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."[1] He did not say the man was a Yankee;
- ↑ 4
