JIGSAW GENS
Prospectors — The Homesteading Microgeneration
As the youngest Transcendentals and the oldest Redeemers, this cusp traversed prairies while pushing their countrymen closer to warfare
Why do there exist such communication gaps between parents and children? It’s usually a combination of things: firsthand accounts of tragedy, dissimilar priorities when viewing the role of government in our lives, and the pace at which technology develops. With each new decade, younger generations can go through much different hardships than those endured by their parents, grandparents, or long-deceased ancestors.
In order to crystallize these cycles of conflict across the American landscape, I’ve created an anthological body-of-work known as “Jigsaw Gens” — an extended project I’d started back in 2023. When we study history, we see how patterns repeat and language evolves.
Over time, our commonalities and our chasms drive Americans to resort to drastic measures while building on our nation’s legacy.
My initial focus was the process of delineating and defining a set of 27 various generations born as far back as the 1560s…and stretching all the way into the present day:
Parliamentarians | Concentrics | Inflectors
Kingdomites | Cavaliers | Magnas
Glory Warriors | Lumineers | Enlightening Rods
Septennials | Liberty Lords | Goodpublicans
Madisonians | Unimpressionists | Transcendentals
Redeemers | Golden Renegades | Stowegressives
Missionaries | Hemingrebels | GI-Gens
Traditionalists | Baby Boomers | GenXers
Millennials | Zoomers | Alphas
But, let’s be clear: “Generations” aren’t scientific. They are an approximation tracking chunks of time in which systems and culture have changed. In that spirit, the oldest and youngest members of every “generation” fall within sort of an amorphous zone.
Labels may serve a limited purpose. To account for the “cusps” that form a bridge between two adjacent generations, we must admit there are grey areas. These “microgenerations” offer a short period of time when, according to one’s birthyear, an American “cusper” might transition between the last members of a given generation and the first members of its subsequent generation.
In chronological order, I’m telling the stories of “cuspers” who belong to these various microgenerations. For Americans born during the early- to mid-1810s, I’ve placed them into a microgenerational cohort whom I’ve dubbed as the Prospectors.
Who They Are
Prospectors were born approximately between 1811 to 1815 — give or take a couple of years on either end. They cross over between the youngest Transcendentals (“Prairie Embryos”) and the oldest Redeemers (“Dredgers”) — the First and Second “Gold Rush Generations.” With childhoods spanning the “Era of Good Feelings,” they were the youngest Americans to witness construction of the National Road.
As they came-of-age, the New Church and Transcendentalist Movements landed within the bosom of American culture. The Santa Fe Trail facilitated military caravans as well as trade of textiles, gold, silver, livestock, and dry goods between the West and the East. With their civic interest peaked, Prospectors grew into adults during the transition from the First Party System to the Second Party System.
I call Prospectors “the Homesteading Microgeneration” because they were frequently dragging their children (and sometimes grandchildren) along the Oregon Trail to settle the western frontier. As they moved through adulthood, Prospectors were on the front lines of Westward Expansion leading up to the American Civil War. Others struck it rich — or came up empty — while inhabiting temporary communities (soon to become “ghost towns”) during the gold rush era. In addition to gold, they mined for silver and oil.
By the time they’d become senior citizens, Reconstruction was underway. After this, they saw the earliest decades of what would turn into nearly a century of Jim Crow. Some of them survived the Spanish-American War…but none of the Prospectors would live to see World War I.
Their Early Lives
Prospectors were essentially born into the War of 1812. They grew up during a time when American/British tensions took their final gasps of major discord — headed toward a much more conciliatory phase. This coincided with a rise in prominence for the Monroe Doctrine…combined with fallout from the 1811 German Coast Uprising, the Battle of Tippecanoe, the first Creek War, and President James Monroe’s Great Goodwill Tour.
Thus, this cohort had been brought up with a more positive outlook toward Great Britain than perhaps any generation or microgeneration prior to them. Also, since their cusp was born into an America where organized sports had begun to gain momentum, Prospectors would grow up with a greater thirst for competition than the older folks of their time period.
