between empire and US culture and history. Williams, William Appleman. Empire as a Way of Life. Traces the American preoccupation with empire from revolutionary times through Reagan. Buell is an authoritative text for analyzing literary representations of nature. Abrams is included for its distinguished status and focus on important midth-century authors. Merchant makes a direct connection between a recurring narrative and manifest destiny ideology.
Abrams, Robert E. Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture. Midth-century American writers developed new concepts of landscape and space, denoting an interpretive limit to national expansion, according to Abrams. An important study of how the environment is represented in literature using Walden as its central text.
In discussing environmental nonfiction from the colonial era to the late 20th century, Buell identifies enduring themes, such as the personification of the landscape and a sense of impending environmental catastrophe.
Merchant, Carolyn. New York: Routledge, This compelling study suffers somewhat from its broad focus. The scholars included here all write about the role of film, especially Westerns, in transmitting manifest destiny ideology with their stylized versions of national mythology.
Corkin examines the strategic deployment of manifest destiny mythology in Cold War—era Westerns. Fojas and Fregoso look at film representations of the US-Mexico border. Gann and Gann partly shares that focus, as these works include an analysis of Lone Star , set on a Texas border town, along with other films, as well as literature dating back to the Puritan era.
Corkin, Stanley. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, Argues that Cold War—era Westerns helped their viewers absorb imperialist practices. Further, that the genre eased American audiences through a time of international crisis by reiterating the myths of manifest destiny. Fojas, Camilla. Border Bandits: Hollywood on the Southern Frontier. Austin: University of Texas Press, Important study showing how big Hollywood movies use the border between the United States and Mexico to construct narratives about US power in the Southern Hemisphere and reinforce American values.
Also discusses the counter-hegemonic force of Latino border movies in revising cultural attitudes and opposing US nationalism. Fregoso, Rosa Linda. Fregoso unravels the racial, sexual, and national anxieties underpinning representations of Chicanas and Mexicanas in a variety of film genres. Chapter 7 examines the role of sexuality and race in the US colonial project. Gann, Randall Lee. Traces manifest destiny ideology from its historical origins to more modern iterations in 20th-century American Western films to show the adaptability of the exceptionalist narrative.
Informed by theories of deconstruction, postcolonialism, Marxism, and film. Hawks and Lone Star dir. Contends that Western films reproduce the logic of Manifest Destiny while obscuring the work of empire. These six works represent very different approaches to a common subject. Kolodny presents a groundbreaking feminist reading of the frontier.
Limerick , a seminal work of history, explores the violence enacted against Natives at the frontier. Mogen, et al. Grossman departs from the focus on the written word to consider cultural artifacts and icons associated with the Old West. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, She finds power in the margins in this manifesto on culture and identity construction. This text reflects her scholarly interest in the ideas and tropes of hybridity, flexibility, and plurality. Grossman, James R.
Foremost New West historians discuss the role of the West in forming American identity. White discusses the enduring legacies of Turner and Buffalo Bill Cody. Focusing on artifacts from the Newberry Library, the pair demonstrates how contemporary understandings of time and place reflect much older views of the American West. Kolodny, Annette. Investigates how women created their own Western mythology in writings about the frontier. Presents a gendered interpretation of frontier writing wherein men viewed wilderness as something to be possessed, while women saw it as a garden to be cultivated.
Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest. Important work reconsiders the significance of the West, focusing on the persistent injustice that invading white conquerors inflicted and continue to inflict upon natives and ethnic minorities. Identifies two aspects of conquest: competition for natural resources and for cultural dominance. Mitchell, Lee Clark. Concerns over their complicity in this vanishing would eventually cause Americans to question the values of their national culture, according to Mitchell.
Mogen, David, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B. Essays examining the gothic tradition in frontier writing. Essayists demonstrate how the gothic world of these texts impacted the everyday world in the 19th century. Stories of frontier settlement typically privilege the male perspective. The scholars in this category attempt to counter the hyper-masculinized portrait of the American West by recovering female-authored texts, offering reinterpretations of standard texts, or analyzing the intersection of gender and imperialism.
Baym and Taketani engage in the recovery project. Kolodny and Tompkins take on gender stereotypes and constructions in Western literature. Greenberg furnishes a historical analysis of the influence of gender ideology on filibustering. Along with Greenberg , Kenny examines historical constructions of masculinity.
Sears and Griffin apply queer and transgender theory to their examinations of the California gold rush and a gender-bending 19th-century novel, respectively. Kaplan is a key text for feminist literary studies of manifest destiny. Baym, Nina. Women Writers of the American West, — Champaign: University of Illinois Press, Recovers hundreds of forgotten Western women writers in a variety of genres, along with more famous writers like Cather and Mary Austin.
