THE POPULATION OF COLORADO 205 
During the decade following the opening of this thoroughfare, Ohio, 
Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri were rapidly filling with population. 
These were then the “booming” states settled by restless young men 
and women who had migrated from their birthplaces in the older states 
farther east. In 1830 the population of the region represented by these 
states was much like that of Colorado in 1860. When in the latter year 
the gold fever raged in the country, the children of these restless ~ 
“boomers” of the 1830 period were the first to be seized with it and they 
accordingly hastened to the Rocky Mountain region. They were the 
true children of parents whose restless spirits two or three decades earlier 
had likewise sent them forth in search of fortune in the undeveloped 
resources of the West. 
In the second group of states are found Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and 
Massachusetts. These are older states and with the exception of parts 
of Pennsylvania had been settled before the “booming” times of 1830. 
Hence the young men in these states in 1860 were not the children of 
parents who had migrated there a generation earlier, and accordingly 
they were more immune to the gold fever. 
Wisconsin is in this group of states, having furnished 1,204 persons to 
the migratory movement to Colorado in 1860. ‘This state was organized 
as a territory in 1836 andin 184ohadapopulationof 30,945, largely around 
Milwaukee and the lead mining districts in the southwestern part. This 
population had settled there after 1830 as according to the census no one 
save Indians was in the territory at that time. Of the children born to 
this population between the settlement of the territory and 1840, 1,204 
went to Colorado in the gold rush of 1860. In 1840 the populations of 
the other states of this group, Kentucky, Massachusetts and Pennsyl- 
vania were respectively 779,828, 737,699 and 1,724,033. Yet the 
children of the 30,945 pioneering settlers in Wisconsin went in about the 
same numbers to the mountains of Colorado in 1860 as did the children 
of the settlers of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, states whose popu- 
lations in 1840 exceeded that of Wisconsin by more than twenty and fifty 
fold respectively. It is true Kentucky sent considerably more native 
immigrants to Colorado, than Wisconsin, but this does not injure the 
comparison when the differences in population are considered. This 
