The new Northwest escaped its dangers only to fall a victim to its own ambition. An earlier decade of expansion had produced panic in 1837. Now greater expansion and prosperity stimulated an over-development that chartered railways and even built them between points that scarcely existed and through country rank in its prairie growth, wild with game, and without inhabitants. Over-speculation on borrowed money finally brought retribution in the panic of 1857, with Minnesota about to frame a constitution and enter the Union. The panic destroyed the railways and bankrupted the inhabitants. At Duluth, a canny pioneer, who lived in the present, refused to swap a pair of boots for a town lot in the future city. At the other end of the line a floating population was prepared to hurry west on the first news of Pike's Peak gold. But a new Northwest had come into life in spite of the vicissitudes of 1837 and 1857. Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa had in 1860 ten times the population of Illinois at the opening of the Black Hawk War. More than a million and a half of pioneers had settled within these three new states, building their towns and churches and schools, pushing back the right flank of the Indian frontier, and reiterating their perennial demand that the Indian must go. This was the first departure from the policy laid down by Monroe and carried out by Adams and Jackson. Before this movement had ended, that policy had been attacked from another side, and was once more shown to be impracticable. The Indian had too little strength to compel adherence to the contract, and hence suffered from this encroachment by the new Northwest. His final destruction came from the overland traffic, which already by 1857 had destroyed the fiction of the American desert, and introduced into his domain thousands of pioneers lured by the call of the West and the lust for gold. CHAPTER IV THE SANTA FÉ TRAIL England had had no colonies so remote and inaccessible as the interior provinces of Spain, which stretched up into the country between the Rio Grande and the Pacific for more than fifteen hundred miles above Vera Cruz. Before the English seaboard had received its earliest colonists, the hand of Spain was already strong in the upper waters of the Rio Grande, where her outposts had been planted around the little adobe village of Santa Fé. For more than two hundred years this life had gone on, unchanged by invention or discovery, unenlightened by contact with the world or admixture of foreign blood. Accepting, with a docility characteristic of the colonists of Spain, the hard conditions and restrictions of the law, communication with these villages of Chihuahua and New Mexico had been kept in the narrow rut worn through the hills by the pack-trains of the king.