The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin/1
THE YANKEE AND THE TEUTON IN WISCONSIN
Joseph Schafer
I. CHARACTERISTIC ATTITUDES TOWARD THE LAND
Wisconsin in its racial character is popularly known to the country at large as a Teutonic state. That means the state has a German element, original and derivative, which numerically overshadows the American, English, Irish, Scandinavian, and other stocks also represented in the Badger blend. It is not necessary to quarrel with this widely accepted theorem, though some of the corollaries drawn from it can be shown to be unhistorical; and one can demonstrate statistically that if Wisconsin now is, or at any census period was, a Teutonic state she began her statehood career in 1848 as a Yankee state and thus continued for many years with consequences social, economic, political, religious, and moral which no mere racial substitutions have had power to obliterate. My purpose in the present paper is to present, from local sources, some discussion of the relations of Yankee and Teuton to the land—a theme which ought to throw light on the process of substitution mentioned, revealing how the Teuton came into possession of vast agricultural areas once firmly held by the Yankee.
The agricultural occupation of southern Wisconsin, which brought the first tide of immigration from New England, western New York, northern Pennsylvania, and Ohio—the Yankee element—may be said roughly to have been accomplished within the years 1835 and 1850. The settlements which existed prior to 1835 were in the lead region of the southwest, at Green Bay, and at Prairie du Chien. The population of the lead mines was predominantly of southern and southwestern origin; that of the two other localities—the ancient seats of the Indian trade and more recent centers of military defense—was mainly FrenchCanadian. When, in 1836, a territorial census was taken, it was found that the three areas named had an aggregate population of nearly 9000, of which more than 5000 was in the lead region included in the then county of Iowa. The Green Bay region (Brown County) was next, and the Prairie du Chien settlement (Crawford County) smallest.
The census, however, recognized a new county, Milwaukee, whose territory had been severed from the earlier Brown County. It was bounded east by Lake Michigan, south by Illinois, west by a line drawn due north from the Illinois line to Wisconsin River at the Portage, and north by a line drawn due east from the Portage to the lake. In terms of present-day divisions, the Milwaukee County of 1836 embraced all of Kenosha, Racine, Walworth, Rock, Jefferson, Waukesha, and Milwaukee counties, nearly all of Ozaukee, Washington, and Dodge, a strip of eastern Green County, and most of Dane and Columbia. In that imperial domain the census takers found a grand total of 2900 persons, or almost exactly one-fourth of the population of the entire territory.
Two significant facts distinguish the Milwaukee County census list from the lists of Brown, Crawford, and Iowa counties—the recency of the settlement and the distinctive local origin of the settlers. These people had only just arrived, most of them in the early months of 1836. One could almost count on his ten fingers the individuals who were there prior to the summer of 1835. In reality they were not yet "settled," for most of the rude claim huts—mere shelters of the pre-log house stage—were haunted at night and shadowed at noonday by men only, resident families being still rare, though many were on the lakes, at the ports of Milwaukee and Chicago, or on the overland trail which was to end at the cabin door. It was the prophecy of new communities, not the actuality, that the census taker chronicled when he recorded the names of claim takers with 
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.
Footnotes
[edit]1 As the tide of emigration from the northeastern states rose higher, it bore along a goodly number who were not of the old American stock, particularly English and Irish, with some Scotch and Germans. Yet, many of these were natives of the states named and, if foreign born, had enjoyed so long an apprenticeship to the Yankee system of life as to enable them faithfully to represent it.
2 Of whom England, Ireland, Scotland, and Canada combined furnished 1920, Germany 460, and Norway 340.
3 Wisconsin Domesday Book, General Studies, I. History of Agriculture in Wisconsin, chap. 2.
4 William Dames, Wie Sieht Es in Wiskonsin Aus (Meurs, 1849).
5 For example, see William Dames, Wie Sieht Es in Wiskonsin Aus.
6 See J. F. Diederichs, Diary. Translated by Emil Baensch. Account of a trip from Milwaukee to Manitowoc.
7 Those who filed with von Rohr and on the same day (Nov. 5, 1839) took up most of sections 17, 18, 19, and 20. All of these lands were described by the surveyor as "second rate" and all had a heavy forest covering consisting of sugar maple, lynn, birch, alder, black and white oak, ash, elm, ironwood, etc., together with some cedar in the swamps. The land lay on both sides of the creek, along which was some meadow, but the big marsh was farther east.
8 William F. Whyte, "Settlement of Lebanon," in Wisconsin Historical Society, Proceedings, 1915, 105.
9 MS. translation by Emil Baensch.
10 Page 29 in printed German edition.
11 This farm, located in the town of Greenfield, Milwaukee County, was afterwards divided among Kerler's three sons. A portion of it, at least, is I believe still in the possession of the family. Louis F. Frank, Pioneer Jahre (Milwaukee, 1911).