-It is difficult for the young of to-day to realize
that Wisconsin and Iowa were not states when Hawthorne published his Twice
Told Tales (1837), that Lowell's _The Vision of Sir Launfal_ (1848) was
finished ten years before Minnesota became a state, that Longfellow's
_Hiawatha_ (1855) appeared six years before the admission of Kansas, and
Holmes's _The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_ (1858), nine years before
the admission of Nebraska. In 1861 Mark Twain went to the West in a
primitive stagecoach. Bret Harte had finished _The Luck of Roaring Camp_
(1868) before San Francisco was reached by a transcontinental railroad.
Even after the early pioneers had done their work, the population of the
leading states of the West underwent too rapid a change for quick
assimilation. Between 1870 and 1880 the population of Minnesota increased
77 per cent; Kansas, 173 per cent; Nebraska, 267 per cent. This population
was mostly agricultural, and it was busy subduing the soil and getting
creature comforts.
Mark Twain says of the advance guard of the pioneers who went to the far
West to conquer this new country:--
"It was the _only_ population of the kind that the world has ever seen
gathered together, and it is not likely that the world will ever see its
like again.
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