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By Root 1482 0

and moved westward, both the federal and various state governments waged a campaign against those Native Americans whose usefulness as trading partners had ended. In the early nineteenth century, the U.S. government used its military superiority to force Native Americans to sign treaties ceding, tract by tract, the richest part of the land to whites, and then banished them to desolate reservations. The tacit process of extermination took even more direct and brutal forms. In California, the state legislature at one time offered bounty hunters a fee for each Indian scalp turned in. Eventually murder, hunger, heartbreak, and disease had their desired effect. In 1790 there were almost four million American Indians, but by 1844, fewer than thirty thousand remained east of the Mississippi, a much more manageable inconvenience for the white man.

Yet, by the mid-nineteenth century, some of the oppressed groups in America were starting to find their voices. Working women organized strikes, some violent, smashing through eastern factories with brickbats and stones. They demanded access to education. The era saw the first woman graduate of a medical school, and the first medical school for women established in Pennsylvania. A few daring women abandoned their confining corsets and petticoats for a new style called “bloomers,” baggy, gownlike pants that allowed them a new freedom of movement that did not expose them to the charge that they were flashing views of their legs as they went about active lives. In 1848, the first American convention to discuss women’s rights convened in Seneca Falls, New York, launching the female suffrage movement. The delegates issued a manifesto modeled after the Declaration of Independence, demanding that the legal right to own property, pursue education, and vote be extended to women. In the coming decades, the most oppressed population—the enslaved blacks—would see their cause taken up across the country. Inspired by the words of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, American abolitionists forced their fellow citizens, many far removed from those states where it was practiced, to face the evil of slavery. In 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an anti-slavery book that focused the world’s attention on that horrendous institution.

Although the Chinese came from the most populous nation on earth, at the time of the gold rush perhaps fewer than fifty of them lived in the continental United States. This tiny population included merchants, former sailors, and a handful presented to the American public as sideshow curiosities. Their limited number made them highly marketable commodities in a country captivated by the mystery and exoticism of the East. Afong Moy, the first recorded Chinese woman in America, came to New York City in 1834 as part of a cultural exhibit. Museums in New York and Brooklyn displayed the sixteen-year-old Moy in a life-size diorama, seated on an oriental latticework chair, wearing a silk gown and slippers, as if she were a rare zoological specimen. Audiences watched with fascination as she ate with chopsticks, counted in Chinese and did computations on her abacus, and minced about on her “monstrously small” four-inch-long bound feet. A few years later, a second Chinese woman, starring as a museum showpiece under the aegis of American circus pioneer Phineas T. Barnum, attracted twenty thousand spectators in only six days. A “double-jointed Chinese dwarf Chin Gan” also appeared before huge crowds in America. But the most successful performers were Chang and Eng Bunker, the eponymous Siamese twins, who shared a liver and a five-inch ligament of flesh connecting their torsos. Even though the Bunker twins gained wide renown for their deformity, which reinforced the popular image of all Asians as freaks of nature, they should be remembered today for their formidable entrepreneurial skills and ingenuity in self-promotion—and, possibly even more significant, their ability to find acceptance in America.

The story of these twins contains elements of the American Horatio