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In January 1848, six Mormon men bunked together in a small wood cabin along the South Fork of the American River in Cullumah, as the Nisenan named the land where they had lived for thousands of years, meaning “beautiful valley.” The men, part of the U.S. Army Mormon Battalion, had traveled from Iowa to San Diego to fight in the Mexican-American War, which, fortuitously or not, was close to an end upon their arrival. The war allowed the victorious United States to acquire more than 500,000 square miles of Mexican territory from the Rio Grande to the Pacific Ocean. Undeterred, the men headed north to become laborers at John Sutter’s sawmill