Their childhoods were marked by other conflicts or acquisitions related to Westward Expansion: the First Seminole Wars, the Jackson Purchase, 1819’s Adams-Onis Treaty, and the Missouri Compromise. Americans endured their first major national depression during the Panic of 1819. After the U.S. House of Representatives defied the popular vote total by electing John Quincy Adams in 1824, it would set the stage for a spike in combative populism.
When They Came-of-Age
For the Prospector microgeneration, American life expectancies wouldn’t rise until the 1870s — when members of this cohort approached their sixties. Many of them had perished from warfare of the mid-Nineteenth century, much like their fathers and grandfathers.
Prospectors were teenagers during the comic strip/book revolution of the 1830s and 1840s. Additionally, their formative years were marked by James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans becoming one of the most popular novels of the Nineteenth Century. Electorally, White men from this microgeneration were newly eligible to vote in some of the first elections where being a property owner was no longer a requirement in many jurisdictions.
Following President Andrew Jackson’s 1828 election, American electoral politics realigned (known as “the Second Party System”) between the Whigs and the Jacksonian Democrats. Nat Turner’s rebellion inspired Black Prospectors to more vigorously pursue their freedom; meanwhile, Indigenous Prospectors found themselves massacred and assaulted as the Second Seminole War, the Second Creek War, and the Trail of Tears proceeded. The Battle of the Alamo cemented white supremacy against Latine Prospectors (along with their elders/offspring).
Leisure activities still increased, despite all of the turmoil from this era. Formal cricket clubs surged in popularity, and Philadelphia opened its Olympic Base Ball Club in 1833. Also, Robert Fulton (of the Madisonian generation) had designed the Tom Thumb, which would revolutionize locomotive travel.
But, shortly, consumer outrage reignited. The Panic of 1837 opened floodgates for a widespread scourge of bank failures and unemployment that would follow Prospectors into the next several decades.
How They Shaped The World
Once the Prospectors ventured into parenthood, they had to help their own children make sense of an increasingly chaotic American landscape. Transcendentalists (not to be confused with the Transcendental generation) used platforms such as The Dial to preach humanistic morality. After Texas was granted statehood, the Mexican-American War arrived — as did the California Gold Rush. In the meantime, President James Knox Polk emphasized “Manifest Destiny” as wagon trains embarked upon the Oregon Trail. Around this same time, Spiritualists and women’s suffrage activists organized their respective movements.
Entering their forties, Prospectors were caught in strife over slavery. The Compromise of 1850 (accompanied by The Fugitive Slave Act) prompted Charles Sumner’s “Freedom National” speech and the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. To prod the country toward a transcontinental railroad, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was brokered against the backdrop of “Bleeding Kansas.” This was followed by the Pottawatomie Massacre, the toxic Dred Scott v. Sandford ruling, and John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. The Third Seminole War signified a downturn in Indigenous resistance against the U.S. federal government.
Stowe and Sumner were perhaps the most famous abolitionists born along the Prospector cusp. Others of them included: William Wells Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Wendell Phillips, Anna Ella Carroll, Horace Greeley, Edwin Stanton, John Swanson Jacobs, Henry Box Brown, Lydia Hamilton Smith, Charles Turner Torrey, Willis Augustus Hodges, Owen Lovejoy, Henry Highland Garnet, Martin Delany, Henry Ward Beecher, Israel Washburn Jr., Amos Dresser, Zachariah Chandler, Sherman Booth, John Bingham, and Richard Henry Dana Jr.
Even as the Whig Party collapsed and the Gadsden Purchase resolved the Mexican-American War, Americans continued to immerse themselves in sports culture. Cricket enjoyed a short-lived revival, while the National Association of Base Ball Players prodded the country toward shoring up what would become its “favorite pastime” (followed up by the National League of Baseball, nearly twenty years later).
Yet, the global ramifications from the Panic of 1857 (soon to be succeeded by the Panic of 1873) heralded one of America’s most ominous periods.
