g of their populations and
their riches, put in their own eloquent pleas. But the members of
Congress were busy with politics. The Democrats saw no good reason for
admitting new Republican states until after their defeat in 1888. Near
the end of their term the next year they opened the door for North and
South Dakota, Washington, and Montana. In 1890, a Republican Congress
brought Idaho and Wyoming into the union, the latter with woman
suffrage, which had been granted twenty-one years before.

=Utah.=--Although Utah had long presented all the elements of a
well-settled and industrious community, its admission to the union was
delayed on account of popular hostility to the practice of polygamy. The
custom, it is true, had been prohibited by act of Congress in 1862; but
the law had been systematically evaded. In 1882 Congress made another
and more effective effort to stamp out polygamy. Five years later it
even went so far as to authorize the confiscation of the property of the
Mormon Church in case the practice of plural marriages was not stopped.
Meanwhile the Gentile or non-Mormon population was steadily increasing
and the leaders in the Church became convinced that the battle
against the sentiment of the country was futile. At last in 1896 Utah
was admitted as a state under a constitution which forbade plural
marriages absolutely and forever. Horace Greeley, who visited Utah in
1859, had prophesied that the Pacific Railroad would work a revolution
in the land of Brigham Young. His prophecy had come true.

[Illustration: THE UNITED STATES IN 1912]

=Rounding out the Continent.=--Three more territories now remained out
of the Union. Oklahoma, long an Indian reservation, had been opened for
settlement to white men in 1889. The rush upon the fertile lands of this
region, the last in the history of America, was marked by all the frenzy
of the final, desperate chance. At a signal from a bugle an army of men
with families in wagons, men and women on horseback and on foot, burst
into the territory. During the first night a city of tents was raised at
Guthrie and Oklahoma City. In ten days wooden houses rose on the plains.
In a single year there were schools, churches, business blocks, and
newspapers. Within fifteen years there was a population of more than
half a million. To the west, Arizona with a population of about 125,000
and New Mexico with 200,000 inhabitants joined Oklahoma in asking for
statehood. Congress, then Re