As late as the Civil War, Florida was one of the weakest of the American States, with but 140,000 population, of which well over a third was colored. Nearly all of the Whites represented a southward thrust of the Atlantic seaboard states, from or through Georgia. Foreigners were a scattered lot, constituting but one in twenty-five of the white population.
FROM THE MISSISSIPPI TO THE OREGON
After the Old Northwest Territory was filled up, it began to overflow into the territories across the Mississippi which the Louisiana Purchase had provided.
Minnesota's early settlers were French and half-breeds, who came over the border from Canada, together with a small number of Scots escaping from the breakup of the Red River Colony in Manitoba in the first quarter of the last century. This Red River is, of course, the Red River of the North which forms the present boundary between Minnesota and the Dakotas.
Beginning in 1837 treaties were made with the Indians which gradually opened up the land to settlement; but in 1849, when a territorial organization was effected and the first official census taken, there were less than 5000 persons in the region.
Meanwhile the flood of immigration was reaching the nearby States, and Wisconsin and Iowa were growing with tremendous spurts. The tide soon began to flow up to Minnesota, coming by four principal routes. Some of the invaders came from Milwaukee across Wisconsin by land. Others from Chicago by land through northern Illinois and southwestern Wisconsin. Still others from Chicago to Galena, embarking there on the river steamers. Another group embarked at Saint Louis and came 800 miles up the Mississippi to Fort Snelling, the nucleus around which the Twin Cities began to develop.