Unlike the other populations of Wisconsin at that time, the vast
majority of Milwaukee County settlers were Northeasterners. Such
evidence as we have indicates that New York supplied more than half,
the New England states, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan nearly all of
the balance.[1] New York’s title to primacy in peopling Wisconsin is
exhibited, most impressively, in the statistics of the 1850 census. At
that time native Americans constituted 63 per cent of the total and
New Yorkers had 36 per cent of the native majority. Native Americans
predominated in all but three of the twenty-six counties, and in all
but five those who were natives of New York, added to the natives of
Wisconsin, were a majority of the American born. The exceptions were
the four lead mining counties of Grant, Iowa, Lafayette, and Green,
together with Richland, which, however, had so few inhabitants that its
case is divested of any significance.
The three counties which, in 1850, showed a majority of foreign born
inhabitants were Manitowoc, Milwaukee, and Washington (the last named
including the present Ozaukee County); and in each case Germans
constituted more than half of that majority. Together those three
counties had over 20,000, which was considerably more than one-half
of all the Germans (38,054) domiciled in Wisconsin at that time. The
other lake shore counties, together with Calumet, Fond du Lac, Dodge,
Jefferson, and Waukesha, accounted for 15,000 of the balance, leaving
about 3000 scattered over the rest of the state. Thus the area embraced
by Lake Michigan, Lake Winnebago and lower Fox River, the upper reaches
of Rock River, and the south boundary of Jefferson, Waukesha, and
Milwaukee counties was all strongly and in the main distinctively
German.
Investigating the causes which may have operated to concentrate the
German population within such clearly defined geographic limits, our
first inquiry concerns the land on which settlement was taking place.
And here we find that the distinguishing fact marking off the region
in which Germans abounded from most of the other settled or partially
settled areas of the state was its originally thickly wooded character.
In a way almost startling, and superficially conclusive, the German
settlements coincided with the great maple forest of southeastern
Wisconsin, spreading also through the included pine forest on Lake
Michigan south of Green Bay.
Returning now to the Yankee element, we find that although it was
strong in all of the settled districts save the five counties named,
it was more completely dominant in some districts than in others. For
example, in Walworth County the northeastern states furnished 96.5 per
cent of the American population, while 3.5 per cent was furnished by
sixteen other states. The foreign born constituted less than 16 per
cent of the total.[2] Walworth County was a section of the new “Yankee
Land,” which included in its boundaries also the counties of Racine
and Kenosha, Rock, and at that time parts of Waukesha and Jefferson.
Nowhere in that region were foreigners very numerous, and in many
localities non-English speaking foreigners were almost scarce.
Physically, this new Yankee Land comprised those portions of the
prairies and openings of southern Wisconsin which lay not more than
from sixty to seventy-five miles from the lake ports at Milwaukee,
Racine, and Kenosha. The region was just as characteristically “open
country” as that occupied so extensively by Germans was forested. One
land type, the glacial marsh or swale--good for hay and pasture--was
common to the two districts of country. But for the rest, the Yankee’s
land was all ready for the plow if it was prairie, and if oak openings
the labor of felling the scattered trees and dragging them away before
the breaking team was comparatively light.
The German, on the other hand, in order to subdue his land to the
requirements of successful tillage, must attack with ax, mattock,
and firebrand each successive acre, patiently slashing and burning,
hewing and delving, till by dint of unremitting toil extended over an
indefinite number of years his farm became “cleared.”
Shall we therefore repeat, as the sober verdict of history, the
statement often heard, that in settling this new country the Yankee
showed a preference for open land, the German for woodland? On the
face of the census returns that seems to be the case, and if our
evidence were limited to the census such a conclusion would be well
nigh inescapable. Fortunately, he who deals with culture history
problems of the American West has this advantage over the Greenes and
the Lamprechts of Europe, that on such matters his evidence is minutely
particular, while theirs is general to the point of vagueness. No one
will doubt that the Yankee staked his claim in the open lands because
he preferred those lands on account of the ease with which a farm could
be made. The question is, whether the German’s presence in the woods
rather than in the openings or on the prairies was with him a matter of
preference so far as land selection in itself was concerned.
