MAP 13.4 The Mexican Cession, 1848
In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), Mexico ceded to the United States its vast northern territories — the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and half of Colorado. These new territories, President Polk boasted to Congress, “constitute of themselves a country large enough for a great empire, and the acquisition is second in importance only to that of Louisiana in 1803.”