=Rounding out the Continent.=—­Three more territories now remained out of the Union.  Oklahoma, long an Indian reservation, had been opened for settlement to white men in 1889.  The rush upon the fertile lands of this region, the last in the history of America, was marked by all the frenzy of the final, desperate chance.  At a signal from a bugle an army of men with families in wagons, men and women on horseback and on foot, burst into the territory.  During the first night a city of tents was raised at Guthrie and Oklahoma City.  In ten days wooden houses rose on the plains.  In a single year there were schools, churches, business blocks, and newspapers.  Within fifteen years there was a population of more than half a million.  To the west, Arizona with a population of about 125,000 and New Mexico with 200,000 inhabitants joined Oklahoma in asking for statehood.  Congress, then Republican, looked with reluctance upon the addition of more Democratic states; but in 1907 it was literally compelled by public sentiment and a sense of justice to admit Oklahoma.  In 1910 the House of Representatives went to the Democrats and within two years Arizona and New Mexico were “under the roof.”  So the continental domain was rounded out.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE FAR WEST ON NATIONAL LIFE

=The Last of the Frontier.=—­When Horace Greeley made his trip west in 1859 he thus recorded the progress of civilization in his journal: 

     “May 12th, Chicago.—­Chocolate and morning journals last
     seen on the hotel breakfast table.

     23rd, Leavenworth (Kansas).—­Room bells and bath tubs make
     their final appearance.

     26th, Manhattan.—­Potatoes and eggs last recognized among
     the blessings that ‘brighten as they take their flight.’

     27th, Junction City.—­Last visitation of a boot-black, with
     dissolving views of a board bedroom.  Beds bid us good-by.”

[Illustration:  Copyright by Panama-California Exposition

THE CANADIAN BUILDING AT THE PANAMA-CALIFORNIA INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION, SAN DIEGO, 1915]

Within thirty years travelers were riding across that country in Pullman cars and enjoying at the hotels all the comforts of a standardized civilization.  The “wild west” was gone, and with it that frontier of pioneers and settlers who had long given such a bent and tone to American life and had “poured in upon the floor of Congress” such a long line of “backwoods politicians,” as they were scornfully styled.

=Free Land and Eastern Labor.=—­It was not only the picturesque features of the frontier that were gone.  Of far more consequence was the disappearance of free lands with all that meant for American labor.  For more than a hundred years, any man of even moderate means had been able to secure a homestead of his own and an independent livelihood.  For a hundred years America had been able to supply farms to as many