t escaped the invasion of slave owners
from Missouri and was settled mainly by farmers from the North. Though
it claimed a population of only 67,000, it was regarded with kindly
interest by the Republican Congress at Washington and, reduced to its
present boundaries, it received the coveted statehood in 1867.

This was hardly accomplished before the people of Colorado to the
southwest began to make known their demands. They had been organized
under territorial government in 1861 when they numbered only a handful;
but within ten years the aspect of their affairs had completely changed.
The silver and gold deposits of the Leadville and Cripple Creek regions
had attracted an army of miners and prospectors. The city of Denver,
founded in 1858 and named after the governor of Kansas whence came many
of the early settlers, had grown from a straggling camp of log huts into
a prosperous center of trade. By 1875 it was reckoned that the
population of the territory was not less than one hundred thousand; the
following year Congress, yielding to the popular appeal, made Colorado a
member of the American union.

=Six New States (1889-1890).=--For many years there was a deadlock in
Congress over the admission of new states. The spell was broken in 1889
under the leadership of the Dakotas. For a long time the Dakota
territory, organized in 1861, had been looked upon as the home of the
powerful Sioux Indians whose enormous reservation blocked the advance of
the frontier. The discovery of gold in the Black Hills, however, marked
their doom. Even before Congress could open their lands to prospectors,
pioneers were swarming over the country. Farmers from the adjoining
Minnesota and the Eastern states, Scandinavians, Germans, and Canadians,
came in swelling waves to occupy the fertile Dakota lands, now famous
even as far away as the fjords of Norway. Seldom had the plow of man cut
through richer soil than was found in the bottoms of the Red River
Valley, and it became all the more precious when the opening of the
Northern Pacific in 1883 afforded a means of transportation east and
west. The population, which had numbered 135,000 in 1880, passed the
half million mark before ten years had elapsed.

Remembering that Nebraska had been admitted with only 67,000
inhabitants, the Dakotans could not see why they should be kept under
federal tutelage. At the same time Washington, far away on the Pacific
Coast, Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, boastin