Timber for shelter, fuel, building, and fencing was an important
consideration to all settlers, including the Yankees. In another
connection I have shown, from the records of land entries, that the
Yankee settlers in a prevailingly prairie township of Racine County
took up first every acre of forested land, together with the prairie
lands and marsh lands adjoining the woods, while they shunned for
some years the big, open, unsheltered prairie where farms would be
out of immediate touch with woods.[3] Rather than take treeless lands
near the lake shore, these settlers preferred to go farther inland
where inviting combinations of groves, meadows, and dry prairie
lands, or openings, could still be found in the public domain. Only
gradually did American settlers overcome their natural repugnance to
a shelterless, timberless farm home--a repugnance justified by common
sense, but springing from the habit of generations. When, for economic
reasons, they began to settle on the open prairies, the planting of
quick-growing trees about the farmsteads was always esteemed a work of
fundamental utility.
Yankee agricultural settlers found special inducements for going inland
in search of ideal farm locations, in the glowing advertisements of
Yankee speculators who early pioneered the open country far and wide.
These speculators concerned themselves primarily with water powers for
sawmill and gristmill sites and town sites. Yet power and town sites
both depended for their development on the agricultural occupation
of the surrounding country, and this made the speculators careful to
locate their claims in areas of desirable lands which would soon be
wanted. It also made them doubly active in proclaiming to immigrants
the agricultural advantages of their chosen localities.
One may take up at random the land office records of townships in the
older Wisconsin, and in practically every case find proof that the
speculator was abroad in the land before the arrival of the farmer.
Along the banks of navigable rivers he took up, early, such tracts
as seemed to afford good steamboat landings, which might mean towns
or villages also. Along smaller streams he engrossed potential water
powers. In the prairie regions he seized the timbered tracts which
commonly lay along the streams. And wherever nature seemed to have
sketched the physical basis for a future town, there he drove his
stakes and entered an area large enough at least for a municipal center.
In some portions, particularly of the earliest surveys, the speculator
also absorbed a goodly share of the best farm land, which he held
for an advance when the immigration of farmers became heavy. Other
Americans, aside from Yankees, participated in these speculations,
but the records show that the Yankee’s reputation for alertness and
sagacity in that line is not unmerited. For illustration, the plats of
Dane County townships disclose among the original entrymen who bought
their lands early, the names of well known speculators like James D.
Doty, Lucius Lyon, the Bronsons, Cyrus Woodman, Hazen Cheney, and
C. C. Washburn--all Yankees. In addition, we have distinguished New
Englanders who probably never came west but invested through the agency
of their Yankee correspondents. Among them are Daniel Webster, Edward
Everett, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Caleb Cushing.
To a considerable extent these speculators, in paying for government
lands, employed military land warrants, usually purchased at a heavy
discount. “Scripping” by this means became more common after the
Mexican War. A German immigration leader wrote at the close of 1848:
“There is a man living in Sheboygan who has already placed 344 of these
warrants [each good for 160 acres] on government lands and intends next
spring to place 200 more on tracts lying north of Fox River.”[4] He
did not say the man was a Yankee; possibly he deemed that information
unnecessary. For, although the German sometimes bought warrants of
the brokers in order to save the difference between the price of such
warrants and the land office price of government land, he did not in
the early years of the immigration speculate in farm lands.
Therein was one of the outstanding differences between him and the
Yankee. The German could not be tolled into the interior by golden
promises of unearned increments from the sale of city lots, of mill
sites, or of choice farm lands which were going rapidly. His caution
and his phlegm were a protection. He was not particularly responsive
to the optimistic prophecies of the development of this region or
that region in which this company or that prominent individual had
interests. For these reasons, the German’s motives as a land seeker
were more legitimately economic and social than were those of the
Yankee, and on the basis of such motives we can explain his settlement
in the woods.
