Missouri, adjoining Kansas to the east, had then nearly 600,000 inhabitants, and the counties bordering on the Kansas line contained a population of some 80,000 whites, as shown by the census of 1850. These naturally were the most available material for settlement of the new land and in a short time they had staked out the best claims in the river bottoms. While they do not bear a good reputation in the Kansas histories, where they generally go by the name of "border ruffians," they represented, worthily or not, pure Nordic American stock. Most of the Missourians who had moved into Kansas at that time were simply seeking new homes and were not even in favor of slavery. The trouble that was made on the border was due to small organized gangs of quite a different complexion.
Kansas represented a real battleground for the slavery and free-soil elements, and colonies were organized in a number of the Southern States, but particularly in Alabama and Kentucky, to move to the new territory and insure its retention for the cause. Most of the Southern settlers naturally stayed as close to the Missouri border as possible. The Free-State settlers on the other hand tended to get away from the border, to leave the belt of pro-slavery settlers behind, and to stake out their claims well within the interior of the territory.
The New England Emigrant Aid Company was the principal crusader in the campaign to make Kansas free soil, and proclaimed widely that it would send 10,000 men into the region. Its funds, however, were scanty, and beyond advertising the opportunities of the country, it gave little substantial aid to the emigration. Contrary to what is generally supposed, the number of settlers who came directly from New England to Kansas was small. As had been the history elsewhere in this country, most of the settlers came from nearby States such as Illinois; though often of New England ancestry.
In the first census of the territory, in 1855, more than half of the population was found to be from the South, although the Slave States' representatives made strong protests against the manner of taking the census which was sudden and in mid-winter when many of the Missouri settlers had returned to their old homes. The high-water mark of the Southern immigration was in 1856. Thereafter the emigration from the Free States increased until by 1860 it outnumbered the Slave-State natives nearly three to one. That year's census, crediting Kansas with 107,000 population, also revealed that Missouri and Kentucky were the principal sources of the pro-slavery immigration, while the main sources of the free-soil immigration were in the following order: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York, with only 3000 direct from all the New England States together. Indeed, there were almost as many natives of North Carolina in Kansas as there were natives of Massachusetts.
Kansas was at the end of this period a western State, of almost wholly British complexion. The streams of Scandinavians and Germans which afterward entered the State had scarcely begun at this period. Kansas was, to a marked degree, the offspring of New England through the Central States, while not much more than one-fourth of its population, arriving from the border States, had ancestral lines running back to Virginia.
Nebraska, like many other Western States, was first settled by trappers, traders, missionaries, and soldiers. In 1845 the Mormons, driven out of Illinois and Iowa, stopped in the Nebraska country, but most of them afterward moved on to Utah. Meanwhile, the State was being traversed each year by hundreds of emigrant trains on their way to the Pacific Coast, and thus became known to people from all parts of the Union. During the years 1849 and 1850 it was estimated that more than 100,000 people crossed the Nebraska plains in this way. Some of them would stop there for various reasons, while others came into the section to cater to the needs of the emigrants. Thus Nebraska was gradually built up out of the overland traffic. The early migration to Utah and to Oregon was succeeded by the rush to California, and that had scarcely died down when the boom days in Colorado brought new contingents to the region. Before this had disappeared the Transcontinental Railway opened up the territory in real earnest.
The first boom year in the territory was in 1856 when a large number of permanent settlers came in. In 1860 the population numbered 28,841, and even at this time relatively few of the settlers depended upon agriculture, most of them still "living off of the tourists," which became a recognized profession in some States half a century later.
Utah, when Brigham Young led his Saints there in 1847, was a desert as to the region of the Great Salt Lake, with scarcely even a population of Indians. The early population was almost wholly Nordic, made up of people from the New England States, New York, and those States in which the Mormon Church had temporarily settled, or through which it had moved successively to Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and Nebraska.