Abstract
Although the United States was “a mere child,” as Theodore Dreiser later described it, by the 1840s the young nation was more than ready to grow—by whatever means necessary. James K. Polk certainly understood the expansionist mood of the country and largely based his 1844 presidential campaign on that sentiment. At the center of America’s initial growth spurt was Texas, an independent nation since the mid-1830s and one that desperately wanted to join the Union. Polk’s victory demonstrated Americans’ passion for expansion, and, therefore, the outgoing president, John Tyler, set in motion the annexation of the Republic of Texas. Americans and their new executive officer, however, had their eyes on more than the Lone Star State. The United States coveted both the disputed territory of Oregon and Mexico’s California. Ownership of the lands that would eventually become Washington, Oregon, and Idaho was somewhat unclear; the British and the Americans both claimed them. On his first day as president, Polk unambiguously asserted “the right of the United States to that portion of our territory which lies beyond the Rocky Mountains.” “Our title to the country of Oregon,” the president insisted, “is ‘clear and unquestionable.’”1 The Oregon question was settled in 1846 through peaceful negotiations with Great Britain, but Mexico certainly would not let go of California without a fight.
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Notes
Theodore Dreiser, A Hoosier Holiday (1916; reprint, with a new introduction by Douglas Brinkley, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 61; Manuel G. Gonzales, Mexicanos: A History of Mexicans in the United States (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 72–81; James K. Polk, “Expanding Westward,” in Our Nation’s Archive: The History of the United States in Documents, ed. Erik Bruun and Jay Crosby (New York: Tess Press, 1999), 314.
Polk, “Expanding Westward,” in Our Nation’s Archive, 314; Johann Carl Wilhelm Pritzlaff, February 21, 1847, in News from the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home, ed. Walter D. Kamphoefner, Wolfgang Helbich, and Ulrike Sommer, trans. Susan Carter Vogel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991, 313; Gonzales, Mexicanos, 75–81, 91–92; Atlas of American History (Skokie, IL: Houghton Mifflin / Rand McNally, 1993), 27–29.
Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail, ed. Mason Wade (Heritage Press, 1943), 4, 33, 254; Elliot West, Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 2–7; Gonzales, Mexicanos, 106–108.
West, Growing Up with the Country, 2–7; Gonzales, Mexicanos, 62–69, 84–91; Parkman, The Oregon Trail, 1, 189–196; Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Two Years before the Mast, ed. Thomas Philbrick (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 124–125, 237; Carl Blümner, March 18, 1841, in News from the Land of Freedom, 105; Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 78.
West, Growing Up with the Country, 12–21, 190.
Frederick C. Luebke, “Ethnic Group Settlement on the Great Plains,” The Western Historical Quarterly 8, no. 4 (1977): 405–430; Parkman, The Oregon Trail, 9, 63, 92, 97–113; Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2000), 270.
Luebke, “Ethnic Group Settlement on the Great Plains,” 405–430; Andreas Hjerpeland to Ivar Kleiven, June 24, 1871, in In Their Own Words: Letters from Norwegian Immigrants, ed. and trans. Solveig Zempel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 4; Andreas Hjerpeland to Ivar Kleiven, February 24, 1893, in In Their Own Words, 22–23; Einar Haugen, The Norwegian Language in America: A Study of Bilingual behavior, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953), 18–27; Olaf Morgan Norlie, History of the Norwegian People in America (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1925), 82–83; Walter Struve, Germans and Texans: Commerce, Migration, and Culture in the Days of the Lone Star Republic (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 39–66; Carlos Kevin Blanton, The Strange Career of Bilingual Education in Texas, 1836–1981 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), 31–37; O. E. Rolvaag, Giants in the Earth (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1929), 129.
Luebke, “Ethnic Group Settlement on the Great Plains,” 405–430; West, Growing Up with the Country, 179–210; Rolvaag, Giants in the Earth, 257–258; Eighth Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction: State of South Dakota, 1905–1906 (Huron, SD: John Longstaff, n.d.), 5–7, 64. Soddies were common farther south as well. In 1897, for example, Nebraska still had 622 sod schoolhouses in use; see Fifteenth Biennial Report of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction to the Governor of the State of Nebraska, Dec. 1, 1898 (Lincoln: Jacob North and Co., 1898), 360–361.
Charles Hart Handschin, The Teaching of Modern Languages in the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913), 67; [Third Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction to the Governor of North Dakota, 1892–1894] (n.p., n.d.), 137–138, 149–150; Fourth Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction to the Governor of North Dakota, for the Two Years Ending June 30, 1896 (Jamestown, ND: Alert, State Printers and Binders, 1896), 16, 283–284.
Stephen Crane, The Blue Hotel, ed. Joseph Katz (Columbus: Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company, 1969), 13; Luebke, “Ethnic Group Settlement on the Great Plains,” 405–430; Heinz Kloss, The American Bilingual Tradition (1977; reprint, with a new introduction by Reynaldo F. Macias and Terrence G. Wiley, McHenry, IL: Center for Applied Linguistics and Delta Systems Co., 1998), 107; Blanton, Strange Career, 18–21, 31–37; School Laws of Texas, 1913 (Austin: Von [Boe]ckmann-Jones Company, n.d.), 82–83; Lauren Ann Kattner, “Land and Marriage: German Regional Reflections in Four Texas Towns, 1845–1860,” in Emigration and Settlement Patterns of German Communities in North America, ed. Eberhard Reichmann, LaVern J. Rippley, and Jörg Nagler (Indianapolis: Max Kade German-American Center, 1995), 237–257; Struve, Germans and Texans, 39–66.
Gonzalez, Mexicanos, 58–69, 96; Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Perennial Classics, 1998), 181, 361; George I. Sanchez, Forgotten People: A Study of New Mexicans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1940), 10–12.
Gonzales, Mexicanos, 64–69; Guadalupe Vallejo, “The Romantic Frontier,” in Foreigners in Their Native Land: Historical Roots of the Mexican Americans, ed. David J. Weber, 30th anniversary ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 45–49; Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1925; reprint, New York: Vintage Classics, 1990), 153.
Dana, Two Years before the Mast, 126–127; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (New York: Signet Classic, 1997), 19–21; Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993), 121–126.
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Blanton, Strange Career, 18–31; Mills, Forty Years at El Paso, 5, 23.
Blanton, Strange Career, 28–30; Biennial Report, Texas, 1888, 297, 301, 309.
Gonzales, Mexicanos, 98–106; Nieto-Phillips, The Language of Blood, 1–11, 171–205; “The Spanish Language and Its Importance for the Natives of New Mexico,” in Foreigners in Their Native Land, 254–255.
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Ramsey, P.J. (2010). The Polyglot Boarders Move West. In: Bilingual Public Schooling in the United States. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106093_5
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