1846: America Moves West

It was the year covered wagons began heading for California, the year the first baseball game was played, the year when the Mexican-American War began.


It was also, writes author Timothy Foote, “the year when the country, taking a quantum leap forward, suddenly completed the westward course of empire that Thomas Jefferson had dreamed of when he sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark out exploring forty years before.”


The man who set it all in motion was President James K. Polk. The means he used to acquire California, New Mexico, and most or all of what are now Arizona, Nevada, and Utah were controversial even then. Here, in this Quick Read, is the surprising story of one of the most decisive years in American history.