130 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
and survived to tell the story. Had they not done so, there would be
no Indigenous peoples remaining in Northern California, because
the objective was to eradicate them. From the onset of the California
gold rush, crazed "gold bugs" invade� Indigenous territories, terror
izing and brutally killing those who were in their path. These settlers
seemed to require no military assistance in running roughshod over
unarmed Indigenous residents of fishing communities in a bountiful
paradise of woods, rivers, and mountains. The role left for the US
Army was to round up the starving Indigenous refugees to transport
them to established reservations in Oregon and Oklahoma.THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN
The two-year invasion and occupation of Mexico was a joyful ex
perience for most US citizens, as evidenced by Walt Whitman's
populist poetry. Its popularity was possible because of buoyant na
tionalism, and the war itself accelerated the spirit of nationalism
and confirmed the manifest destiny of the United States. Besides
new weapons of war and productive capacity brought about by the
emerging industrial revolution, there was also an advance in print
ing and publishing techniques, which increased the book publishing
market from $2.5 million in 1830 to $12. 5 million in 1850. Most
of the books published during the five-year period leading up to,
during, and after the invasion were war-mongering tracts. Euro
American settlers were nearly all literate, and this was the period
of the foundational "American literature," with writers James Fen
imore Cooper, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf
Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Haw
thorne, and Herman Melville all active-each of whom remains
read, revered, and studied in the twenty-first century, as national
and nationalist writers, not as colonialists.
Although some of the writers, like Melville and Longfellow, paid
little attention to the war, most of the others either fiercely sup
ported it or opposed it. Whitman, a supporter, was also enamored
of the violent Indian-and Mexican-killing Texas Rangers. Whit-