There had been no white population in Kansas in 1853, and no special desire to create one. But the political struggle had advertised the territory on a large scale, while the whole West was under the influence of the agricultural boom that was extending settlement into Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. Governor Reeder's census in 1855 found that about 8500 had come in since the erection of the territory. The rioting and fighting, the rumors of Sharpe rifles and the stories of Lawrence and Potawatomi, instead of frightening settlers away, drew them there in increasing thousands. Some few came from the South, but the northern majority was overwhelming before the panic of 1857 laid its heavy hand upon expansion. There was a white population of 106,390 in 1860. The westward movement, under its normal influences, had extended the range of prosperous agricultural settlement into the Northwest in this past decade. It had coöperated in the extension into that part of the old desert now known as Kansas. But chiefly politics, and secondly the call of the West, is the order of causes which must explain the first westward advance of the agricultural frontier since 1820. Even in 1860 the population of Kansas was almost exclusively within a three days' journey of the Missouri bend. CHAPTER IX "PIKE'S PEAK OR BUST"[2] [2] This chapter is in part based upon my article on "The Territory of Colorado" which was published in _The American Historical Review_ in October, 1906. The territory of Kansas completed the political organization of the prairies. Before 1854 there had been a great stretch of land beyond Missouri and the Indian frontier without any semblance of organization or law. Indeed within the area whites had been forbidden to enter, since here was the final abode of the Indians. But with the Kansas-Nebraska act all this was changed. In five years a series of amorphous territories had been provided for by law. Along the line of the frontier were now three distinct divisions. From the Canadian border to the fortieth parallel, Nebraska extended. Kansas lay between 40° and 37°. Lying west of Arkansas, the old Indian Country, now much reduced by partition, embraced the rest. The whole plains country, east of the mountains, was covered by these territorial projects. Indian Territory was without the government which its name implied, but popular parlance regarded it as the others and refused to see any difference among them.