Md139115
Banned
I had an odd thought this morning in the shower.
I was thinking over the Mexican-American War and how the US gained so much territory from it, and I suddenly wondered “would we have gotten most of it anyway?”
What I mean is, the California Gold Rush of 1848 almost certainly would have happened around that time regardless of who owned the territory. John Sutter for instance had been there since 1839, and one of his employees was bound to discover gold along the Sacramento River sooner or later. When that occurred, the territory was certain to be flooded with prospective miners from around the world, with the largest cohort likely to be Americans as OTL. In OTL, California bordered on complete anarchy for a few years due to this sudden and rapid influx, rectified only by its establishment as a US state and the building of infrastructure and institutions based off that. In a world in where California was Mexican, particularly under the rule of Santa Anna and his rather dim view of provincial autonomy, would the territory have stayed Mexican, or would we see a California Republic a few years later than OTL and a war of independence eerily similar to Texas’s just over a decade prior?
Furthermore, if California or at least a large chunk of it left Mexico and was able to be annexed by the US, what would happen then to all the land between it and the rest of the US? Most of it was seen as worthless; desert populated only by hostile Natives and strange Mormons. Yet the US now has a vested interest in acquiring it in order to achieve a land connection to its new territory. Would it have purchased most of what is now Utah, Colorado, and Nevada in order to do so?
Just how close to OTL could a US have gotten to its present southern borders if there had been no war?
I was thinking over the Mexican-American War and how the US gained so much territory from it, and I suddenly wondered “would we have gotten most of it anyway?”
What I mean is, the California Gold Rush of 1848 almost certainly would have happened around that time regardless of who owned the territory. John Sutter for instance had been there since 1839, and one of his employees was bound to discover gold along the Sacramento River sooner or later. When that occurred, the territory was certain to be flooded with prospective miners from around the world, with the largest cohort likely to be Americans as OTL. In OTL, California bordered on complete anarchy for a few years due to this sudden and rapid influx, rectified only by its establishment as a US state and the building of infrastructure and institutions based off that. In a world in where California was Mexican, particularly under the rule of Santa Anna and his rather dim view of provincial autonomy, would the territory have stayed Mexican, or would we see a California Republic a few years later than OTL and a war of independence eerily similar to Texas’s just over a decade prior?
Furthermore, if California or at least a large chunk of it left Mexico and was able to be annexed by the US, what would happen then to all the land between it and the rest of the US? Most of it was seen as worthless; desert populated only by hostile Natives and strange Mormons. Yet the US now has a vested interest in acquiring it in order to achieve a land connection to its new territory. Would it have purchased most of what is now Utah, Colorado, and Nevada in order to do so?
Just how close to OTL could a US have gotten to its present southern borders if there had been no war?