In their fifties, Prospectors were key decision-makers when the United States grappled with its game-changing Civil War. This period was marred by unprecedented bloodshed: Little Crow’s War, the Sand Creek Massacre, New York City’s Draft Riots, and battles at Fort Sumter, Bull Run, Harpers Ferry, Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, and Vicksburg.
With surviving Prospectors largely being veterans of the Mexican-American War (and, to a lesser extent, the Civil War), this cohort drove a shift of American war veterans increasingly going into politics after coming home from the battlefield.
Prospector lawmakers continued the trend of equivocating over slavery, modeled by their Defiant Giant counterparts of previous legislative sessions. Samuel J. Tilden, Judah Philip Benjamin, Stevens Thompson Mason, Lyman Trumbull, Sanford E. Church, and Andrew Gregg Curtin were among the more influential ones from this cusp. Others — such as Alexander Stephens, William J. Hardee, Stephen A. Douglas, Howell Cobb, and William Lowndes Yancey — aligned with the Confederate States of America.
Immediately following Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. New “black codes” accompanied the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Although President Andrew Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, he was impeached for abuses of power.
Still, Prospectors found reasons for hope amidst the bloodshed and bigotry they were forced to confront. The Alaska Purchase and completion of the Transcontinental Railroad reconfigured U.S. economic fortunes. American farmers gained a significant voice via the National Grange, while women gained the right to vote in Wyoming. Although cricket had permanently declined in popularity, it was supplanted heavily by baseball — opening the door for a much broader sports culture to flourish.
As these Prospectors prepared to take their place as society’s elders, the Fifteenth Amendment gave Black men the right to vote, nationally. More backlash sprouted from that, with additional “black codes” and a new era of Jim Crow leading into the end of Reconstruction. Anti-Indigenous policies intensified in the shadows of the Red River War, the Battle of Little Bighorn, and the Nez Perce War.
By the 1870s, their microgenerational cohort had produced three U.S. Supreme Court Justices (John Archibald Campbell, David Davis, Joseph P. Bradley), one U.S. Vice-President (Henry Wilson), and feminist icons in Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Adaline Couzins.
Prospectors made great strides in science. Horace Wells and Gardner Quincy Colton pioneered dentistry, while James McCune Smith and Crawford Williamson Long pushed forward pharmaceuticals. Others included John Gross Barnard (navigation), Benjamin Alvord (botany), and James Curtis Hepburn (linguistics). Notable inventors from the Prospector cusp boasted the likes of Erastus Brigham Bigelow (the weaving machine), Joseph Glidden (barbed wire), Richard March Hoe (the rotary printing press), and James Marion Sims (urology equipment).
On the heels of the Industrial Revolution, Prospectors were some of the most resourceful entrepreneurs to date. Amongst their ranks were…
Charles Lewis Tiffany’s jewelry empire.
Isaac Singer becoming a sewing machine mogul.
Samuel Colt’s gun manufacturing franchise.
William Hepburn Russell mainstreaming stagecoach travel and the Pony Express.
Henry Morris Naglee’s brandy production.
Samuel Kier rising as an oil baron.
Mark Hopkins Jr.’s railroad and mining companies.
Junius Spencer Morgan serving as patriarch to an iconic American family of bankers.
Continental exploration was slowly approaching its end point. But the Prospectors were part of the final phase that would culminate in fifty states: John C. Frémont reaping wealth from gold after blazing trails through California, Oregon, and the Greater Rocky Mountains; Randolph B. Marcy mapping prairies that stretched from Utah to Texas; and Galen Clark revering the sequoias of the future Yosemite National Park.
John Louis O’Sullivan, who coined the term “Manifest Destiny,” was from the Prospector cohort — as were poets Ellen Sturgis Hooper and Rufus Wilmot Griswold. Some of this cohort’s key journalists included James Shepherd Pike, John Lothrop Motley, and Cornelia Walter — the latter of whom became the first female newspaper editor in the U.S.
