When the Rock Island and Pacific Railway was built through to the Mississippi in the early summer of 1854, the gateways really opened. The next season saw 50,000 persons in the territory of Minnesota. That number was doubled in 1856. In 1854 the sales of public land had amounted to 300,000 acres, in 1856 to 2,300,000. Most of this population, which evidently came to stay, was from the Middle States. The States of the Old Northwest and New England were not far behind, but little of the Southern emigration came this far north. The years 1855, 1856, and 1857 marked the high tide of the flood of immigration of territorial days which has not since been duplicated.
The Scandinavian immigration, which has colored Minnesota so strongly, began in this decade, and brought a steady stream of hardy Nordics who avoided the cities, their objective being to acquire land, establish a home, develop a farm, and become American citizens. A substantial part of the German migration also reached Minnesota, so that in the census of 1860 one-third of the foreign-born population was German. By this time the Canadian elements had been completely swamped. The Federal Census of 1860, three years after the territory had been admitted to Statehood, found 170,000 inhabitants, of whom 58,000 were foreign-born. The Germans at this time still somewhat exceeded the Scandinavians in number. The native-born were overwhelmingly of British ancestry and represented a prolongation of the westward movement of population from New England that had been going on for more than two centuries. Minnesota at this time had a Nordic population and was pre-dominantly Anglo-Saxon in character.
Dakota was included in Minnesota in 1860 when a few settlers had already begun to enter the region. Dakota Territory, however, scarcely deserves consideration until the final period is herein reviewed.
Iowa had no real settlement until the spring of 1833, when several companies of Americans from Illinois and elsewhere settled in the vicinity of Burlington, although John Dubuque established a settlement in 1788 on the site of the city which now bears his name, and, with his descendants, carried on a business of mining lead and trading with the Indians for a generation or more. Settlements then began to be made at other points along the Mississippi, and in 1838 the country was cut off from Wisconsin and established as a separate territory.
As in the States of the Old Northwest Territory, the early population of Iowa was made up principally from the Southern States; and when Dubuque was formally declared to be a town in 1834 its 500 citizens were mostly from Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina.
The delay in the settlement of Iowa, as compared with that of the States east of the Mississippi, was due mainly to the fact that it was held by the Indians. The Black Hawk War kept the country disturbed for three years. At the end of that time the chief was utterly routed and ultimately captured, and in September, 1832, a treaty was signed in which the Indians relinquished what was afterward known as the Black Hawk Purchase, comprising about one-third of the present State of Iowa.
At that time there were probably not fifty white men in Iowa, but thenceforward the settlement was extraordinarily rapid. The pioneers from the South came up the Mississippi, while those from the East could go down the Ohio. But since the purpose of most of the settlers was to take up farm land and since the livestock and implements necessary for this purpose could not be transported easily on the small river boats, the great bulk of the immigration was overland in wagons drawn by oxen, horses, or mules.
In 1836 there were 10,000 Southerners in the territory. In the following two years this number had more than doubled and the census of 1840 made it 43,000.