Despite the Civil War, California grew by 47 percent between 1860 and 1870 without the railroad. It grew by 54 percent between 1870 and 1880 with the railroad, reaching 864,694 people. It had grown more slowly and was smaller than Kansas. Calculated from Historical Census Browser.
Historical Census Browser, Univ. of Virginia Library.
Orsi, Sunset Limited, 130, 193-204, 323-29.
Fite, Farmer's Frontier, 106-7.
Fite, Farmer's Frontier, 108.
Fite, Farmer's Frontier, 130.
Cunfer finds an increase in diversified farming on the Great Plains after 1900, stabilizing in the 1920s and then slowly declining.
Claire Strom, Profiting from the Plains: The Great Northern Railway and Corporate Development of the American West (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 2003), 13-39.
Also Cunfer, On the Great Plains, 76-80, 82, 85.