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Railroads and Coal: Resource Extraction in Indian Territory, 1866-1907

More than a river: using nature for reform in the progressive era

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Castle Valley America

Between 1840 and 1898, the United States and Canada reconfigured their geographic and demographic contours. In only the first few decades of this period, the United States added over one million square miles to its territory, gaining tens of thousands of new citizens through these annexations, while African-American men were, at least officially, granted citizenship and the franchise in the wake of the Civil War. In Canada, the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada were united with provinces as far away as British Columbia, and millions of British citizens became members of the new nation of Canada. My project explores the effects of these shifts on American national self-perception. While I analyze events and ideas in both the United States and Canada, the core of my argument is about the United States. Canadian expansion and unification was a continual backdrop to American attempts to dominate the North American continent, serving as both competition for continental domination and as a comparison for new U.S. policies and governmental forms.Through their acquisition and incorporation of the Far West, the United States and Canada transformed themselves into what I call transcontinental nations. I use this term to emphasize the significance of the acquisition of the Pacific Coast to the development of the nineteenth-century North American nation. A distinctly North American form, the transcontinental nation was created out of the geographic circumstances that led European settlement to begin on the Atlantic Ocean and offered access to the Pacific only by crossing a continent. At the same time, the transcontinental national form was not only geographically determined, but was also fuelled by the nationalistic desire for territorial expansion and international influence that could be gained by settling lands on the Pacific Coast combined with a determination to avoid previous examples of states built over such distances and with such imperialistic goals. Rather than presenting a conventional comparative study, my dissertation explores changing ideas about U.S. national identity through a focus on the similarities and differences between the development of the United States during the period from 1840 and 1898 and parallel events in other former British settler colonies, particularly Canada. The period between 1848 and 1898 is often seen as a gap in US expansionism, a hiatus between the Manifest Destiny of the early nineteenth century and the formal and informal imperialism of the twentieth. By looking at the parallel processes in the United States and other former British settler colonies, it becomes obvious that during these decades the expansionist energy had not dissipated, but had merely been refocused. The consolidation of transcontinental nations represented a shift in this energy from piecemeal territorial acquisition to concentrated national consolidation. Putting the United States in context with Canadian expansion allows me to avoid the pitfall of treating U.S. expansion as if it were exceptional and puts American territorial growth within the context of its origins in the first decades of British colonialism in North America. It also reflects the substantial parallels between the nineteenth-century transformation of the United States and other former and current settler colonies of the British Empire. Finally, comparing the United States with Canada and other British settler colonies allows me to sidestep an anachronistic consideration of United States expansion in the nineteenth century within the context of its eventual divergence from other nations in the twentieth.

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Parallel Tracks: American Transcontinentalism and the Specter of Canada

Opinions of railroad expansion viewed through the medium of song.

Although he deserves credit for promoting a transcontinental railroad as early as 1845, Asa Whitney may better represent the culmination of a discourse that had begun over twenty years earlier. Visions
 of a Pacific railroad originated in the 1820s and evolved into a widely debated issue by the 1830s. From the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, early promoters not only envisioned railroads to Oregon but
 also into the Mexican provinces of California and Sonora——suggesting that such visions represented an important element of U.S. expansionism. Relying on romantically charged language, advocates ignored
 geographical and political realities and wedded their vision with a faith in railroad technology that was yet in its infancy. Wishing to lay claim to the perceived riches of the Asian trade, advocates described
 the Pacific railroad as a commercial venture, preceding actual settlement. Northerners generally promoted routes to Oregon, while the South sought California and Sonora as destinations, but these contending
 visions should not be confused with the sectionalism that characterized the debates over the railroad during the 1850s. Instead, the differences present in the discourse of the 1830s largely reflect civic
 boosterism. While scholars have noted these earlier visionaries, this article analyzes their ideas and places them in the context of U.S. expansion to the Pacific.

Richard Francaviglia

Papers

Are We Chimerical in this Opinion? Visions of a Pacific Railroad and Westward Expansion before 1845