Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/63

 THE TERRITORY OF COLORADO It is commonly taken for granted that the Kansas-Nebraska legis- lation of 1854 settled the territorial question in the United States, and that the territorial question itself was only a single phase of the larger question of slavery. The tyranny of the slavery problem over the historical mind has completely subordinated the problem of the expansion of the agricultural West, the settlement of new areas, and the providing of adequate institutions of government for the citizens of the frontier. The erection of the territory of Colo- rado in 1861 is itself proof that slavery was not in its own day de- structive of interest in all other topics, however it may have im- peded their consideration, and is an illuminative precedent in show- ing the manner in which territorial problems have been forced upon Congress and ultimately adjusted. The acquisition of the southwest at the treaty of Guadalupe- Hidalgo in 1848 extended the legal frontier of the United States far beyond the frontier of actual settlement and compelled Congress to give serious thought to the subdivision of large and relatively un- inhabited areas of public lands. The act of May 30, 1854, which has commonly been misunderstood as saying the last important word upon the territorial question, merely marked the end of the earliest period of preliminary adjustment. The residuum of the Louisiana purchase and the lands acquired through the Mexican War were at last distributed among two states, California and Texas, and four territories. The two territorial organizations of New Mexico and Utah covered the whole area between California and the Rocky Mountains, while the fortieth parallel divided most of the unorgan- ized area east of the mountains into Kansas and Nebraska territories. The distribution in eflfect at the end of the session of 1854 was only preliminary, and within three years Congress had begun to con- sider the division of three of these territories, Nebraska, Utah, and New ]Iexico, whose gigantic size precluded the rigorous execution of law by single territorial establishments. In the first session of the thirty-fifth Congress, 1857-1858, it was finally proposed to di- vide two of these territories, creating Arizona in the western end of New Mexico and Nevada in the western end of LTtah ■^ while the next session brought a bill to erect Dakota in the northern end of ' Congressional Globe, 35 Cong., i Sess., pp. 62, 2090. (53)