to publish the _Nation_ in New York in the
summer of 1865, and H.V. Poore issued the first volume of his annual
_Manual of the Railroads of the United States_, in 1868.

CHAPTER II

THE WEST AND THE GREENBACKS

The activity of the North and the East between 1861 and 1865 was
imitated and magnified among the youthful communities that made up the
western border and ranged in age from a few weeks to thirty years. These
had been mostly agricultural in 1857. Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and
Kansas had been the frontier before the Civil War. In place of these,
now grown to be populous and more or less sedate, a new group appeared
farther west, within what had been believed to be the "American Desert."
By 1868 Congress completed the subdivision of the last lands between the
Missouri River and the Pacific, since which date only one new political
division has appeared in the United States.

The last frontier, that developed after 1857, was novel as well as new.
It was made up of mining camps. Everywhere in the Rocky Mountains
prospectors staked out claims and introduced their free-and-easy life.
Before 1857 the group of Mormons around the Great Salt Lake was the only
considerable settlement between eastern Kansas and California. Now came
in quick succession the rush to Pike's Peak and Colorado Territory
(1861), the rush from California to the Carson Valley and Nevada
Territory (1861), and the creation of the agricultural territory of
Dakota (1861) for the up-river Missouri country, where in a few more
years were revealed the riches of the Black Hills. In 1863 the mines of
the lower Colorado River gave excuse for Arizona Territory. Those of the
northern Continental Divide were grouped in Idaho in the same year, and
divided in 1864 when Montana was created. Wyoming, the last of the
subdivisions, was the product of mines and railroads in 1868. Oklahoma
was not named for twenty years more, but had existed in its final shape
since the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in 1854.

The legitimate influence of these mining-camps upon the United States
was great. It was no new thing for Congress to solve its national
problems on the initiative of the West. Since the passage of the
Ordinance of 1787 this had been a frequent occurrence, and the history
of the public lands had always been directed by Western demands. In 1862
the agricultural West, whose capacity to cultivate land had been
magnified by the new reaper of McCormic