The territory between east and west US states in the 1800's

Factual Questions
1

There was a period of time when the US had an area between the east states and the few western states (CA, NV) that had not yet been declared as states. Did this territory have a name?

Why was that area left void of states while CA and NV had already been settled? I’m assuming the gold rush led to the quick state formation of CA and NV which gave it more protection against hostilities. If that’s the case wouldn’t it have been better to immediately declare individual states within this empty territory?

Were the present day state boundaries already decided for the states in this empty territory?

2

Generally, in order to apply for and be granted statehood, an area needed a certain population. For instance, the Northwest Ordinance (the 1787 law that established the Northwest Territory, which is now Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin) said that , for a specific territory to petition for statehood, it needed at least 60,000 people. A lot of the middle of the country wasn’t very heavily populated. And sure, the territory had names; they were territories organized under the laws of the US with territorial governments. So you had Dakota Territory, Utah Territory, New Mexico Territory, Arizona Territory, Wyoming Territory, etc. The actual territory names changed as more people settled there.

So, for instance, all the land we bought from France was first just “Louisiana Territory”, and then, after the state of Louisiana became part of the US, the area that was left was called “Missouri Territory”, then, after Missouri became a state, most of the rest of it was unorganized, then organized by Congress as various territories.

3

To add, here’s a map of the US published by an anti-slavery publisher before the Civil War. It’s got a lot of information on slave populations and the relative political power of the slave states, but more to our purpose, it also delineates the various US Territories that existed as of 1856, along with their boundaries and names.

4

California statehood caught everyone by surprise. When we took the territory from Mexico in 1848, there were less than 10,000 non-natives living in California. The expectation was that western settlement would continue in the same general pattern it had been going, with settlement going from east to west. It was expected that California would remain mostly unsettled for several decades.

And then gold was discovered. (The gold had actually been discovered two weeks before the United States legally acquired ownership of California but the word hadn’t gotten out yet.) Within five years, there were hundreds of thousands of settlers in California. California, which had been expected to remain a territory for several decades, became a state within two years.

5

That’s a really interesting map.

6

Often the names of the territories were the same as the states partly or completely covering the same ground today. A grandmother of mine was born in Utah Territory, about six years before statehood was granted.

A curious minor plot arc in the Civil War’s early period is that the rebel forces extended as far west as present-day New Mexico, where the Confederate Territory of Arizona was organized and incorporated. This area covered approximately the southern half of both New Mexico and Arizona.

7

No, not at all. As various territories were organized, Congress chose boundaries (and a name) and those usually stuck with minor changes. Dakota Territory got divided, for instance, while parts of five states were once Oregon Territory.

You may be interested in Mark Stein’s book How the States Got Their Shapes, although it disturbs me that he never even mentions the Washington Meridian.

8

For a long time after the Louisiana Purchase, the land west of Minnesota-Iowa-Missouri remained unorganized. No states, and no territories. The southern part of this land had been promised in perpetuity (yeah, right) to various Indian tribes, and partly due to erroneous reports by the earliest American explorers, the land was regarded as subprime for agriculture.

Three things happened to change this in the 1840’s: (1) John C. Fremont explored the Great Plains more thoroughly, and reported they were more fertile than previously thought. (2) The US acquired the Southwest in 1846, meaning that the Plains were no longer Western borderlands, but were in the middle of the country. (3) The Gold Rush turned Western travel from a trickle to a flood, meaning the Plains were vital as a transportation corridor.

But still, when California was admitted as a state in 1850, the Plains were completely unorganized. And so they remained for another four years. The problem now was that the South didn’t want to organize territorial governments for the Plains, because slavery was banned there (by the Missouri Compromise of 1820), and territories would become states, and who wanted more free states?

So Stephen Douglas, in 1854, contrived to bribe the South by opening the Plains to slavery, allowing Congress to create Kansas and Nebraska Territories via the Kansas-Nebraska Act, with slavery legal unless and until the territorial legislatures decreed otherwise.

The Indians, who had been promised the land in perpetuity, were of course shunted aside. Most of the debate in Congress focused on slavery; Sam Houston was one of the only members of Congress who berated the wrong being done to the Indians.

Kansas Territory was roughly similar to modern Kansas, except that it included eastern Colorado to the Continental Divide. Nebraska Territory was a behemoth extending all the way to the Canadian border. It was understood that as this territory was settled pieces would be hived off into other territories and states, as of course they were until Nebraska was reduced to its current boundaries when admitted as a state in 1867.

9

The book “How the States Got Their Shapes” and the History Channel show of the same name delves into a lot of this.

10

A while ago I read the wiki on Albert Johnson, one of the finer generals of the CSA, and it included the information:
Early in the Civil War, Confederate President Jefferson Davis decided that the Confederacy would attempt to hold as much of its territory as possible, and he distributed its military forces around its borders and coasts.
And I thought ‘What the fuck ?’
The Hitlerian imperative seems to have obvious drawbacks at any time, but still more so in the Confederate case.

Not that I am comparing old Jeff to Hitler at all. AH never owned a slave in his life.