THE WEST AND THE AMERICAN DREAM

Visions of ProgressAndrew Melrose, “Westward the Star of Empire Takes Its

Way,” 1867

Albert Bierstadt, Emigrants Crossing the Plains, 1867

California as New EdenWilliam Jewett, The Promised Land, 1850

Illegal Immigrants in the Nineteenth-Century “West”

• Governor Pio Pico: “We find ourselves threatened by hordes of Yankee immigrants who have already begun to flock into our country, and whose progress we cannot arrest. . . . Shall we remain supine, while these daring strangers are overrunning our fertile plains, and gradually outnumbering and displacing us? Shall these incursions go on unchecked, until we shall become strangers in our own land?”

Pastoral Visions

• Attractions of the Pacific Slope• Oregon vs. California• Getting There

Donner Party Cookbook

The Overland Experience

Intercultural Relations on the Trail

Disease and Death

Women vs. Men

Male Adventures and Family Ventures

• The Decision to Move• Reluctant Emigrants• Labor on the Trail• The Adventure of Their Lives• The Quest for Domesticity

California Gold RushCharles Nahl, Miners in the Sierras, 1851-

52

The Americanization of California and the Californication of America

• The World Rush• The Dream of “Independence” and

“Competence”• Golden Dreams: Prospecting as Lottery• Transforming Expectations

Dreams Denied

• Ethnic Cleansing in Gold Rush California• Ethnic Discrimination in Gold Rush

California– Foreign Miners’ Tax– Dispossessing Californios– Excluding Free Blacks– To Chinese Exclusion

Focus Questions• How did artists depict expansionist dreams?• How were nineteenth-century versions of the

“American dream” like and not like that of today? • How did the West transform the “American

dream” in the nineteenth century? • Which destination would you have preferred:

California or Oregon? Why?• How and why were men’s and women’s

expectations and experiences so different on the Overland Trail?

Websites

www.isu.edu/~trinmich/Oregontrail.html www.over-land.com/diaries.htmllibrary.thinkquest.org/CR0210182/sitemap.html

www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/donner/ www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/ www.people.virginia.edu/~mmw3v/west/home.htm