Focus on representations of women and the region. Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press, Demonstrates how gender ideology in the United States influenced attitudes toward expansion, conquest, and exploration in Latin America and the Pacific.
Griffin, Megan Jenison. Important essay critiques the separate public and private spheres. Contends that 19th-century feminist authors stressed the influence of the female-centered domestic sphere on national expansion, and urged women to spread their national values to domesticate the expanding foreign population within US borders.
Kenny, Gale L. Kenny explores the gendered assumptions of manifest destiny in source materials including pro-emigration pamphlets and abolitionist newspaper articles.
Argues the female gendering of Nature contributes to stereotypes, promotes a resourcist view of nature, and separates humans from nature. Applies Freudian and Jungian theory to canonical works to analyze the trope wherein the hero flees a society pictured as feminine and then projects his own fantastical ideas about women onto nature. Sears, Clare. Studies the writings of Euro-American migrant men.
Taketani, Etsuko. Women Writers and the Discourses of Colonialism, — Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, Examines antebellum works by white US women in different genres with colonial and neocolonial settings. Tompkins, Jane. Considers the effect of Westerns, a male-dominated genre, on the 20th-century American imagination. A growing body of research is fast emerging from the fields of hemispheric and transnational literary and historical studies.
These critics make the case for expanding the category of American literature beyond national borders, to conceive of America more broadly as a nexus of exchange, movement, and influence.
Hemispheric and transnational criticism shares much with the works listed under Culture and Imperialism. Giles and Wertheimer argue for a reevaluation of the way we delimit space and time in literary and cultural studies. Murphy and Rowe take on the related issues of isolationism and defensive nationalism. The stories of individuals affected by global imperialism are used to critique contemporary policy decisions in Campbell, et al. Pease provides a comprehensive introduction to transnationalism as conceived within literary studies.
Gupta remarks upon the transatlantic influence of Bret Harte on James Joyce. Campbell, James T. Lee, eds. Highlights the stories of relatively obscure figures impacted by global imperialism both inside and outside the United States. Considers the intertwined processes of boundary formation and crossing.
Connects events and attitudes dating back from the colonial period to earlyst-century neoconservative policy. Giles, Paul. Following Edward Said, argues American literature should be imagined in terms of space rather than time.
Such a reconfiguration challenges established critical traditions reliant on temporal notions like destiny and prophesy. Gupta, Nikhil. Argues that in Ulysses Joyce takes a more hopeful view of Irish national progress. Murphy, Gretchen.
Novels discussed include Hobomok and House of the Seven Gables. Pease, Donald E. Edited by Winifred Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe, 1— Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College, In early American literature this defensive, paranoid stance creates a desire for borders. Rowe locates the origins of manifest destiny in this social psychology.
National expansion manages threats by casting them beyond national boundaries. Wertheimer, Eric. Contends that theories and histories of Manifest Destiny focus on the New World in relation to Europe, obscuring US domination of southern locations. Wesling, Meg. Imperialism in the Philippines. Examines English language and American literature education in the newly acquired Philippines and the birth of the field of American literature. Looks at education as assimilation in Philippines, arguing that territorial expansion shaped the field of American literature in critical but unseen ways.
These works by noted Latin American studies scholars may be divided into two groups: those that focus on the US-Mexico War and take a more strictly historical approach and those that examine varied cultural productions to comment on US-Mexico relations. Midth-century Mexican public opinion is examined primarily through expressions in the Mexican press both liberal and conservative and the utterances of Mexican politicians and intellectuals.
Provides a useful historical and cultural background. Gomez, Laura E. Blends law, history, and sociology. Boston: Beacon, Relocates cultural studies by arguing for the centrality of the US-Mexico border. Discusses the militarization around border areas and the demonization of immigrants. Examines a range of cultural productions, including music and literature. Sanchez employs a borderlands framework and draws on the work of James Clifford, George Marcuse, and Renato Rosaldo to argue that cultural identity is always in process.
Vargas, Zaragosa. This survey of Mexican American history fully engages with the most recent scholarship and current debates. Manifest destiny is itself a rhetorical invention and an important narrative trope.
Her two five-hundred-mile stretches of coast-line, east and west, separated by the whole circumference of South America, would be brought into immediate juxtaposition. Colombia would be a great beneficiary of this work, and it was clearly her duty to aid in its accomplishment.
She had no right to consider her consent as such aid, for she had no moral right to withhold such consent. The very least that she could do would have been to grant a free right of way, with such control as would be necessary to the nation building the canal. From any possible standpoint of equity and justice, the cash contribution, if there were to be any, should have been from Colombia to the state which was going to the prodigious expense of building the canal.
Instead of this, Colombia demanded, and in the interests of harmony, no doubt was granted, a cash contribution by that state.
