The last of these was unique.  Its provisions were designed, no doubt, to meet the unusual conditions presented by the overland emigration to California.  Military protection for the emigrant, a telegraph line, and an overland mail were among the ostensible objects.  The military force was to be a volunteer corps, which would construct military posts and at the same time provide for its own maintenance by tilling the soil.  At the end of three years these military farmers were each to receive 640 acres along the route, and thus form a sort of military colony.[419] Douglas pressed the measure with great warmth; but Southerners doubted the advisability of “encouraging new swarms to leave the old hives,” not wishing to foster an expansion in which they could not share,[420] nor forgetting that this was free soil by the terms of the Missouri Compromise.  All sorts of objections were trumped up to discredit the bill.  Douglas was visibly irritated.  “Sir,” he exclaimed, “it looks to me as if the design was to deprive us of everything like protection in that vast region ...  I must remind the Senate again that the pointing out of these objections, and the suggesting of these large expenditures show us that we are to expect no protection at all; they evince direct, open hostility to that section of the country."[421]

It was the fate of the Nebraska country to be bound up more or less intimately with the agitation in favor of a Pacific railroad.  All sorts of projects were in the air.  Asa Whitney had advocated, in season and out, a railroad from Lake Michigan to some available harbor on the Pacific.  Douglas and his Chicago friends were naturally interested in this enterprise.  Benton, on the other hand, jealous for the interests of St. Louis, advocated a “National Central Highway” from that city to San Francisco, with branches to other points.  The South looked forward to a Pacific railroad which should follow a southern route.[422] A northern or central route would inevitably open a pathway through the Indian country and force on the settlement and organization of the territory;[423] the choice of a southern route would in all likelihood retard the development of Nebraska.

While Congress was shirking its duty toward Nebraska, the Wyandot Indians, a civilized tribe occupying lands in the fork of the Kansas and Missouri rivers, repeatedly memorialized Congress to grant them a territorial government.[424] Dogged perseverance may be an Indian characteristic, but there is reason to believe that outside influences were working upon them.  Across the border, in Missouri, they had a staunch friend in ex-Senator Benton, who had reasons of his own for furthering their petitions.  In 1850, the opposition, which had been steadily making headway against him, succeeded in deposing the old parliamentarian and electing a Whig as his successor in the Senate.  The coup d’etat was effected largely through the efforts of an aggressive pro-slavery faction led