In his homeland the German villager loved the forest for its shelter,
its recreational hospitality, and the benefits it conferred in
necessary fuel, timber, bedding, and forage. A large proportion of the
early German immigrants came from south German provinces dominated by
such famous old forests as the Schwartzwald and the Odenwald. From
considerations both of habit and of economy it was natural that in the
New World they should make sure of an abundance of timber on the lands
they sought for future homes. Yet, there is no reason to assume that
the German, any more than the Yankee, courted the grilling labor of
clearing heavily forested land--a labor to him the more formidable for
the want of the Yankee’s training in axmanship and his almost unbroken
tradition of winning fields from forests. Some German pioneers who were
self-helpful struck for the openings and the prairies, and like the
Yankee chose for their farms the ideal combination of wood, marsh, and
open land whenever such a combination could be found within easy reach
of the market.[5]
But Germans were less venturesome than Yankees, or more prudent,
depending on the point of view. In the old home they were accustomed
to haul their farm produce many miles in going to the markets and
fairs. But there the roads were passable at all seasons. In the New
World, where all was in the making, the roads were often impassable and
always--except in winter--so rough and troublesome as to daunt those
who were not to the manner born.[6] Hence the German settler’s idea
of what constituted a safe distance from the lake ports within which
to open a farm differed from the Yankee’s idea. There is one striking
illustration of that difference. Along the Illinois boundary from Lake
Michigan westward was the strip of prairie and openings twenty-four
miles wide and seventy-eight long which was divided into Racine and
Kenosha counties (on the lake), Walworth, and Rock. We have already
called that region the new Yankee Land and have seen the Yankee farmers
spread over it with seeming disregard to distance from the lake ports,
each being intent rather on finding an ideal combination of desirable
kinds of land. The three divisions of the strip contained almost equal
numbers of Yankees--these people evidently believing that canals,
roads, plank roads, and railways would come to them when needed, while
a good farm location once lost was gone forever; and being willing
also, until such improvements should come, to haul their crops sixty or
seventy-five miles to market. Not so the few Germans who entered this
Yankee Land prior to 1850. More than four-fifths of them were in the
section nearest the lake (Racine and Kenosha counties), and less than
one-thirtieth in Rock County, the farthest west of the strip.
The movement into the prairies and openings of the southeast had been
going on for about four years before the Germans began coming to
Wisconsin, and so many selections of first choice, second choice, and
even third choice land had been made that newcomers were already at a
disadvantage in that region, especially if a number of them desired
to settle near together in a body, which was the case of Old Lutheran
congregations who made up the earliest German immigrations. Moreover,
most of the Yankees were business-like farmers who generally planned
for fairly large farms, in order to make money by raising wheat. They
were mainly men who had sold small farms in the East in order to secure
larger, or sons of large farmers. Most of them had money or credit to
enable them to acquire land, construct buildings and fences, buy stock,
and begin farming operations. Having found good land by canvassing the
whole region, they were not to be dislodged until, with the failure of
wheat crops at a later time, the spirit of emigration sent numbers of
them to fresh wheat lands farther west, thus making opportunity for
well-to-do Germans to buy their improved farms, which they did to a
great extent.
Meantime, the forested lands pivoting on Milwaukee, the most promising
of the lake ports, were open to entry at the land office or to
purchase at private sale on easy terms. The Yankee had not altogether
shunned those lands. There, as elsewhere, he had been looking for
good investments, and the project for the Milwaukee and Rock River
Canal, which was to traverse a portion of the forested area through
the present Milwaukee, Waukesha, and Jefferson counties, favored
speculation in farm lands as well as in mill sites and town sites.
Besides, there is evidence that some of the poorer Yankee immigrants
who felt unable at once to maintain themselves on open land farms,
often settled first in the woods, where they began making improvements
with ax and fire, only to sell out promptly at an advance and go to
the prairie or openings to establish permanent farms. But most of the
forested land was still “Congress land” when the Germans began coming
to Wisconsin.
The German “Pilgrims,” as the first colony was called, arrived at
Milwaukee early in October, 1839, their leader being Henry von Rohr.
Within a month they had decided on a location, in the western part of
township 9, range 21 east (the town of Mequon, Ozaukee County), and
had made numerous purchases of government land. They selected a tract
of high, rolling land, heavily timbered, well watered, and with an
extensive marsh near by in the public domain which would furnish free
hay and pasture.[7] The situation was similar to that which was chosen,
near Watertown (in the town of Lebanon), a few years later by a German
colony from the same region. They also took a tract of heavily timbered
upland neighbored by an extensive marsh. “Here,” said their leader, “we
have both wood and hay” (“_Holz und Heu_”).[8]
Many of the colonists in these two congregations were very poor. Those
who had means lent to the indigent to enable them to emigrate. For them
it would have been madness to go to the prairies, where such absolute
necessities as fuel, building material, and fencing might cost ready
money and at best would be difficult to procure. In the woods trees
cut on the spot were used to build cabin and log house, stable, garden
and field enclosure. Some of the German families were months without
draft ox or even cow. All work was performed by hand, including the
carrying of logs from the spot where the trees were felled to the
place where they were to be rolled up to make the cabin wall. To such
settlers, bringing timber from a distance would have been among the
impossibilities. Their place was in the forest, where labor alone was
required for making the beginnings of a self-sustaining home.
