This table tells its own story. In New England the Norwegian factor is unimportant. There has been a high ratio of growth in New York and New Jersey since 1880, but the total number is not large. In the rest of the Atlantic seaboard states, as in the gulf states, the Norwegian population has remained almost stationary at a very low figure. Such is also the case with the inland states of the South, as in the Southwest. The effort to direct Norwegian immigration to Texas, which goes back to the forties, has been productive of only meagre results. Even Kansas is too far south for the Norwegian. In the extreme West, however, considerable numbers of Norwegians have established homes since about 1882, particularly in California, Oregon and Washington, since 1895 also in Montana, and in recent years even in the extreme North, in Alaska. What were the influences that directed the Norwegian immigrants so largely to the Northwest in the early period and down to 1890? The great majority came for the sake of bettering their material condition. They came here to found a home and to make a living. Moreover, as I have observed above, immigrants in their new home generally enter the same pursuits and engage in the same occupations in which they were engaged in their native country. Three-fourths of the population of Norway live in the rural districts and are mostly engaged in some form of farming.[16] Thus seventy-two per cent of the Norwegian immigrants are found in the rural districts and in towns with less than twenty-five thousand population. The fact that the influx of the immigrants from Norway coincided with the opening up of the middle western states resulted in the settlement of those states by Norwegian immigrants. Land could be had for almost nothing in the West. Land-seekers from New England, New York and Pennsylvania were in those days flocking to the West.[17] About ninety per cent of the Norwegian immigrants at that time were land-seekers. As a rule long before he emigrated the Norseman had made up his mind to settle in Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, or Minnesota. [16] This includes also fishermen and foresters. [17] Outside of Chicago, Illinois had in 1840 a population of 142,210; Wisconsin was organized as a Territory in 1836, its population in 1840 was 30,945; Iowa had a population of only 192,212 in 1850; and Minnesota, organized at a Territory in 1849, had in 1850, 1,056 inhabitants. To the square mile the population of each was in 1850: Illinois, 15.37; Wisconsin, 5.66; Iowa, 3.77; Minnesota, .04. CHAPTER III _The Earliest Immigrants from Norway, 1620 to 1825._