Its sufficiency need not be discussed, for according to any equitable consideration there should have been no payment at all. The Hay-Herran Treaty erred, if at all in this matter, in excess of generosity to Colombia. Although the treaty was negotiated with the apparent approval of the Colombian government, and necessarily with its full knowledge of the essential features, it was unanimously rejected when it came to ratification by the Colombian Senate.
This occurred about ten months after the treaty was signed, at which time the Colombian Congress adjourned, not to meet again for a year, and the matter was hung up at least for that period with every prospect of interminable delay afterward. The ostensible reason assigned was refuted by the document itself. The real reason, as believed by the American government at the time, and as firmly believed still by those instrumental in the negotiations, was a determination to extort a larger payment.
An actual situation had now arisen in which a major right was in direct conflict with a minor and technical right. Colombia was interposing unjust, unreasonable, and, from our point of view, dishonorable obstacles, with every prospect of long and vexatious delay, international complications, and possible complete failure of the enterprise.
A vast expenditure had already been made by the United States; with infinite study a course of action had been determined upon; the government was ready to proceed. What, then, was its duty in the obvious impasse that had arisen? There is no right of eminent domain among nations.
The United States had made every reasonable concession to the holder of technical sovereignty, but without avail. It is submitted that in this situation duty and honor required the United States summarily to brush Colombia aside and proceed with the work assigned to it. This, as we understand it, was the view of the administration at the time, and it was about to recommend drastic action against Colombia direct, when events developed which made such measures unnecessary.
The Province of Panama, exasperated by the policy of the mother country, revolted and declared its independence. The United States, by virtue of treaty rights, forbade the transport of troops across the Isthmus and any armed conflict along the line of the Isthmian railway.
This effectually prevented the Colombian government from suppressing the rebellion, even if it had otherwise been able to do so; the Panama Republic was promptly recognized by the United States and the leading nations of the world; a canal treaty was entered into with the new state; the construction of the Canal was at once begun and was carried to triumphant completion.
This decisive result was, of course, due to coercion by the United States upon Colombia—no less so, though less directly, than if war had been declared upon that state. It is a fact not to be denied or glossed over, but to be openly commended. Then and there the vexed question was settled forever, and the world is to-day— to-day , not in the indefinite future—reaping the benefit of the completed work. Yet amid the chorus of universal acclaim for this greatest engineering feat of all time, the voice of criticism—nay, even of calumny—is heard for those who were its pioneers.
But what matters it? The work itself is a sufficient answer, and the ships which are passing to and fro are a silent and everlasting vindication.
We have considered two historic examples— faits accomplis , so to speak. It is not generally realized that there exists on the American border to-day a similar situation, which, though less important in the area of territory and magnitude of interests involved, is even the line of action which must be taken.
Five years after the close of the Mexican War, the United States negotiated with Mexico, on friendly and equitable terms, the acquisition of an additional strip of territory which exploration had shown to be necessary for a southern railroad route entirely north of the boundary.
This cession embraced about 45, square miles, all of it east of the Colorado River. If physical conditions in contiguous territory had been known then as they are now, undoubtedly the purchase would have included an additional square miles lying mainly on the west side of the Colorado. Within this territory is what is now known as the Imperial Valley, of which nearly every one has vaguely heard, but of the remarkable nature of which very little is generally known.
In the not remote geologic past, the Gulf of California extended northwesterly some miles farther inland than at present, — far into what is now the State of California.
In the course of time the Colorado River, a large stream and a very heavy silt-carrier, built a dam by its deposits clear across the Gulf, cutting off entirely the upper portion, which was thus changed from a body of salt water to a fresh-water lake.
Finally, as a result of the long exclusion of the river, which for centuries has flowed directly into the Gulf, evaporation emptied the lake and left an immense basin, most of it the former bed of the sea, and, of course, below sea-level. Along the eastern margin of the basin, fully feet above its lowest point, flows the Colorado River. Below its level at the international boundary, lies this basin more than square miles in extent. It was once supposed to be incapable of reclamation, and was known as the Colorado desert.
It has since been found to be of extraordinary fertility, physically well adapted to irrigation, capable of becoming a highly productive country and ultimately of supporting a population of perhaps a million.
Remarkable and wholly unprecedented is the relation of the Colorado River to the Imperial Valley. On the one hand it is the sole reclaiming agency anywhere available. Water for irrigation, domestic supply, and so forth, must come from this river or not be had at all. On the other hand, the river, flowing along the upper rim of the basin, rests there in unstable equilibrium, liable at any time to burst its bounds and go into the basin instead of the sea.
While dispensing manna where all would be death without it, it hangs like a sword of Damocles, ready at any moment to destroy all that it has built up. Both aspects of this situation have been vividly impressed upon local and official attention in the past ten years. The river did not break loose in , and is still not fully under control.
