This essay was first published on Medium, and can be found at: https://medium.com/p/7777859dbf03

1816: The Forgotten Climate Crisis That Pushed America West
“You’ve heard of Manifest Destiny. But what about Malnutrition Destiny?”

July 4, 2025

By Brian Eisold

Picture it! The Dutch East Indies, 1815…

Mount Tambora erupts in what is now Indonesia. Not a cute little puff. A planet-altering explosion. The kind of eruption that dims the sun, kills crops, and casually rewrites human history while nobody’s looking. The ash cloud loops the globe. Temperatures plummet. And suddenly Vermont looks a lot like Siberia wearing a powdered wig.

By the time the ash settled into the upper atmosphere, it was already reshaping the world. In 1816, crops failed in China. Famine swept through Europe. But in the young United States, the skies didn’t turn black — they just got weird. New England saw snow in June. Frost in August. Crops died in the field. And thousands of families quietly packed their wagons and started heading west.

Frostbite and Folklore

It’s fitting that this story lands on the Fourth of July — a day we dedicate to myths about independence, grit, and Manifest Destiny. We celebrate by grilling meat on gas-fed flames and posting flag emojis, all while forgetting that a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world once caused Americans to flee like climate refugees in ox-drawn minivans.

“Ohio Fever” became folklore. But the migration wasn’t about adventure or opportunity. It was about escaping collapse. Tambora launched more than 100 million tons of sulfur into the stratosphere — enough to cool the planet and plunge entire regions into chaos. Crop failures weren’t a nuisance. They were existential. Families didn’t chase freedom. They fled frost.

The Land Wasn’t Empty

Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were already home to the Shawnee, Miami, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, and dozens of other Indigenous nations. The families who abandoned the frozen fields of New England didn’t disappear into the wilderness — they showed up on someone else’s land. But they weren’t called invaders. They were called settlers.

Their desperation was romanticized. Their movement justified. And their impact? Sanitized. The U.S. government paved the way with land grants, military protection, and legal frameworks designed to erase Indigenous sovereignty as efficiently as possible. The result wasn’t just migration. It was removal.

We call it “pioneering.” We teach it as courage. The wagons became icons of grit. And the people already living on the land? They were written out of the frame. We replaced their names with counties, mascots, and casino signage. None of this was accidental. Expansion was engineered. Indiana became a state that same year. Illinois followed shortly after. Statehood wasn’t a coincidence — it was the payoff. The myth of Manifest Destiny grew from those frozen gardens and forced marches.

Then and Now

And that’s the trick, isn’t it? We turned desperation into destiny. We canonized settlers and criminalized the displaced. We kept the migration engine, but rewrote the casting call. If a group of starving families today tried to escape drought, gang violence, or political collapse by walking north toward the U.S., we wouldn’t call them settlers. We wouldn’t celebrate their determination. We’d call them an invasion.

But they’re not invaders.

They’re refugees — just like the frostbitten families who abandoned New England centuries ago. What’s changed isn’t the cause. It’s the costume. Swap rifles for backpacks and wagons for buses, and the entire narrative flips. We once gave land to people fleeing a dying climate. Now we give them ankle monitors, cages, and Guantánamo.

The Fireworks and the Frame

The ash from Tambora is long gone. The borders have shifted. The stories have hardened into legend. But the patterns remain. Climate pushes. People move. Some are welcomed. Others are criminalized. And the line between the two? It’s never been about need. It’s always been about narrative.

We made a myth to explain the migration. We still believe it. And that belief decides who suffers.