The Evangelical Christian prophecies of nineteenth-century America were not just predictions of a distant future; they were a prescribed way, a map, for a people to move from their specific, present circumstances into that preordained moment ahead. They offered agency to those who followed them.
What keeps drawing me closer into this history is that these prophecies—these God-granted predictions that run like golden whispers, or dark threads, through the history of the Great Plains in the nineteenth century—for all their divine certainty, manifested in human contradiction. They became sticky things as they passed from human lips to human ears. They gave new homelands to uprooted settlers, who then uprooted the people and nonhuman beings who had long called those lands home. They justified immense violences in exchange for a promised future of peace. None of this robbed the prophecies of their power.
Here is what I want to say about the prophecy of Manifest Destiny: the words took on their own unstoppable momentum. In all of their manifestations, the promises of a God who smiled down on America buzzed in the ears of millions.
I want to say that human speech—seemingly small escapes of breath from our mouths—can become like a storm. The written word—a few drops of ink from our pens—can spill like a flood.
CENTRAL TO THE FULFILLMENT of God’s promised land was the cultivation of the Great Plains into an agricultural paradise. Thus, the need to remove Indigenous peoples from the land was paramount. The Homestead Act of 1862—no coincidence that it passed the same year as the Pacific Railway Act—accelerated plains settlement by offering men over the age of twenty-one 160 acres of “public land” in the West for a minimal filing fee and with the requirement that they cultivate their allotment and stay for five years. As railroad construction began, land-hungry settlers journeyed along the Oregon Trail staking their claims.
General William Tecumseh Sherman commanded the territory west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies after the Civil War. His priorities were to protect railroad construction and oversee the United States’ engagement in the Indian Wars. Violent conflict with Native Americans had become increasingly distasteful to the American public. After the Civil War, assimilation and “civilization” became the preferred method for dealing with the “Indian problem.” Assimilation meant that tribes were to be removed onto reservations administered by government agents; children would be sent to boarding schools; Christian missionaries would be stationed on reservations to save souls; languages, ceremonies, and rituals would be stamped out.