54 F. L. Pax sou Nebraska.' The division was required b)^ various facts of popula- tion and migration. Tlie location of the great Pacific trails, the dis- covery of silver-mines, the willingness to restrict the territory of the Mormons, all appear as inspiring a further subdivision of the scantily populated West. The Congress of 1857-1858 passed no laws for the erection of new territories in the areas marked out in the debates. There is some internal evidence throughout these and later debates that the young sponsors of the new Republican party were interested in territorial development as a means of continuing the antislavery argument which all parties had agreed in 1854 to forget. But what- ever may have been the motives underlying the agitation, the argu- ments make entirely clear the facts that the boundaries of 1854 were only temporary and that the great, shapeless territories must some day be divided. The session of 1857-1858 contented itself with the suggestion of two new territories of Nevada and Arizona ; when the same Congress met for its second session in 1858-1859, two more new territorial projects, those of Dakota and Jefferson, had been added to its list. In the migrations to the far West, beginning to be heavy in the forties, the two principal routes had branched from the Missouri River near its northern bend on the western boundary of the state of Missouri. From this point the northern or Oregon route had run westwardly along the Platte, the southern or Santa Fe route along the Arkansas. And at the one hundred and second meridian the two trails were already two hundred and fifty miles apart, and were devi- ating still further to the northwest and southwest respectively. - The angle between the trails covered the heart of the "great Ameri- can desert ", which jXIajor Long had described in 1820 as utterly uninhabitable for man, and which men had since 1820 been willing to take at the word of the explorer. It was this uninviting, unin- habited area which in the fall of 1858 appeared before Congress. It demanded not a slicing up of existing great territories, but a new grouping of lands taken out of the crest of the Rockies and in part ^ Globe, December 21, 1858, p. 159. 2 An act of Congress of May 19, 1846, provided for the erection of forts along the Oregon route, fort Kearney was established on the Platte 310 miles west of Fort Leavenworth, and Fort Laramie 337 miles beyond Fort Kearney, in 1848. Ex. Doc. 5, 31 Cong., i Sess., Serial 569, pp. 94, 225. Fort Kearney became the most important post on the northern route and was not abandoned until 1871. House Ex. Doc. 12, 43 Cong., 2 Sess., Serial 1164. Lieutenant-colonel William Gilpin was on July 20, 1847, detailed to a station near the crossing of the Arkansas to keep the peace along the Sante Fe trail. Ex. Doc. 1, 30 Cong., i Sess., pp. 136, 139.
