Revolver by Jim Rasenberger

Author:Jim Rasenberger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2020-05-26T00:00:00+00:00

VI

Three months after Walker’s death, on the morning of Monday, January 24, 1848, a millwright named James Marshall was walking along the raceway of a new sawmill on the American River, in the forested foothills of the western flank of the Sierra Nevada, when a glimmer in the water caught his eye. It was “one of those rare moments,” as historian H. W. Brands puts it, “that divide human existence into before and after.” Marshall hurried to the cabin where his workers were eating breakfast. “Boys,” he announced, “I believe I have found a gold mine.”

The discovery of gold in California in January of 1848 was one of the many hard-to-believe coincidences that occurred so regularly and providentially in the United States in the early years of its existence. James K. Polk could not have timed it better if he’d planted the ore in the American River himself. Just over a week after Marshall made his discovery, on Wednesday, February 2, 1848, Mexican and American officials, ignorant of events in the Sierra Nevada, signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. For a bargain price of $15 million the United States took possession of more than half a million square miles of Mexico, including the largest prize of all, California. Adding this to Texas and Oregon, the United States was now half a million square miles—33 percent—larger than it had been when Polk became president three years earlier.

Most historians agree that the Civil War became inevitable the day the treaty to end the Mexican War was signed. It suddenly made pressing the future of slavery. What sort of land would this new territory be—slave, free, or some combination thereof? Heretofore, the nation had handled slavery mainly by kicking the can of worms down the road, but it now became clear that no peaceful way—no compromise, no law—could solve this issue.

The appropriation of Mexican lands also sealed the fate of Native Americans in the west. The tribes of the plains and the mountains had lived in awareness of whites to the east, but aside from their diseases and liquor, the whites had not yet presented a serious threat. That would change now.

Sam Walker was dead, but Sam Colt’s time had come at last. As he wrote in a letter to an old friend that December, “Now is the time to make money.”

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