“The Way West: Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way (1845-1864)”, Ken Burns (notes/commentary on video)

“Fewer than 20,000 white Americans lived west of the Mississippi River in 1845.”

1845-93 was the great conquest, the time when the square replaced the circle, Enemy Earth replaced Mother Earth, uniformity replaced diversity, the alienated individual replaced the integrated community, shoes and other barriers came between feet and ground.

There were 10 million Indians in North America when the first whites arrived.  Three-and-a-half centuries later only 360,000 Indians remained on the continent.

In exchange for wealth, beauty, game, and water, the Indians received trinkets, rum, microbes, and disrespect . . . and a kind of cultural (and even physical) genocide that is still going on and is nearly complete despite the protestations of a few to the contrary.

The American Ways of Life got replaced by “The American Way of Life” and a multitude of beautiful American Dreams got replaced by one tawdry, petty “American Dream”.

“They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement.  They must necessarily yield to the force of circumstance, and ‘ere long disappear.”—President Andrew Jackson (of course)

In 1843 the “permanent Indian frontier” (all of Texas and line extending thence north) began to crumble.  Explorer/promoter John C. Fremont had a lot to do with it.  That spring 1,000 pioneers stepped off into the “wilderness” at Independence, Missouri bound for the promised lands of California and Oregon on their way to create heaven on earth (the operative word being “create”) . . . morality lay in “making the wilderness bloom”.  RIGHT was on their side.

Then came the 1846-48 war with Mexico, by the end of which more than 2 million square miles were added to the U.S.

January 24, 1848, James Marshall . . . “Boys, I believe I have found a goldmine” . . . Keep it a secret?  Yea, right.

In less than a year the population of San Francisco jumped from 429 to 725,000.  Two years after January 1848, California entered the Union as the 31st state.

“They were the freest people the world has ever known.” (Stephen E. Ambrose, historian, re the Plains Indians (and others?) in the early 1840s.  “They had freedom such as the world has never known.  No one else has ever experienced anything to compare with being a Sioux Indian in the 1840s with these magnificent horses and this marvelous sweep of grasslands and these immense herds of buffalo, and the opportunity to ride and to hunt and to live freely and to live without restraint—the openness of Indian life, the absence of geographical restraint, the absence of political restraint . . .”  [But cf Mabury-Lewis]

It must have been a slight culture-shock when these people were so completely deprived of every freedom they once enjoyed by the reservation system: deprived of movement, self-reliance, pride, hope, then tradition, thought, language, religion . . .

By ten years after the Gold Rush, the West Coast had 500,000 “Americans”.

“They were the most numerous, the most powerful, and the most recently arrived (my italics) . . .”  [Sound familiar?  Was it a reference to the Anglos on the Western frontier? The Mongols in 14th Century Asia?]  Surprise:  the divisions of Teton Lakota (Sioux)

Tribes differed in all ways except their attitude toward the Land.  Differed in attitude toward whites.  Tribes that once traded amiably with the whites now came to them to beg, steal, or try to exact payment for passage.