main reason for the removal to the West, on the part of farmers whose holdings were too small to make successful stock farms, or who refused to abandon wheat raising as a business, was that lands in the West could be had already cleared by nature. Many half-cleared farms, with customary buildings and fences, could in the forties be purchased in western New York for from four to eight dollars per acre. Instead of buying these farms, the young men preferred going to Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, or Wisconsin, those having such farms for sale doing likewise after selling out to neighbors, usually the larger farmers, who elected to remain and change their system of farming. In Vermont we have a similar story, in Ohio the same. The Yankee farmers who came to Wisconsin were generally at home either small farmers or the sons of farmers large or small; while a certain proportion of the larger farmers, by reason of debt or desire to extend their business, also sold out and came west to buy cheap lands on the prairies or in the openings.
An agriculture which dates from before the time of Tacitus, and which acquired permanent characteristics from the influence of Roman merchants, monastics, and feudatories in Roman and medieval times, was bound to differ widely and even fundamentally from the agriculture of a far flung American frontier. The Germans who met the Yankee immigrants in primitive Wisconsin brought an inheritance of habit and training analogous to that of the English Puritan emigrants to New England, but with the difference that the Germans' training had continued two hundred years longer, on similar lines. They were old-world cultivators, the Yankees new-world cultivators.
Tacitus says in one place: "The Germans live scattered and apart, as a spring, a hill, or a wood entices them."[1]
- ↑ Germania (translated slightly differently in University of Pennsylvania Translations and Reprints), 11.
