14.1: Learning the Geography of Indian Country

In the North American continent, the fur trade, which flourished in the seventies to the forty, was an important stimulus.
The federal government has played a major part in the exploration and development of the U.S. West following leadership of fur-trade explorers like Alexander Mackenzie, David Thompson, and others.
While American artists painted west Indian peoples' way of life, eastern Indian tribes were taken from their homelands to Indian territory

14.2: American Frontiers

Long ago, for British and French fur companies the traders and trappers realized they had to gain the positive will of the indigenous people by accommodating local customs to succeed
It was a threat of war against Great Britain, claiming the Pacific North-West, and against Mexico, now held by Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, California, and Colorado.
It took usually seven months, and sometimes more, to drive 2000 miles on the Overland trails from the banks of the Missouri bank to Oregon and California.
The Oregon settlement is a capsule example of the stages of the development of borders.
- The first contacts were commercial between the Indian people of the region and Europeans.
American traders had long sought trade with Santa Fé, settled first by colonists from Mexico in 1609 and central to New Mexico's Spanish frontier province.
- When Mexico became independent of Spain in 1821 2,240 were living in Texas in Tejano.
In 1821 the Mexican government allowed Moses Austin of Missouri an area of 18,000 m2 in the territory of Texas to increase the force of the buffer zone between the heart of Mexico and the marauding Comanches.
When Texas applied for membership in the Union in 1837, the US Congress refused to give it statehood.
- Petitions against the acceptance of a 14th slave State were sent to Congress.

Trails

Just as the controversy over Oregon concluded peacefully in the spring of 1846, there was a growing tension with Mexico.
The Mexico-US war had been politically divisive from the beginning.
- Whig's congressional critics challenged Polk's border incident account.
The Mexico-US war was the first to hit the mass of ordinary citizens in the daily events of the war on the scene, reporting by the press.

The center of American settlement was in the 1840s by Johann Augustus Sutter, who had resided in California in 1839, and who became a Mexican citizen.
In January 1848, in the millrace at Sutter's Mill, carpenter James Marschall noticed little flakes of gold.
- Soon in California, he and all the other John Sutter staff panned for gold.
Most mining camps boomed to life almost immediately, as had happened in San Francisco, but in a matter of years they had been empties, unlike San Francisco.

Territories

Nearly all northern Whig Party members opposed the beligerent anti-slavery expansion of Democratic President James Polk in 1846.
The Wilmot Proviso was so controversial that during the Mexican-American War it was taken from the necessary military appropriations.
Founded in 1840 by abolitionists, the tragic growth of the Libertad Party threatened to remove votes from both the Whig and the Democrats.
Lewis Cass of Michigan, the Democrat nominee for president, proposed that the doctrine of popular sovereignty be applied to the vital slave free issue

In the North American continent, the fur trade, which flourished in the seventies to the forty, was an important stimulus.
The federal government has played a major part in the exploration and development of the U.S. West following leadership of fur-trade explorers like Alexander Mackenzie, David Thompson, and others.
While American artists painted west Indian peoples' way of life, eastern Indian tribes were taken from their homelands to Indian territory

Long ago, for British and French fur companies the traders and trappers realized they had to gain the positive will of the indigenous people by accommodating local customs to succeed
It was a threat of war against Great Britain, claiming the Pacific North-West, and against Mexico, now held by Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, California, and Colorado.
It took usually seven months, and sometimes more, to drive 2000 miles on the Overland trails from the banks of the Missouri bank to Oregon and California.
The Oregon settlement is a capsule example of the stages of the development of borders.
- The first contacts were commercial between the Indian people of the region and Europeans.
American traders had long sought trade with Santa Fé, settled first by colonists from Mexico in 1609 and central to New Mexico's Spanish frontier province.
- When Mexico became independent of Spain in 1821 2,240 were living in Texas in Tejano.
In 1821 the Mexican government allowed Moses Austin of Missouri an area of 18,000 m2 in the territory of Texas to increase the force of the buffer zone between the heart of Mexico and the marauding Comanches.
When Texas applied for membership in the Union in 1837, the US Congress refused to give it statehood.
- Petitions against the acceptance of a 14th slave State were sent to Congress.

Trails

Just as the controversy over Oregon concluded peacefully in the spring of 1846, there was a growing tension with Mexico.
The Mexico-US war had been politically divisive from the beginning.
- Whig's congressional critics challenged Polk's border incident account.
The Mexico-US war was the first to hit the mass of ordinary citizens in the daily events of the war on the scene, reporting by the press.

The center of American settlement was in the 1840s by Johann Augustus Sutter, who had resided in California in 1839, and who became a Mexican citizen.
In January 1848, in the millrace at Sutter's Mill, carpenter James Marschall noticed little flakes of gold.
- Soon in California, he and all the other John Sutter staff panned for gold.
Most mining camps boomed to life almost immediately, as had happened in San Francisco, but in a matter of years they had been empties, unlike San Francisco.

Territories

Nearly all northern Whig Party members opposed the beligerent anti-slavery expansion of Democratic President James Polk in 1846.
The Wilmot Proviso was so controversial that during the Mexican-American War it was taken from the necessary military appropriations.
Founded in 1840 by abolitionists, the tragic growth of the Libertad Party threatened to remove votes from both the Whig and the Democrats.
Lewis Cass of Michigan, the Democrat nominee for president, proposed that the doctrine of popular sovereignty be applied to the vital slave free issue