In thousands of later instances, Germans who came to Wisconsin on their
own slender means were in a similar case to these early seekers of
religious freedom. An immigrant of 1848, J. F. Diederichs, has left a
diary and letters from which the process of home making in the woods
can be reconstructed.[9] Diederichs, after considerable search, found
eighty acres of good government land nine miles from Manitowoc, where
early in winter he settled down to work alongside of several other
Germans who were as poor as himself. The location was favorable, being
near a port. “What good is there,” he writes, “to possess the finest
land and be 6, 8 or 10 days journey from market.”[10] The first step
was to build a cabin, the next to bring his family from Milwaukee and
with a few dollars borrowed for the purpose to lay in supplies for
them. Then he erected a comfortable log house and continued clearing
till, by the middle of May, he had two acres ready partly for garden
and partly for potatoes, corn, and beans to provide the family with
food. Diederichs realized that “to begin such work at the age of 44 is
some job,” and recognized that not he and his wife but the children
would be the chief beneficiaries. Nevertheless, the joy of creation was
not wholly denied him. He had, he said, the “prettiest” location; house
set on a commanding knoll, with a pure limpid stream flowing within
a few yards of it, along whose course was some open land, making a
“layout for the finest pastures.” And there was timber enough on his
eighty to be worth $30,000 in the home town of Elberfelt. Of this, he
would gladly make his friends in Germany a present of about $20,000
worth!
The question of nearness to market was a determinant also in the cases
of Germans who were well enough off to take open lands. William Dames
found, for himself and associates, a favorable tract near Ripon. It
contained 160 acres prairie, 320 acres openings, and 160 acres of
low prairie or meadow land. The advantages of that neighborhood, he
wrote, were these: first, the prospectively near market, by way of
the Fox River Canal to be completed the following spring; second, the
excellence of the soil; third, the ease with which the land could be
made into productive farms. There one need not subject himself to the
murderous toil incident to farm making in the woods. And, fourth, the
healthfulness of the climate and the superb drinking water.
One bit of information which Dames conveyed to his fellow Germans who
were contemplating immigration to Wisconsin, was that the Yankees (by
which term he described all native Americans) and the Scotch settlers
of that neighborhood were becoming eager to sell their partly improved
farms, preparatory to moving into the newer region north of Fox River.
He advised Germans able to do so to buy such farms, which were to
be had in plenty not only in Fond du Lac County but near Watertown,
near Delafield, and even near Milwaukee--prices varying with the
improvements, nearness to the city, etc. He seemed to think the Germans
but ill adapted to pioneering. Let the German immigrant, he said, buy a
partly cleared farm; then he could follow his calling in ways to which
he was accustomed. Moreover, since such farms produced fairly well even
under the indifferent treatment accorded them by the Yankee farmers,
the German farmer need have no fear of failure.
The advice to purchase farms already begun was widely followed by the
financially competent German immigrants. Ownership records of one
Milwaukee County township show that the lands were originally taken
mainly by Irish and Americans, yet in 1850 nearly one-half of the
settlers were Germans; and there is no reason to regard that case
as singular. Probably the Germans who bought improved farms were as
numerous as those who bought Congress land. Many poor men worked as
farm hands for some years and then bought small improved farms in
preference to buying Congress land.
The experience of an 1849 immigrant, Johannes Kerler, illustrates
the less common case of Germans who arrived with considerable means.
Kerler brought with him to Milwaukee a sum, derived from the sale of
a profitable business, which would have enabled him to buy scores of
mill sites and town sites in the public domain. Instead, he limited his
investment to a 200-acre farm seven miles from the city, paying for the
land, including all crops and livestock, $17 per acre. The buildings
consisted of a log house and a cabin. One-half the farm was divided
between plow land and meadow; the balance--100 acres--supported a dense
forest growth. Kerler at once erected a barn for his cattle, and a
good two-story frame house for the family. Then he went to farming and
quickly transformed the earlier crude homestead into a fruitful and
beautiful farm, the show place of the neighborhood.[11]
Social forces are among the imponderables, and yet their influence
in controlling the distribution of immigration must have been
considerable. The fact that nearly all incoming Germans landed in
Milwaukee, where were acquaintances and often friends, tended in
a hundred subtle ways to attach the newcomers to that community.
Before 1850 Milwaukee had come to be looked upon as a German city.
