From Wilderness to Megalopolis

Abstract

Using a historical Geographic Information System (GIS) and statistical measures, this research examines the sex ratios of the United States between 1790 and 1910 to determine whether men truly outnumbered women on the American Frontier. We used United States Census data combined with historical digital county maps to calculate male-to-female sex ratios by county and settlement density class. We analyzed these ratios using descriptive statistics, the Games-Howell analysis of variance (ANOVA) test, and comparisons of historical GIS maps. We found that gender ratios on the American Frontier were extremely high throughout the study period and were significantly different from those in more densely populated areas. In addition, sex ratios declined as population density increased in each decade of this study. However, frontier areas still had fairly high gender ratios in 1910, thus showing ongoing significant demographic differences between those sparsely settled counties and more urbanized regions.