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By Root 1477 0

log cabin or a sod hut of prairie turf, its doors built from wood packing crates. What would later grow into the grand cities of the American Midwest were then nothing but muddy outposts, often with more livestock than people walking their streets. Nearly everything had to be done by hand and took great physical effort. As they converted prairie into planting field, farmers struggled with grass roots so old and stubborn that steel plows were needed to overturn the soil. Their wives spent hours in household drudgery, washing the family’s clothing, preparing meals, dipping candles, making soap out of lye, churning butter. Even though textile mills and sewing machines mass-produced clothes in the East, most women of the Midwest still made their garments by hand: combing wool, spinning yarn, weaving cloth, then stitching with thread and needle. Work defined even recreation, as families organized their social lives around communal labor, such as corn husking, flax making, and quilting.

Although the middle of the country remained relatively sparsely populated during the early- to mid-nineteenth century, many farmers began to feel more and more penned in with the arrival of each new family. What “crowded” meant to them might startle a city dweller today, and the urge to go westward never abated. One man decided to leave Illinois because “people were settling right under his nose”—twelve miles away.

The 1840s saw a significant rise in the number of families venturing westward from the Midwest to settle the Great Plains, that plateau between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains that stretches from Canada in the north to Texas in the south. They journeyed by covered wagon over unbroken stretches of prairie inhabited by enormous buffalo herds, following the wheel marks of other pioneers before them, across flat seas of grass all the way to a horizon that never seemed to change.

This expansionism was reinforced by a swelling sense of national chauvinism regarding the United States’ right to dominate the continent. During the 1840s, the federal government threatened war with Canada over the northern border of Oregon, declared war on Mexico, and then forced its southern neighbor to cede large western territories that would become the states of California and New Mexico. Journalist John L. O’Sullivan coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny” to describe the prevailing, though arrogant, belief among Americans that the entire expanse of the continent belonged to them, as if preordained by Providence. In the next three decades, a quarter of a million Americans crossed the nation from east to west.

The most adventurous pioneers pushed across the plains to California, all the more swiftly after news of the discovery of gold there in 1848 spread across the world. To reach the West Coast, pioneers had to cross first the Rocky Mountains and then the Sierra Nevada by wagon or stagecoach, relying on guides and scouts to lead them through traversable passes. In fact, so treacherous was this journey that some who were intent on reaching California opted instead for one of two indirect routes, each thousands of miles longer than the direct one. The first was to sail all the way around South America, a sea voyage of more than ten thousand miles. The second was a combination of land and sea routes: booking an ocean voyage to Central America, crossing by land to the Pacific Ocean, then proceeding by ship north up the West Coast.

For the Chinese headed for California from across the Pacific, the greatest threat would come not from the harshness of nature, but from the cruelty of fellow humans and the racism endemic to their beloved “Gold Mountain.” When the founding fathers of the United States “ordained and established” a Constitution intended, in the words of its preamble, to “establish justice ... and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,” they excluded blacks from those blessings and saw no place in their society for the people living on the land before the arrival of Europeans. As the white population expanded