The American Future (29 page)

Illustration for a song sheet, the musical version of Bret Harte's “The Heathen Chinee.”

Colonel Fred Bee, Chinese consul, in his familiar plug hat, with Chinese and U.S. Army investigators into the Rock Springs, Wyoming, massacre.

“Where the Blame Lies”: anti-immigration cartoon, 1891, the complete gallery of ethnic caricatures of the “inferior races.”

Graduation Day, 1916, at Henry Ford's English School in Dearborn, Michigan.
E Pluribus Unum
is the name of the steamer bringing immigrants to the “Melting Pot,” in which the graduates stand, holding their Stars and Stripes.

Grace Abbott, 1925, two decades after founding the Immigrants Protective League in Chicago.

Immigrant matrons from eastern Europe, doing their bit for wartime America, 1918.

John Gast's
American Progress
, 1872, a much-reproduced image from the years leading up to the Centennial, embodying the inevitability of western manifest destiny: the telegraph and railroad completing what covered wagons and stagecoaches had begun.

Franklinia alatamaha
, native to western Georgia, from William Bartram's
Travels
, 1791.

Colonel Return Jonathan Meigs Sr., at the time of his residence among the Cherokee.

Seal of the Cherokee Nation, 1839.

John Ross, chief of the Cherokee Nation, Jackson's antagonist, during the years of their independence and mass deportation over the Mississippi.

George Healey's portrait of President Andrew Jackson, author of the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

The last great land run, Cherokee Strip, Oklahoma Territory, 16 September 1893.