largely before the era of railways and in part before the steamboat came into use. Yet these three states multiplied their population in fifty-years (1790-1840) from 45,000 to 2,680,000. West of the Mississippi are the four neighbour states, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and Kansas. Their rich prairie lands were as yet almost unbroken when the wagon trains bound for Oregon began wearing deep trails westward across their surface. Yet, between the years 1840 and 1880 these four states gained a combined population of 3,793,000.
To sum the matter up, population in the states north of the Ohio advanced during the first half century of settlement about three times as fast as in the Pacific Northwest, while in the states west of the Mississippi the rate was five times as rapid.
Inadequate markets, however, were only one cause of the delay in peopling this favoured region. The other main cause was the existence of vast stretches of rich unappropriated land east of the Rockies, which would have to be taken up for the most part before a general movement of homeseeking farmers into the Northwest could be realized. For the "rush "of settlement is always into the next available contiguous area. Other conditions being equal, emigrants cling as closely to the old home as they can. This is a principle which western promoters who were ignorant of the history of settlement in the United States sometimes forgot, to their sorrow.
It would seem, therefore, that in recent years, with
