“An Outlet to the Western Sea”: Puget Sound, Terraqueous Mobility, and Northern Pacific Railroad’s Pursuit of Trade with Asia, 1864–1892

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 439-458
Author(s):  
Sean Fraga
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
American West ◽  
Puget Sound ◽  
North American West ◽  
The North ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Aqueous Environments ◽  
Physical Infrastructure ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
Northern Pacific

Abstract The Northern Pacific Railroad saw Puget Sound harbors as environments uniquely suited to connect the North American interior with the Pacific Ocean and enable U.S. trade with East Asia. But in building the physical infrastructure to link transcontinental trains with transpacific ships, Northern Pacific significantly altered Commencement Bay’s shoreline and displaced Puyallups from their traditional territory. The articles uses a terraqueous perspective, emphasizing movement between terrestrial and aqueous environments, to demonstrate how U.S. pursuit of transpacific trade shaped the North American West.

Bound for California: Chilean Contract Laborers and "Patrones" in the California Gold Rush, 1848-1852

2008 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly J. Sisson
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
American West ◽  
Gold Rush ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Early Years ◽  
North American West ◽  
Pacific World ◽  
The North ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Contract Laborers

Hired Chilean laborers who ventured to California during the early years of the gold rush rarely appear in the historical record. However, notarized contracts signed in the cities of Valparaíso and Santiago between 1848 and 1852 illuminate how hired laborers, mostly illiterate peons, actively shaped companies and expeditions bound for California. By reading these for evidence of what the Latin Americanist Arnold Bauer has identified as a "system" of "give and take, choice and accommodation,"¹ we can better understand how even the most marginalized workers made the transnational spaces of the North American West and the Pacific world comprehensible within their own schemas and patterns. This paper proposes that hired laborers were central to the organization of Chileans' emigration patterns in the California gold rush; that their relations were far more complex than the "free" or "unfree" binary representations supposed; that they actively mapped the relations of production they expected to deploy in California's physical and social spaces; and that by turning to alternative archival sources, U.S.-based historians can better link the histories of the Pacific world to those of the North American West.

Scots in the North American West, 1790-1917

2002 ◽  
Vol 88 (4) ◽  
pp. 1514
Author(s):  
J. M. Bumsted ◽  
Ferenc Morton Szasz
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
American West ◽  
North American West ◽  
The North

scholarly journals Changes in Winter Atmospheric Rivers along the North American West Coast in CMIP5 Climate Models

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael D. Warner ◽  
Clifford F. Mass ◽  
Eric P. Salathé
Keyword(s):  
Water Vapor ◽  
North American ◽  
West Coast ◽  
American West ◽  
Climate Models ◽  
Water Vapor Transport ◽  
The West ◽  
North American West ◽  
The North ◽  
Extreme Precipitation Events

Abstract Most extreme precipitation events that occur along the North American west coast are associated with winter atmospheric river (AR) events. Global climate models have sufficient resolution to simulate synoptic features associated with AR events, such as high values of vertically integrated water vapor transport (IVT) approaching the coast. From phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5), 10 simulations are used to identify changes in ARs impacting the west coast of North America between historical (1970–99) and end-of-century (2070–99) runs, using representative concentration pathway (RCP) 8.5. The most extreme ARs are identified in both time periods by the 99th percentile of IVT days along a north–south transect offshore of the coast. Integrated water vapor (IWV) and IVT are predicted to increase, while lower-tropospheric winds change little. Winter mean precipitation along the west coast increases by 11%–18% [from 4% to 6% (°C)−1], while precipitation on extreme IVT days increases by 15%–39% [from 5% to 19% (°C)−1]. The frequency of IVT days above the historical 99th percentile threshold increases as much as 290% by the end of this century.

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