118 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
grade of rats come and then all the minor rats are cleared out." The
whole world would benefit from US expansion: "We pant to see our
country and its rule far-reaching. What has miserable, inefficient
Mexico ... to do with the great mission of peopling the New World
with a noble race?"3 In September 1846, when General Zachary
Taylor's troops captured Monterrey, Whitman hailed it as " ''another
clinching proof of the indomitable energy of the Anglo-Saxon char
acter."4 Whitman's sentiments reflected the established US origin
myth that had the frontier settlers replacing the Native peoples as
historical destiny, adding his own theoretical twist of what would
later be called social Darwinism.US OVERSEAS IMPERIALISM
Traversing the continent "from sea to shining sea" was hardly a natu
ral westward procession of covered wagons as portrayed in Western
movies. The US invasion of Mexico was carried out by US marines,
by sea, through Veracruz, and the early colonization of California
initially progressed from the Pacific coast, reached from the Atlantic
coast by way of Tierra del Fuego. Between the Mississippi River
and the Rockies lay a vast region controlled by Indigenous nations
that were neither conquered nor colonized by any European power,
and although the United States managed to annex northern Mexico,
large numbers of settlers could not reach the Northern California
goldfields or the fertile Willamette Va lley region of the Pacific North
west without army regiments accompanying them. Why then does
the popular US historical narrative of a "natural" westward move
ment persist? The answer is that those who still hold to the narrative
remain captives of the ideology of "manifest destiny," according
to which the United States expanded across the continent to assume
its preordained size and shape. This ideology normalizes the succes
sive invasions and occupations of Indigenous nations and Mexico
as not being colonialist or imperialist, rather simply ordained prog
ress. In this view, Mexico was just another Indian nation to be
crushed.