In this connection the census map offers an unfailing interest. Investigation shows that our star, denoting the center of population, has traveled in all only 525 miles since 1790, the greatest west-bound gains being in the decade 1850-60, 81 miles. At no time has the center of population moved back toward the East, though it is nearer to doing so now than ever before--proof that the history of America has been but the history of a West, and also proof that that wayward West may soon bend its footsteps homeward after a century of adventure. The record of the movement of the population center is as follows:
1790, 23 miles east of Baltimore, Maryland; 1800, 18 miles west of Baltimore, Maryland; 1810, 40 miles northwest by west of Washington, D. C.; 1820, 16 miles north of Woodstock, Virginia; 1830, 19 miles west-southwest of Moorefield, West Virginia; 1840, 16 miles south of Clarksburg, West Virginia; 1850, 23 miles southeast of Parkersburg, West Virginia; 1860, 20 miles south of Chillicothe, Ohio; 1870, 48 miles east by north of Cincinnati, Ohio; 1880, 8 miles west by south of Cincinnati, Ohio; 1890, 20 miles east of Columbus, Indiana; 1900, 7 miles north of Columbus, Indiana.
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At the time of the discovery of gold in California, there had been built up a splendid Western population, hardy, self-confident, able to shift for itself, wholly distinct from that population that it had for a generation left behind at the old starting places of the trails. These trails across the continent, wavering, tortuous, yet practicable, had been fully established. So far as might be within the horizon of those days, all was now ready for the epoch-making event that was to change all the methods of America, that was to make Westerners by wholesale and to draw them swiftly from every corner of the earth.
The great state of California alone was cause and sufficient reason for the swift development of the remoter American West. There can not be denied the tremendous effect produced by the sudden growth of California, coming as it did hard on the time of the annexation of Texas and the widening of our national territory in the far Southwest. As to the discovery of gold and the swift growth of California being unmixed benefits, there may exist at this later day something of a sober doubt.