On a crisp January morning in the forested foothills of the Sierra Nevada, in part of the remote Mexican province of California, a frontier carpenter spotted a few shiny pebbles in a drainage ditch. Little did he know that in the same week he validated his discovery as unusually pure gold, the suddenly valuable territory passed from Mexican possession to that of the United States. The result: the most rapid mass migration in American history and a transformation that led the young nation to a fateful rise in economic power. As one observer noted at the time, "It had been so ordered by Providence that the gold might not be discovered until California should be in the hands of the Americans.”

The peace treaty with Mexico that ended the Mexican War was negotiated by one of the great unsung heroes of our history, Nicholas Trist. A former aide to James Madison and Andrew Jackson, married to Thomas Jefferson's granddaughter, Trist defied a president and risked arrest. As chief clerk of the State Department, with no official sanction, he broke every rule to make the monumental deal that changed the world.

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