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The difficulties of administering the General Land Office in the face of such a migration as was now under way were great. They were alleviated by the fact that the task was nearing its end. The population map of 1880, as shown by the census report, revealed the fact that the best farm lands of the public domain were all disposed of, and that recent entries were carrying the farmers dangerously close to the sub-humid plains and the high mountains. There was room for some further advance before 1890, but not much. At every census since the first in 1790 the line of six inhabitants per square mile had shifted west, forming a positive measure for the advance of the frontier. The line of 1890 was so broken and irregular, and approached so near, at various places, to the western line that was swinging east, that obviously the frontier task was done. In 1900, indeed, the line shows an absolute recession. The migrations of the eighties were over-large; and the enthusiasm of the settlers, recruited by alien immigrants, and stimulated by lenders with money to advance on farms, and railroads with lands to sell, planted more farmer families on the western plains than the plains could hold. Between 1880 and 1890 the typical American frontier process reached its end.

CHAPTER LVIII

THE ADMISSION OF THE "OMNIBUS" STATES

In the period of depression after the panic of 1873, Colorado, the thirty-eighth State, was admitted to the Union in 1876. It brought no change in the boundaries upon the political map of the United States, for these lines had become substantially complete after the organization of Wyoming Territory in 1868. It established, however, a western status that remained unchanged for thirteen years, until new States had ripened under the boom of the eighties.

During these thirteen years approximately two thirds of the total area of the United States lay under autonomous State governments, and one third was dependent upon the will of Congress. Of the total area, 3,026,789 square miles, the eight territories of Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Washington, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, and Indian Territory which last was not a territory at all, comprised 938,015 square miles. They occupied an unbroken tract from Canada to Mexico, and varied in breadth from nearly twenty-seven degrees of longitude along the Canadian line to five degrees at the narrowest part, Utah. Their region had much of it been included in the legendary American desert, or the Indian Country. Their first institutions of government had mostly originated in the demand of mining camps for home rule. The oldest of them, New Mexico and Utah, had rounded over a quarter century since their creation; the newest, Wyoming, was still in its first decade. All of them bore testimony to the fact that while mineral resources were capable of inspiring territorial talk they rarely provided a sound basis for civil organization unless supplemented by extensive agriculture. The white population, 150,220 in 1860, had grown to 271,166 in 1870, and to 606,810 in 1880. Ten years later, with the inclusion of most of the 325,464 Indians which were now enumerated, the gross population of the area was 1,908,803.

The three States of Kansas,1 Nebraska, and Colorado shared

1 William E. Connelley, The Life of Preston B. Plumb, 1837-1891 (1913) and Ingalls of Kansas (1909), pictures through the lives of two senators "the founding of a great State," and the "passing of an old order." Plumb was so typical that William H. Crane copied him

with the territorial area in many of its characteristics. They were set up in the undulating plains that rise gradually from the Missouri River to the watershed of the Rockies. In 1860 their population of 170,324 had been close to that of the territorial area; but with the earlier influence of the continental railroads bearing upon them, and their closer proximity to eastern sources of emigration, they grew to 527,256 by 1870. In 1880 they had far outstripped the territorial area, having 1,642,825 inhabitants; and in 1890 this was increased to 2,904,013. They possessed home rule, which gave them greater political influence than their territorial neighbors, but their social age was about the same and their difference was that of greater size rather than of inherent quality. There was no new State admitted after Nebraska (1867) until Colorado (1876); and political considerations as well as immaturity had much to do with the long interval after Colorado until the next admissions in 1889.

Colorado limped and lingered in its advance toward statehood. Under its first enabling act it rejected admission in 1864. When it thought better of it, and approved admission the following year, the President of the United States had changed from Lincoln to Johnson, and presidential policy had also changed. Johnson did not want additional Republican States and found excellent reasons for refusing to admit Colorado with its scanty population, its vagrant habits, and its low taxable wealth. After the completion of the Union Pacific and its Kansas Pacific branch, agriculture awoke on the eastern slopes of the mountains, and the tributaries of the South Platte and the Arkansas yielded water for irrigation ditches that induced a more permanent prosperity than Colorado Territory had yet witnessed. Thereafter another enabling act came easily in 1875, and a constitution was framed at Denver in 1876.

