Speculators and promoters
industriously advertised the advantages of localities in which
they were interested, boomed new towns, and even loaned money to
ambitious emigrants.
The upshot was that the population of Indiana grew from
twenty-five thousand in 1810 to seventy thousand in 1816, when
the State was admitted to the Union. Illinois filled with equal
rapidity, and attained statehood only two years later. Then the
tide swept irresistibly westward across the Mississippi into the
great regions which had been acquired from France in 1803. As
late as 1819, the Territory of Missouri, comprising all of the
Louisiana Purchase north of the present State of Louisiana, had a
population of only twenty-two thousand, including many French and
Spanish settlers and traders. But in 1818 it had a population of
more than sixty thousand, and was asking Congress for legislation
under which the most densely inhabited portion should be set off
as the State of Missouri. Thus the Old Northwest was not merely
losing its frontier character and taking its place in the nation
on a footing with the seaboard sections; it was also serving as
the open gateway to a newer, vaster, and in some respects richer
American back country.
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