Intelligent easterners had difficulty in keeping pace with western development during the decade of the Civil War. The United States itself had made no codification of Indian treaties since 1837, and allowed the law of tribal relations to remain scattered through a thousand volumes of government documents. Even Indian agents and army officers were often as ignorant of the facts as was the general public. "All Americans have some knowledge of the country west of the Mississippi," lamented the _Nation_ in 1868, but "there is no book of travel relating to those regions which does more than add to a mass of very desultory information. Few men have more than the most unconnected and unmethodical knowledge of the vast expanse of territory which lies beyond Kansas.... [By] this time Leavenworth must have ceased to be in the West; probably, as we write, Denver has become an Eastern city, and day by day the Pacific Railroad is abolishing the marks that distinguish Western from Eastern life.... A man talks to us of the country west of the Rocky Mountains, and while he is talking, the Territory of Wyoming is established, of which neither he nor his auditors have before heard." [Illustration: THE WEST IN 1863 The mining booms had completed the territorial divisions of the Southwest. In 1864 Idaho was reduced and Montana created. Wyoming followed in 1868.] In that division of the plains which was sketched out in the fifties, the great amorphous eastern territories of Kansas and Nebraska met on the summit of the Rockies the great western territories of Washington, Utah, and New Mexico. The gold booms had broken up all of these. Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Dakota, Colorado, had found their excuses for existence, while Kansas and Nevada entered the Union, with Nebraska following in 1867. Between the thirty-seventh and forty-first parallels Colorado fairly straddled the divide. To the north, in the region of the great river valleys,--Green, Big Horn, Powder, Platte, and Sweetwater,--the precious metals were not found in quantities which justified exploitation earlier than 1867. But in that year moderate discoveries on the Sweetwater and the arrival of the terminal camps of the Union Pacific gave plausibility to a scheme for a new territory. The Sweetwater mines, without causing any great excitement, brought a few hundred men to the vicinity of South Pass. A handful of towns was established, a county was organized, a newspaper was brought into life at Fort Bridger. If the railway had not appeared at the same time, the foundation for a territory would probably have been too slight. But the Union Pacific, which had ended at Julesburg early in 1867, extended its terminus to a new town, Cheyenne, in the summer, and to Laramie City in the spring of 1868.