which included 236 Democrats and 8 members of a new third party, that called itself the Farmers' Alliance and that presented a baffling problem for the deliberations of politicians.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Additional works having special value at this point are William D. Orcutt, Burrows of Michigan and the Republican Party (1917), and Samuel W. McCall, Life of T. B. Reed (1914).

CHAPTER XVI

THE FAR WEST IN POLITICS

THE Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890 owed its passage
to a "hold-up" in Congress, engineered by Republican
Congressmen from the Western States.
It was

Admission

omnibus States

not the first occasion on which the frontier had of the demanded and obtained legislation satisfactory to itself, but at no preceding time had there been so large a group of new Western members present in a single Congress. Six new States were received into the Union between November, 1889, and July, 1890. North Dakota and South Dakota, Washington and Montana constituted a group admitted under an omnibus act signed by Cleveland in February, 1889. Idaho and Wyoming, which failed to secure authorization in the same act, made constitutions without authority for doing so and were admitted in the summer of 1890. The narrow Republican majority in each house made that party peculiarly susceptible to the admission of new States, whose Congressional delegations were likely to be Republican. Of the twelve Senators and seven Representatives allotted to the six new States, all but one voted with the dominant party. Their support on party issues demanded and received its reward, with the result that the silver issue was advanced in importance until it threatened to displace the tariff.

The State of Colorado, admitted as the thirty-eighth State in the centennial year, 1876, was still in 1890 the farthest west of the Eastern States. The old frontier of States as it existed before the Civil War with its western border touching the plains along the boundaries of Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas, represented the limits to which agriculture was able to expand without artificial aid. The three Territories of Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado, projecting west from the middle of this line,

owed their admission to the need for Republican votes in reconstruction and to the demands of the miners in Colorado. Their initial population was small, but the railroads that crossed them from east to west, Union Pacific, Burlington, Kansas Pacific, and Santa Fé, had lands to sell and stimulated their settlement by organized promotion. With the revival of business in 1879, home-seekers turned toward this triangle of young States. Omaha, Kansas City, and Denver developed new importance as distributing centers. In connection with the cattle industry and with the influence of the Western prairie farmers they brought a new political pressure in Congress.

The Far Western States of 1880 had not been changed since the admission of Nevada as a rotten borough in 1864. There was no excuse for Nevada except that Lincoln needed Republican votes to strengthen the Union majority in Congress. Nevada, Oregon, and California were separated from the other organized States of the Union by a huge, irregular tract of public domain that extended across half the width of the continent along the Canadian line, and that covered the Mexican border between the Colorado and the Rio Grande. There were eight Territorial Governments within this area, five in the Northwest — Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Washington. Two in the Southwest New Mexico and Arizona - were scarcely less primitive than they had been at the date of their conquest in 1846. The barrier was narrowest between Colorado and Nevada where the Mormon hierarchy of Utah covered a Territory and retarded its admission into the Union.

In the earlier decades of frontier advance the prevailing growth had occurred along a narrow strip on the western edge of the last frontier. In each generation since the planting of the seaboard colonies the new frontier was settled by the children of the old, and as the new frontier ripened into social consciousness its children were got ready to repeat the process. The systematic advance of the frontier was checked at the western border of Missouri by lack of easy transportation, by the diminishing fertility of the land upon

the plains, and by the popular belief in the existence of the "Great American Desert." West of Missouri the agricultural frontier did not advance unaided. When the aid

came in the form of free homesteads to advertise the West and continental railroads to lessen its distances, the result was a scattering of effort. The frontier line disappeared from the map after 1880. In its place the farther west was dotted with irregular settlements whose location was determined by natural resources or communications. From all of these there early came demands for the abolition of the Territorial status and for admission into the Union.

The Southwest Territories were the least affected by the incentives to colonization, and with a population relatively stationary were the weakest of the statehood projects. New Mexico, with nearly three times the population of Arizona, had 153,000 inhabitants in 1890, and the preponderance of Mexicans among these weakened the force of her intermittent demands for admission.

The five Northwest Territories more than trebled in the decade, the population rising from 301,000 in 1880 to 1,136,000 in 1890. Within their limits 8673 miles of railroad were completed in this decade. From the valley of the Red River of the North to the banks of the Columbia and the shores of Puget Sound, clusters of inhabitants were spread along the lines of the Northern Pacific, and the Great Northern which James J. Hill was thrusting through the same country. In Dakota and Washington there were already organized movements for statehood earlier than 1880. By the date of their admission Dakota had over half a million inhabitants and Washington 349,000.

In the struggle for the admission of Territories after Colorado, Dakota was the usual text upon which arguments were based. Largest in population and nearest the East, if she might not come in, no Territory could hope for entrance. Her demands for statehood were shaped by the geographic facts that produced a geographic sectionalism. within her borders. There was no good reason for most of the boundary lines given to the Western Territories. They

were arbitrary and rectangular. Those of Dakota included three isolated areas of divergent economic interests. Oldest of these was the Yankton country in the southeast corner. Next in prominence was the northeast corner, where Red River wheat became the staple product of a region singularly fitted for its production. Until nearly 1890 each of these sections had less in common with the other than with the city of Chicago through which each maintained its contacts with the outside world. The mining region in the Black Hills in the southwest corner found an outlet through Cheyenne and the Union Pacific and constituted a third center of sectionalism in the Territory.

Long before statehood was in sight the Territory was intent upon division before admission, and was thinking genDivision erously of its future as two States. Educational of Dakota and penal institutions were established in pairs, making provision for the northern and southern halves of the Territory. The capital of the Territory was shifted from Yankton to Bismarck, where the Northern Pacific crossed the Missouri River. Here Henry Villard, while celebrating the completion of his road in 1883, stopped long enough to lay the cornerstone of the prairie capital. "The confidence of these Westerns is superb," wrote James Bryce, who was a guest on Villard's special train. "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 forest trees."

The Western demand for new States was stronger than the disposition of Congress to admit them. From 1876 until 1889 Congress was at no time under the control of a single party except for the two years between 1881 and 1883. The Northwest Territories were all settled in years in which the Republican Party was dominant and in which its plea for party regularity received strong response from men who had lived through the period of the Civil War. The probability that they would add Republican votes to