New opportunities and discoveries attracted many people to California. These people included trappers and pioneers.
trailblazers
Jedediah Smith. Early drawing,CA. 1835. This portrait is the only known with any claim to authenticity. It is said to have been done from memory by a friend after Jed died, so noted above. A later artist, Ruth Senf Framberg, used it for the basis of her oil painting at the Friends of the Middle Border Gallery, Mitchell, South Dakota. Both appear in The Pacific Historian, vol. 11, no. 2, Spring, 1967.
wagon trains
Wagon train fording the Arkansas River, from Harper’s Monthly, Sept. 1862.
mexican-american war
This painting (circa 1872) by John Gast called American Progress, is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west. Here Columbia, a personification of the United States, leads civilization westward with American settlers, stringing telegraph wire as she sweeps west; she holds a school book as well. The different stages of economic activity of the pioneers are highlighted and, especially, the changing forms of transportation.