“There,” said one immigrant, “more German than English is spoken.” It
had its German churches, schools, clubs, societies, and recreational
features, all of which constituted powerful attractions. It was the
most important industrial center of the state, with a relatively large
demand for the labor which with farm work was the poorer immigrant’s
sole means of getting a financial start. In addition, it was the
commercial metropolis, and that the German was firmly tethered to his
market has already become clear.
The construction of the Milwaukee and Mississippi Railroad, begun in
1849 and completed to Prairie du Chien in 1857, partially freed the
German immigrant from his dread of being marooned in the interior.
Desirable government lands accessible to the proposed railroad were
generally taken up several years before the completion of the road,
and among the entrymen in certain districts were many newly arrived
Germans. This was true to some extent in Dane County, but more
noticeably so farther west. In Iowa County and in Grant were sheltered
pleasant and fertile valleys, opening toward the Wisconsin, which would
be served by the railroad when completed, and which had long been in
touch with the world by means of steamers plying on the Wisconsin.
In those valleys, and on the wider ridges between them, the Germans
competed with others for the choicest locations on government and state
lands. Land entry records for two townships in Blue River valley show,
by 1860, out of an aggregate of 122 foreign born families 59 of German
origin, while the American families numbered 93. A similar proportion
doubtless obtained in other towns south of the river.
Directly opposite these townships, in the same survey range but lying
on the north side of Wisconsin River, was the town of Eagle, whose
settlement was almost exactly contemporaneous with that of the Blue
River valley. But Eagle, in 1860, had 20 foreign born families to 108
American, and of the 20 only 13 were German.
Inasmuch as the people on the two banks of the river had a common
market--Muscoda, which was a station on the railroad--and the lands of
Eagle were more fertile and quite as well watered, the question why the
Germans avoided that town and made homes south of the river is surely
interesting, and possibly significant.
There were two important differences between the two districts. In
Blue River the valley land, to use the surveyor’s phrase, was “thinly
timbered with oak,” while in the valley of Mill Creek, or Eagle Creek,
opposite was a dense forest dominated by the sugar maple but containing
big timber of several varieties, and dense undergrowth. In a word, it
was a heavily timbered area. Now the Germans near Lake Michigan had
given ample proof of gallantry in attacking forest covered farms, yet
when the choice was before them of taking such land in Richland County
or easily cleared land of poorer quality in Grant, almost with one
accord they selected the latter.
We cannot be certain that the difference in the timbered character of
the land was the sole motive determining the choice, though doubtless
it was the most important. The railroad ran on the south side of the
river and the principal trading center was on that side. Settlers
in Blue River valley could therefore reach the market by a direct,
unbroken haul with teams over public roads. Those in Eagle at first
were obliged to use the ferry in crossing the river, and later they had
to cross on a toll bridge except in midwinter, if the river was frozen
to a safe depth, when they crossed on the ice. These transportation
conditions might have deterred some Germans from settling north of the
river, even if the lands there had been as lightly timbered as those
on the south side. Taken together, the two causes virtually served to
blockade that district against settlers of their type.
But if the Germans declined the rôle of foresters, by refusing to
settle in a partially isolated town like Eagle, the Yankees did
the same. New Yorkers and New Englanders were scarcer there than
Prussians or Hanoverians. The town was occupied mainly by families
from Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, Indiana--with a few from Virginia and
North Carolina; in short, by men who had enjoyed or endured a recent
experience as frontiersmen in heavily wooded regions. So many belonged
to the class described by Eggleston in _The Circuit Rider_, _The
Hoosier Schoolmaster_, and _The Graysons_, that the name “Hoosier
Hollow,” applied to one of the coulees, seems perfectly normal.
To the Yankee, we may be sure, the heavy woods in the town of Eagle
were a sufficient deterrent to settlement there. The Germans shunned it
either because they disliked heavy clearing when it could be avoided
and when no compensating advantages offered, as was the case near
the lake shore; or because they disliked the risk and the expense of
crossing the river to market; or for both of these reasons combined.
Probably either reason, singly, would have sufficed.
By way of summary, we may say that as a land seeker the Yankee’s range
exceeded that of the German. Both clung to the lake ports as their
market base. But the Yankee’s optimism painted for him a roseate future
based on an experimental knowledge of material development for which
the German’s imagination was largely unprepared. The New Yorker had
witnessed, in his home state, the almost miraculous transformation
of rural conditions through the construction of a system of canals;
and canal building affected Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Ohio only less
profoundly than the Empire State. To the Yankee, therefore, who cast
his lot in the favored lands of Wisconsin it seemed that nothing could
halt the march of improvement. The chief point was to obtain prompt
possession of the right kind of farm. Having this, he could count on
doing a big agricultural business as a wheat grower, which promised
generous financial rewards. But if for any reason he failed to get the
right kind of farm, if improvements were unexpectedly dilatory, or if
the land ceased to respond to his demand for wheat and more wheat, he
“sold out” with slight compunction and went elsewhere, confident of
success on a new frontier, especially the great wheat plains. To him
land was a desirable commodity, but by no means a sacred trust.
