In John Gast’s 1872 painting “American Progress,” a towering woman dressed in white robes floats toward the left side of a landscape with a book in one hand and telegraph wire in the other.
This woman is Columbia, a personification of the United States — of Manifest Destiny — and she's seen guiding white settlers from the fields of the east toward something more ominous: a gloomy Pacific coast where snarling animals, a herd of frantic buffalo, and in a nauseating comparison, a small group of Indigenous men, women, and children flee from her advance.
