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The struggle for the independence of Texas took place over many years, although the actual war that achieved independence from Mexico was relatively brief. In the 1820s, Stephen Austin won the Mexican government's approval to bring American families into the sparsely settled Tejas (Texas) region. Vast land grants would be awarded to the settlers if Austin could sponsor 300 families and assure the officials that the newcomers would: Be loyal to the Mexican government Learn the Spanish language Convert to Roman Catholicism.Only the earliest Texans paid much attention to these requirements and the vast distance from the Mexican central government left the settlers free to follow their own inclinations. This area's great attraction was the fertile soil, ideal for cotton production. By the early 1830s, transplanted Americans, many of them slave owners, outnumbered the Tejanos; the Mexican government soon understood that it had committed a great error by encouraging the migration of U.S. citizens with a hankering for independence.

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The 2,200-mile east-west trail served as a critical transportation route for emigrants traveling from Missouri to Oregon and other points west during the mid-1800s. Travelers were inspired by dreams of gold and rich farmlands, but they were also motivated by difficult economic times in the east and the diseases like yellow fever and malaria that were decimating the Midwest around 1837.

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On January 24, 1848, James Wilson Marshall, a carpenter originally from New Jersy, found flakes of gold in the American River at the base of the Sierra NevadaMountains near Coloma, California. At the time, Marshall was working to build a water-powered sawmill owned by John Sutter, a German-born Swiss citizen and founder of a colony of Nueva Helvetia (New Switzerland). (The colony would later become the city of Sacramento.) As Marshall later recalled of his historic discovery: “It made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold.”Just days after Marshall’s discovery at Sutter’s Mill, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgop was signed, ending the Mexican-American War and leaving California in the hands of the United States. At the time, the population of the territory consisted of 6,500 Californios (people of Spanish or Mexican decent); 700 foreigners (primarily Americans); and 150,000 Native Americans (barely half the number that had been there when Spanish settlers arrived in 1769).

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Manifest Destiny is a term for the attitude prevalent during the 19th century period of American expansion that the United States not only could, but was destined to, stretch from coast to coast. This attitude helped fuel western settlement, Native American removal and war with Mexico. The phrase was first employed by John L. O’Sullivan in an article on the annexation of Texas published in the July-August 1845 edition of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, which he edited.

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The Mexican-American War (1846-1848) marked the first U.S. armed conflict chiefly fought on foreign soil. It pitted a politically divided and militarily unprepared Mexico against the expansionist-minded administration of U.S. President James K. Polk, who believed the United States had a “manifest destiny” to spread across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. A border skirmish along the Rio Grande started off the fighting and was followed by a series of U.S. victories. When the dust cleared, Mexico had lost about one-third of its territory.