THE TERRITORY OF JEFFERSON: A SPON- 

 TANEOUS COMMONWEALTH^ 



By Frederic L. Paxson 



A great western scholar has well emphasized the significance of the 

 frontier in the development of American history. He has pointed out 

 the fact that the conditions of life along the edge of the wave of popula- 

 tion moving to the West have been more nearly stable and uniform 

 than those of any other portion of the United States, and that the men 

 produced in this frontier have been a constant and positive force in the 

 development of national life. But the time has been too short and the 

 laborers too few for the vast field of western history to have received 

 more than a most superficial treatment, and so it is that the searcher in 

 this field comes daily to his rich reward. It was here that the territory 

 of Jefferson lived and passed away. 



In January of 1859 some grains of gold were brought to the Missouri 

 River to prove to the world that a great gold field had been overlooked 

 in the rush to California. For more than ten years the busy trails to 

 Santa Fe and Oregon had carried their thousands past the fields of 

 Colorado to the coast; but now the movement changed, and active life 

 sprang into existence at the forks of Cherry Creek and the South Platte, 

 while a restless population, hungry from the panic of 1857, filled the 

 new mining camps of Colorado. 



The mining camp at its best affords a problem in government, at its 

 worst a study in anarchy; and these new camps at Auraria and St. 

 Charles and Central City were no exceptions to the rule. In a legal 

 way, the camps straddled the line of the fortieth parallel that then 

 divided the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. But they were five 

 hundred miles from a seat of government, and no political organization 

 had ever been effected in their district. They needed law and civil 

 rights and justice, but they had only the territorial organizations of a 

 bleeding Kansas and an impotent Nebraska. 



» A paper read before the Section of American History of the International Congress of Arts and Sciences, 

 St. Louis, September, 24, 1904. 



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