How Yoga Arrived in the U.S.--start date usually given as 1893

Yoga in the United States --people usually say it started with a World's Parliament of religions in Chicago  in 1893 and particularly the work of one swami--

Here is a brief article from Ananda Yoga in California

Ananda Los Angeles: A Spiritual Center for the Yoga and Meditation Teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda > Online Community and Resources > Articles > How Yoga Science Came to America

How Yoga Science Came to America

A little more than a hundred years ago, a stranger from India wearing red silk robes and a saffron turban mingled with the crowds at the 1893 World Exposition in Chicago. He carried a speech to give to a religious congress, but his enduring gift was a spiritual discipline called…Yoga.

Today, with over 15 million Americans practicing some form of yoga – including many public figures from former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to the musician Sting – it is hard to imagine a time when virtually no one in America had even heard of yoga. Yet such was the landscape that met Swami Vivekananda, who brought along this 5,000 year old system when he came to America in 1893 to address the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Vivekananda electrified his audience of over 7,000, not with amazing feats of physical control and strength, but with timeless and universal truths. He concluded with an ancient scripture learned in his boyhood: “As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, sources in different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to thee.” Like the other Hindu swamis(teachers) who followed him, Vivekananda came not to teach us how to sculpt our bodies, but rather, how to illuminate our souls. Yet as the eminent scholar Georg Feuerstein has asked, “Why do we hear so little about morality, meditation, and enlightenment in yogic circles today? What happened between then and now?”

The Fertile Ground of American Soil.