Art continued to flourish under the creative guidance of Prospectors…the sculpting of Emma Stebbins and Thomas Crawford, paintings by John Banvard and William Ranney, the lithography of Nathaniel Currier, and the architecture of John M. Trimble.
Stage-based thespians and playwrights gained heightened esteem: Josephine Clifton, Nathaniel Bannister, Charles Walter Couldock, Sarah Kirby-Stark, and John Brougham were all Prospectors…as was America’s first prominent comedian, Joshua Silsbee. The racist practice of blackface was broached by Edwin Pearce Christy and Richard Pelham.
This cohort of sixtysomethings now witnessed the rise and fall of public figures younger than them, both inspirational and notorious. Boss Tweed, John McDonald, Victoria Woodhull, Orville E. Babcock, Joseph Fry, and Wild Bill Hickock were among leaders and provocateurs who gave Prospectors a glimpse into a society that would soon be molded by the younger Redeemer and Golden Renegade generations.
Prospectors became more cognizant of the natural world in ways that were both positive (e.g., the creation of Yellowstone National Park) and negative (e.g., the Great Chicago Fire). Government overreach was more hotly debated as a result of the Comstock Act, the Resumption Act, the Bland-Allison Act, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Munn v. Illinois ruling, and the beginning of the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement.
Even against this backdrop of corruption and hubris, workers and organized labor would achieve victories such as the Pendleton Act and the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. This pro-labor wave — which was about to hit America in full force — bolstered the Gilded Age.
Their Golden Years
Now senior citizens, Prospectors spent the tail end of their lives in awe of how Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were innovating the light bulb and telephone. Oil speculation surged. Another presidential assassination (James A. Garfield) rocked America. The Wild West made legends out of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Jesse James.
Anti-Indigenous racism continued with the surrenders of Sitting Bull and Geronimo, whereas the Chinese Exclusion Act encouraged systemic racism against immigrants of Asian diasporas. Newfound symbols of American culture arose and endured — including the Tuskegee Institute, Coca-Cola, Groundhog Day, the Washington Monument, and the Statue of Liberty.
As more and more Prospectors passed away, Edison dazzled American citizens with a wider variety of technological advancements — radio, the strip motion picture film, the kinetoscope, and the power line. Other innovators rose to fame: George B. Selden (the automobile), Herman Hollerith (the tabulation machine), and Lucien Nunn (the alternating current).
After the Amateur Athletic Union was founded in 1888, many new sports joined baseball as common recreational pastimes: football, basketball, golf, and boxing. That same year, Glover Cleveland lost the Electoral College in a controversial election against Benjamin Harrison. The Oklahoma Land Rush commenced — followed by passage of the Sherman Act, the opening of Ellis Island, and the first school recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance.
Systemic racism escalated as citizens learned of the Wounded Knee Massacre, the deposition of Queen Liliʻuokalani, and the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. Yet another national depression arrived with the Panic of 1893, even while excitement built over the Klondike Gold Rush and America’s participation in the first modern Olympic Games.
The final Prospectors were the oldest cusp alive during the 1898 midterms — which greenlit a new turn-of-the-century reign of terror commandeered by white supremacy. Those who lived long enough would be around for a number of iconic American moments: the Galveston Hurricane, William McKinley’s assassination, the first Rose Bowl, the first World Series, the Wright Brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk, the Niagara Falls Convention, and the San Francisco Earthquake.
This microgeneration broke ground — literally — on the exploitation of natural resources throughout the American continent. They carved out fun and entertainment in the face of extremely bleak conditions and tragedies. But, ultimately, Prospectors will probably be best remembered for transforming the Western United States with homesteads, towns, and electricity.
Here are 10 prominent Americans from the Prospector cohort:
Members of the previous microgenerations were named…
Colonial Zygotes | Turnip Squeezers | Starving Timers
Long Climbers | Rumpus Rebels | Emerald Knights
Royal Raiders | Pre-Continentals | Bottled Beacons
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