The German, on the other hand, came from a land of very gradual change.
Although agricultural conditions there were actually considerably
modified in the first half of the nineteenth century, he still, for
the most part, looked upon his dwindling patrimony as the basis, not
of a money making business, but of a livelihood. If, by the combined
labor of all members of the household, the family could be fed,
clothed, and sheltered, the heavy obligations to church and state
redeemed, and a few _gulden_ sequestered for times of emergency, the
peasant was content. His land was his home. It had been his father’s,
grandfather’s, great-grandfather’s. The original estate was parted into
ever more and smaller divisions, as generation succeeded generation,
until the tracts of many holders were at last too small to support the
families. These had no choice but to sell and go to the city, or go to
America. This condition was one of the most general economic causes
of the large German immigration to this and other states. When the
German farmer, or other German, came to Wisconsin and bought a piece of
land, one purpose dominated his mind--to make a farm for a home, and
establish a family estate. In the beginning it did not occur to him
to speculate in land, although in this as in other things he proved
an apt pupil. Accustomed to a very limited acreage, he was not like
the Yankee ambitious to secure a large domain. Habituated to intensive
tillage, a partly made farm having ten or twelve acres of cleared land
was to him an ample equipment for making a living in agriculture.
Enlarging fields meant a surplus and mounting prosperity. If he took
raw land, he could count on clearing enough in a couple of winters with
his own hands to raise food crops, and he looked upon the prospect of
spending ten, twenty, or twenty-five years in fully subduing his 80-
or 100-acre farm with no unreasoning dread or carking impatience. The
remark of Diederichs characterized the German preëmptor: “If I once
have land enough under cultivation to raise our food supplies, I will
win through.” Whereas the Yankee wanted to break 40, 60, 80, or 100
acres of prairie or openings the first year, the German contemplated
the possession of a similar acreage of tillable land in ten, fifteen,
or twenty years.
But once in possession of a tract of land, the German tended to hold
on, through good years and bad years, as if his farm were the one
piece of land in the world for him and his. The Yankee, already given
to change in the East, tended in the West, under the stimulus of
machine-aided wheat culture, to regard land lightly, and to abandon one
tract for another on the principle that the supply was inexhaustible
and that one social environment was apt to be as satisfactory as
another. He had before him the great wheat plains, the Pacific coast,
the inland empire and the parks of the Rocky Mountains. Latterly
his range has widened to include the plains of the Assiniboin, the
Saskatchewan, and Peace River. For more than half a century he was
free to roam, to pick and choose land even as he picked and chose in
southern Wisconsin--the slower, more cautious, or more timid German
buying his farm when he was ready to sell.
It was peaceful penetration, involving no sabre rattling but much
canny bargaining, sober casting up of accounts, and cheerful jingling
of specie. The Yankees, more speculative to the last, more imaginative
and space-free, pressed ever toward the borders of the primitive, drawn
by the same lure of wealth quickly and easily acquired which brought
so many of them to the prairies of Wisconsin in the earlier days. The
Germans, fearing distance more than debt, confident in their ability
to make grain crops grow and farm stock fatten if only they had a sure
market for cattle and for crops, remained behind to till the abandoned
fields and occupy the deserted homes. Thus, so far as Wisconsin’s
farming areas are concerned, the shadow of the Yankee has grown less in
the land, while the tribe of the Teuton has increased.
What tendencies may have been induced by the passing of the frontier
and the resurgence of a population deprived of its former temptation
to expand into new regions; what social changes were implied in the
agricultural revolution which compels the daily application of science
to the business of farming; what readjustments in relationships were
involved in the modification of the Teutonic type with the coming upon
the stage of the second and third generations of Germans; how the
Germans in turn have reacted to the competition of groups having their
origin in other foreign countries, like the Scandinavians, Bohemians,
and Poles--all these are questions the answers to which would aid us
to determine “where we are and whither we are tending.” But their
discussion will have to be postponed to later issues of this magazine.