red, and illuminating interpretations made by Professors H. E.
Bolton, I. J. Cox, Chapman, Father Engelhart, and other California and
Texas investigators, although the works of Hubert Howe Bancroft remain a
useful mine of material. There was, of course, a contemporaneous Old
West on both the French and the Spanish frontiers. The formation,
approach and ultimate collision and intermingling of these contrasting
types of frontiers are worthy of a special study.]

IV

THE MIDDLE WEST[126:1]

American sectional nomenclature is still confused. Once "the West"
described the whole region beyond the Alleghanies; but the term has
hopelessly lost its definiteness. The rapidity of the spread of
settlement has broken down old usage, and as yet no substitute has been
generally accepted. The "Middle West" is a term variously used by the
public, but for the purpose of the present paper, it will be applied to
that region of the United States included in the census reports under
the name of the North Central division, comprising the States of Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin (the old "Territory Northwest
of the River Ohio"), and their trans-Mississippi sisters of the
Louisiana Purchase,--Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, North
Dakota, and South Dakota. It is an imperial domain. If the greater
countries of Central Europe,--France, Germany, Italy, and
Austro-Hungary,--were laid down upon this area, the Middle West would
still show a margin of spare territory. Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and
Buffalo constitute its gateways to the Eastern States; Kansas City,
Omaha, St. Paul-Minneapolis, and Duluth-Superior dominate its western
areas; Cincinnati and St. Louis stand on its southern borders; and
Chicago reigns at the center. What Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and
Baltimore are to the Atlantic seaboard these cities are to the Middle
West. The Great Lakes and the Mississippi, with the Ohio and the
Missouri as laterals, constitute the vast water system that binds the
Middle West together. It is the economic and political center of the
Republic. At one edge is the Populism of the prairies; at the other, the
capitalism that is typified in Pittsburgh. Great as are the local
differences within the Middle West, it possesses, in its physiography,
in the history of its settlement, and in its economic and social life, a
unity and interdependence which warrant a study of the area as an
entity. Within the limits of this a