It wrought immense havoc. Most of us recall references in the press to the Salton Sea, which suddenly began to rise in the bottom of the basin. To control the river and get it back into its old channel to the sea has been one of the most stupendous and difficult of engineering problems.
The relation of this problem to the subject of the present paper may now be stated. Download Image. The philosophy describing the necessary expansion of the nation westward was called Manifest Destiny ; the belief that it was our duty to settle the continent, conquer and prosper. The settlers have overcome hazardous terrain and death in order to reach the American West, bathed in a welcoming golden light.
This vision of the frontier as a promised land persisted. There was a price to be paid, however. Frontiersmen had to be willing to face the risks inherent in migration — but had their parents not faced similar risks in coming to America? They had to be willing to do the backbreaking work required to turn a wilderness into prosperous farms and towns — but had their ancestors not done that as well?
They had to be willing to break with the familiar and comfortable, and face hardship — perhaps even death. The finished mural, located in the United States Capitol Building, served as propaganda for many Americans looking for a brighter future. This was something that was sorely sought after the time — for at the time this work was painted, the Civil War had just begun.
The theme of American destiny continues in another Capitol mural study, this one for the dome on the Capitol Building. Artist Constantino Brumidi has focused on the eminence of America. At the center is its founding father, George Washington, surrounded by allegories of American inventions and leaders which helped put this country on the path to greatness.
The completed Capitol dome mural was finished in one month, April , the same month in which the Confederacy surrendered and Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Capitol during of one of the most tumultuous times in American history — the onset of the Civil War. The painting celebrates the belief that the American West held both unspoiled beauty and infinite promise for a better future.
What can we learn about the ideals surrounding westward expansion from this artwork? How do artists employ symbolism to augment a specific message in their work? The surging crowd of figures records the births, deaths, and battles fought as European Americans settled the continent to the edge of the Pacific.
Central among them is a three-person family group seated on a promontory and looking to the sunset — an allusion to the Biblical holy family. At the bottom of the composition are small, round portraits of explorer William Clark, at left, and frontiersman Daniel Boone, at right. The portraits flank a landscape painting of San Francisco Bay — the western destination of the pioneers. Both men were entrusted to lead settlers into western territories, with Boone exploring and settling the lands of Kentucky, and Clark of Lewis and Clark fame a pioneer explorer of the land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase and later governor of the Missouri Territory.
In one section, Leutze depicts the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts. This fleece, having been won after a long quest, fulfills a prophecy and returns Jason to his rightful place as king. Leutze reinforces his theme of exploration through a profile portrait of Christopher Columbus left , seemingly taking measure of the world with a globe and calipers. At the bottom right, Leutze situates a dove bearing an olive branch.
Here he alludes to the end of the Old Testament flood. The dove carries proof of dry land to Noah, bearing with it assurances that his seven-month journey across a decimated, watery world is nearing its end. At the top of the margin, front and center, is an American eagle with wings spread. In it, Berkeley predicted that Western expansion would make America the site of the next golden age.
What significance might this image have held for Americans at the start of the Civil War? Emmanuel Leutze was trained abroad as a history painter. In , the Louisiana Purchase almost doubled the size of the United States. Over the next few decades the status of newly admitted western states and territories as free or slave would add fuel to the already contentious relationship between the North and the South. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of allowed the people living in those territories to decide whether slavery was allowed within their borders.
By the time Leutze executed this mural study in , the war was underway and the nation torn in two. With Westward the Course… Leutze encoded a message of national unity, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
This study, and the final mural that would ultimately decorate the House of Representatives side of the U. To that end, Leutze wove together images of the past and present, suffering and success, juxtaposing the hardships of the pioneer voyagers with the triumphs of heroes and explorers.
He chose the vignettes of heroes on the move for the margin to reinforce this point. What can we learn about the way our country saw itself and wished to present itself around ? What clues does the artist, Constantino Brumidi, give us? Observing details and analyzing components of the painting, then putting them in historical context, enables the viewer to interpret the overall message of the work of art.
Look at this overall image. What do you notice about shape of this picture? How about your viewpoint? Where do you think you would find it hanging in a museum? This painting is round and, apart from the group of figures in the center, can be seen correctly from anywhere around its circular edge.
Does it feel like you are looking up when you view the painting? This work hangs flat on a gallery wall in the museum, but it is a study — or a draft — created by the artist. The final work is much, much larger in size and is painted on a ceiling. This work is the study for the mural that the same artist painted in the Rotunda, the space inside the dome of the Capitol of the United States. The cap, called a Phrygian cap, was worn by freed slaves in ancient Rome and is a symbol of freedom.
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