Mexico showed “we take nothing by con-
quest.... Thank God.” But since Mexico
had refused to sell its Far North at any
price before the war, and was persuaded
to do so only under threat of continued
occupation, many people then and since
have regarded the U.S.-Mexican War as
precisely a war of conquest.
The transfer of land from Mexico to
the United States was not yet over. In
1853, in what became known as the
Gadsden Purchase, American foreign
minister James Gadsden convinced
Mexico to sell 30,000 square miles in
what is now southern Arizona and New
Mexico, a region coveted for its mineral
wealth and potential as a railroad route.
The Gadsden Purchase, for which
Mexico received $10 million, established
the present-day boundary in that region
between Mexico and the United States.
The Mexican president who negotiated
the transaction was none other than Santa
Anna, back again from exile and in need
of cash. The purchase once again dis-
graced Santa Anna and contributed to his
being yet again forced out of power, this
time for good.
THE ANGLOS MOVE IN
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo for-
mally made Americans out of the
Mexicans who chose to remain in what
now was the American Southwest. These
thousands of Californios, Nuevo-
mexicanos, and Tejanos were the founda-
tion of today’s Mexican-American
community. Their experience in the years
immediately following the war was large-
ly a sad one, in which their land claims
were regularly violated and their civil
rights ignored, as Anglo-Americans
rushed in to exploit the newly conquered
lands. The land grab happened fastest in
California, where the lure of gold
brought “Forty-Niners” by the tens of
thousands, trampling over the old
Californio society.
The California
Gold RushOn January 24, 1848, nine days before the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed,
Anglo carpenter James Wilson Marshall
made a surprising discovery. While build-
ing a sawmill for landowner John Sutter
on the south fork of the American River
northeast of Sacramento, California,
Marshall picked up some glittering parti-
cles that turned out to be gold. Despite
their talent for discovering gold in other
parts of the New World, the Spanish had
never spotted any substantial deposits in
California. This one, in the foothills of the
Sierra Nevada, proved to be tremendous-
ly rich, especially the mother lode, a great
vein of gold ore extending about 120
miles. Gold was also found in other parts
of California, including the south and
northwest.
Word of the discovery quickly
spread, bringing hordes of treasure seek-
ers from around the world, but especial-
ly from the United States, traveling
overland across the Great Plains, by sea
around Cape Horn, or by a combination
of ship and muleback across the Isthmus
of Panama. Because many prospectors
did not get there until 1849 or later, they
were known as the Forty-Niners. Because
of them, California’s population (other
than Native Americans), which had
totaled only about 8,000 in 1845, rose to
more than 90,000 by the end of 1849 and
to 220,000 by 1852, the year when gold
production peaked at an annual output of
about $80 million. San Francisco, a tiny
settlement of 812 people in March 1848,
contained 25,000 souls by 1850.MANIFEST DESTINY AND HISPANIC AMERICA 97Miners at work in California during the 1850s (Library of Congress)