Following Zebulon Pike's expeditions in the early nineteenth
century, U.S. expansionists focused their gaze on the Southwest.
Explorers, traders, settlers, boundary adjudicators, railway
surveyors, and the U.S. Army crossed into and through New Mexico,
transforming it into a battleground for competing influences
determined to control the region. Previous histories have treated
the Santa Fe trade, the American occupation under Colonel Stephen
W. Kearny, the antebellum Indian Wars, debates over slavery, the
Pacific Railway, and the Confederate invasion during the Civil War
as separate events in New Mexico. In Coast-to-Coast Empire, William
S. Kiser demonstrates instead that these developments were
interconnected parts of a process by which the United States
effected the political, economic, and ideological transformation of
the region. New Mexico was an early proving ground for Manifest
Destiny, the belief that U.S. possession of the entire North
American continent was inevitable. Kiser shows that the federal
government's military commitment to the territory stemmed from its
importance to U.S. expansion. Americans wanted California, but in
order to retain possession of it and realize its full economic and
geopolitical potential, they needed New Mexico as a connecting
thoroughfare in their nation-building project. The use of armed
force to realize this claim fundamentally altered New Mexico and
the Southwest. Soldiers marched into the territory at the onset of
the Mexican-American War and occupied it continuously through the
1890s, leaving an indelible imprint on the region's social,
cultural, political, judicial, and economic systems. By focusing on
the activities of a standing army in a civilian setting, Kiser
reshapes the history of the Southwest, underlining the role of the
military not just in obtaining territory but in retaining it.
General
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