The second Colorado enabling act was passed on the last day upon which the Republican party had a majority in Congress for a period of six years. Beginning with March 4, 1875, Grant was confronted with a Democratic House of Representatives, including a Democratic delegate from Colorado Territory. The opposition developed hopes that from Colorado might come three Democratic electoral votes in 1876, and Patterson, the delegate, encouraged this belief. But the new State was admitted by proclamation on in every detail in his make-up an 1 manner in The Senator, and Plumb himself trimmed the actor's beard to make the resemblance more complete.

August 1, 1876, and cast its vote for Rutherford B. Hayes the following November; without these three, or with them reversed, Samuel J. Tilden would have become President of the United States. It was small wonder that in ensuing Congresses, members of both parties looked upon new States with reference to their influence upon presidential aspirations, and that Democrats resolved not to increase the burden of votes that might be cast against them. Throughout the administration of Hayes, 1877– 1881, there was continuously a Democratic House of Representatives to block the admission of Republican territories as States, and after an intermission of a single Congress, the blockade lasted until the end of the Fiftieth Congress in 1889. During the four years of Cleveland's administration, 1885-1889, the blockade was from the other side, with a Republican Senate suspicious of every statehood proposition that might turn out Democratic.

After Colorado, the likeliest territories were Dakota and Washington, each of which had the beginnings of a solvent population. The massacre of Custer and his men in 1876 drew attention to Dakota and its resources. In the southwest corner of the territory, the region of the Black Hills was filling in with mineral prospectors, and the stage coach running north from Cheyenne on the Union Pacific to Deadwood kept alive a tradition that had largely died after the overland stage was withdrawn. When Colonel William F. Cody organized his first Wild West show in 1883 he capitalized the general interest in the cow country and the mining camps, and made the attack upon the Deadwood coach a spectacular feature of his performance. When he took his show to England in 1887, royalty was more intrigued by this than by any other episode, and his autobiography tells many stories of the experiences of "Buffalo Bill" when he held the reins, and the then Prince of Wales insisted upon riding around the arena on the box. The Black Hills brought advertising to a remote part of Dakota, and suggested an ultimate division of the territory. There were already two clearly defined tracts, one in the northeast, where the wheat lands of the Red River of the North were tapped by the Northern Pacific Railroad, the other in the southeast, where farmers from Iowa and Minnesota had naturally overflowed from these States and occupied the angle between the Missouri and the Big Sioux rivers. When James Bryce traversed this territory with Villard's ceremonial train in 1883, he witnessed the laying of a corner stone for a new capitol building at Bismarck, where there

were hopes rather than inhabitants. "The confidence of these Westerns is superb," he wrote. "Men seem to live in the future rather than in the present: not that they fail to work while it is called to-day, but that they see the country not merely as it is, but as it will be, twenty, fifty, a hundred years hence, when the seedlings shall have grown to be forest trees." The starting of a capitol at Bismarck was evidence that in Dakota the intention was to enter the Union as two States. Universities were established at both Grand Forks, on Red River, and Vermilion, on the Missouri, so that institutions might be ready for each half when the division

care.

Bills for the admission of Dakota were before Congress during the session of 1882-1883, but failed to pass. The defeat was due to Democratic opposition, reinforced by a vigorous protest from a group of Republicans. The Republican protest was founded upon the fact that Yankton County had made no provision for the payment of its issue of railroad bonds, whose holders sought to compel payment by exclusion. "I believe that all the objections which have been hitherto urged against the passage of that bill are purely partisan and malignant," declared John J. Ingalls, Republican Senator from Kansas; and he knew much of both partisanship and malignancy. With the defeat of this measure, the moment of possible admission was passed, and there was no chance for success until after the election of 1888.

In Dakota spontaneous attempts at statehood kept aspirations alive through the years of partisan blockade. A constitution was drawn up at Sioux Falls in 1883, and another at the same place in 1885. The United States Senate, which was Republican, repeatedly passed enabling acts for the division of the territory and the admission of its parts. The House as consistently rejected the proposals, searching for arguments in the size of the population and the allegation that division was a measure being forced upon an unwilling northern half of the territory. In 1888 the Senate again had under consideration a division-admission bill, with no hope of passing it through the House, when the result of the presidential election disclosed the fact that after March 4, 1889, the Government of the United States would be Republican in all its branches. This removed the blockade. The question now immediately became not whether Dakota could be admitted, but how many other territories would be admitted with it.

Washington Territory had a local statehood movement in 1878.

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