Though frontier race relations were complex and even free African Americans were unarguably second-class citizens in comparison to whites, many people ultimately recognized only two kinds of people: “whites” and Indians. The white category…
The Emancipation Proclamation appears to have been the catalyst that launched the unfortunate slave on a journey to his doom. That spring, according to Owens’ letter, the slave’s master, afraid he would lose his…
Exactly how many blacks traversed the continent is unclear, but they were only a tiny fraction of the entire emigration. In 1860, California’s population was 379,994, of which 200,335 traveled overland. There is no…
The presence of black emigrants who traveled west before the Civil War was an oddity occasionally noted in emigrants’ diaries. Anna Maria Goodell, for example, commented in 1854, “There is a darkey in the company.”…
Westering Americans believed that overspreading the continent with their yearly multiplying millions was a God-given right, perhaps even pre-ordained. They envisioned a nation of white people extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Renowned…
By 1912, when the last documented wagon trains crested South Pass, as many as 500,000 mostly white individuals had used this great highway.
It is a notorious fact that many of the overland stage drivers and stock tenders, between three and four decades ago, were inhabited by a species of vermin known as…
California's white population climbed from about 2,00 in 1848 to 100,000 by 1858. The tiny village of San Francisco, which had 200 residents in 18461 became the official port of entry, and by…
Washington, Jefferson, and other forward-thinking politicians had wanted to create a system of decent highways to promote settlement as well as postal service and weave the frontier into the fabric of the mother…
In the last year of Democrat James Buchanan's one term as president, about 31.4 million people, including slaves, lived in the United States, according to the census of 1860. But only about…
And here at Fort Davy Crockett Wislizenus and the two expilgrims cut the trail of the other group of innocents who had started to settle Oregon this year and were…
Like Narcissa and Eliza the women were casting the lines that emigrant wives were to follow - botanizing, collecting curious pebbles, gaping at the scenery, putting on their nightgowns and…
The bitterest money war in American history and the wildest speculation of the nineteenth century had precipitated the first national depression. The final Specie Circular, Andrew Jackson's broadside at the…
He met the Flatheads and Nez Perces at Ham's Fork. There is no way of knowing whether disgust or despair moved him chiefly, there is no way of knowing how…
Stewart may have had many motives for coming to the United States, but probably foremost among them was a desire to experience what seems to have been the finest of all sports…