The Rocky Mountain States grew up in the first place out of this traffic, then by the mining discoveries within their limits, and the fact that there was a restless population on the Pacific Coast, ready to surge back eastward, together with a footloose population to the East ready to move into any part of the West.
This Eastern contingent received its impetus from the panic of 1857, when many men, bankrupt or dislocated, were prepared to make a new start. The mining activities in the Far West encouraged adventurers to try their hand at the gold pan, and the country was full of prospectors, some of them professional but mostly amateur. Men who had no jobs at home thought they might as well seek a fortune in this way; it would not cost them much to live, and they could at least see the country. A similar renaissance of prospecting and small-scale mining took place all over the mountains of the West when the depression of 1929 was well under way.
To this element was shortly added another composed of people getting away from the Civil War. Some of these were actual deserters from military service; others went West to escape the pressure of public opinion toward enlistment; others in the border States, ruined by the conflict or unwilling to cast their lot with either combatant, simply started in motion as their fathers and grandfathers had done before them.
The population of the mountain States varied remarkably from month to month, as the crowd moved from one reputed bonanza to another. The government at Washington showed itself unusually ready to set up new governments in that region, because it was on the whole of unquestioned Union loyalty and, if the South, at the close of the war, should be brought back into the Union on the old terms, as President Lincoln evidently planned, a dozen new senators from half as many new Western States could easily be secured, leaving the South in the minority and breaking that deadlock of almost half a century which had been the source of so many compromises and the occasion of so many conflicts.
Colorado, at that time a part of Kansas, was an almost unknown "Indian territory" when prospectors struck gold in the neighborhood of Denver in 1858 and 1859. The rush from Kansas and Nebraska, when the legend "Pike's Peak or Bust," lettered on the sides of emigrant wagons, became traditional, disclosed how little was known of the country. Pike's Peak, though not near the gold diggings, was the only place in Colorado of which most Americans had ever heard.
In 1861 there was enough population to justify territorial government. Statehood was not attained until 1876. From then on until the agricultural period, the history of Colorado was the history of its fluctuating mining camps. But by 1930 the State had reached a permanent basis and a population of more than a million, of which two-thirds was native and the other third a heterogeneous lot, partly Nordic but containing strong Slav, Italian, and Mexican elements. So far as the native American population was concerned, its geographical origin still represented a fan spreading out from Pike's Peak until it reached the Atlantic Ocean. In large or small proportions, emigrants from most of the older States had converged on the Rockies.
Wyoming, first explored by trappers and fur traders, became important because it was traversed by the Oregon Trail; but it was merely a place to pass through, until the arrival of the Union Pacific Railway and the discovery of gold in the same year (1867) gave it a life of its own. Nearly 6000 persons spent the following winter in Cheyenne—a cosmopolitan crowd of adventurers and speculators. After its organization as a territory in 1859, agriculture had begun, stock raising became important, there were local gold rushes, and the region slowly developed until admitted to the Union in 1890.
Wyoming's population, smaller than that of any other State with the single exception of Nevada, is less than two-thirds native stock, and this represents a blend from all parts of the United States. Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, have all contributed more inhabitants than either of its neighbors, Colorado and Utah. In these mountain States the general rule that a State is settled by its neighbors, quite breaks down. Its foreign stock is equally mixed; while much is Nordic the State has also attracted its quota of Slavs and Italians, and even of Mexicans.