hanical appliances on the movement of population
was amazing. The day when emigrants settled along the banks of streams,
pushed their boats up the rivers by means of poles, carried their goods
on the backs of pack horses, and floated their produce in Kentucky
broadhorns down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, was fast
disappearing. The steamboat, the canal, the railroad, had opened new
possibilities. Land once valueless as too far from market suddenly
became valuable. Men grew loath to live in a wilderness; the rush of
emigrants across the Mississippi was checked. The region between the
Alleghanies and the great river began to fill up rapidly. During the
twenty years, 1821 to 1841, but two states, Arkansas (1836) and Michigan
(1837), were admitted to the Union, and but three new territories,
Florida (1822-23), Wisconsin (1836), and Iowa (1838), were established.

So few people went west from the Atlantic seaboard states that in each
one of them except Maine and Georgia population increased more rapidly
than it had ever done for forty years. From the Mississippi valley
states, however, numbers of people went to Wisconsin and Iowa.

In consequence of this, Iowa was admitted to the Union in 1846, and
Wisconsin in 1848. Minnesota and Oregon were made territories. Florida
and Texas had been admitted in 1845, and the number of states was thus
raised to thirty before 1850. The population of the country in 1850 was
23,000,000. Two states in the Mississippi valley now had each of them
more than a million of inhabitants.

%404. The First States on the Pacific.%--Until 1840 the people had
moved westward steadily. Each state as it was settled had touched some
other east, or north, or south of it. After 1840 people, attracted by
the rich farming land and pleasant climate of Oregon, and after 1848 by
the gold mines of California, rushed across the plains to the Pacific,
and between 1850 and 1860 built up the states of California and Oregon
(1859), and the territory of Washington (1853). Minnesota was admitted
in 1858. The population of the United States in 1860 was 31,000,000.

[Illustration: %DISTRIBUTION OF THE POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES
SEVENTH CENSUS, 1850%]

%405. Immigration to the United States since 1820.%--The people whose
movements across our continent we have been following were chiefly
natives of the United States. But we have reached the time when
foreigners began to arrive by hundreds of thousands every y