Part 2

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.

THE YANKEE AND THE TEUTON IN WISCONSIN

JOSEPH SCHAFER

II. DISTINCTIVE TRAITS AS FARMERS

The agricultural traits and peculiarities of the nineteenth century Yankees were the resultant of partly contradictory forces, some of them evolutionary, others devolutionary. In England the period of the Puritan migration to America and the half-century antecedent thereto was a time of vigorous agricultural change marked by many improvements in cultivation and in land management. The agrarian revolution introduced by the transfer of church properties to laymen was accompanied by enclosures and a widespread tendency to shift from an uneconomical crop economy to an agriculture governed by business principles. In this new system the production of farm animals--especially sheep--the fertilization of the soil, rotation of crops, and livestock improvement were main factors. Forces and interests were set in motion at this time which, a century or so later, made farming the concern of many of England’s leading minds, whose wise and persistent experimentation benefited the whole civilized world.

The few thousand immigrants to the New England colonies, founders of America’s Yankeedom, were not all farmers. Some were fishermen, some were small tradesmen, others craftsmen; a few were professional men and soldiers. But a goodly proportion were land owners and peasants, and all had a more or less direct knowledge of the principles and processes which governed English agriculture. The influence of habit, always a determining factor in the transfer of civilization from an old land to a new, caused the occasional reproduction in New England of some features of English farming, especially under village conditions. The common field system in Old Salem reflected a disappearing element in English farm life, while the commons of hay, commons of pasture, commons of wood, and commons of mast, with their administrative “hay reeve,” “hog reeve,” “wood reeve,” herdsmen, and shepherds, mark a natural imitating of the ways of parish life at home.

But there were differences in the conditions “at home” and in America as wide as those symbolized by the terms “insular,” and “continental,” applied to the geography of the two countries. Chief among these differences were the generally forested character of the new-world land, the necessity of adapting tillage to an unfamiliar climate, in part to new food cereals, especially Indian corn, and the absolute dependence upon markets which could be created or opened by the colonists themselves. It was in fact the problem of a market which so long subordinated farming proper in New England to a species of country living in which small patches of arable supplied most of the family’s food, while forest and stream were the objects of exploitation for marketable furs, for medicinal plants, and for timber products. Yankee ingenuity, which justly became proverbial, had an assignable cause. It was not an inherited quality, or one which was imported and conserved; it was a distinctively American product, explained by the situation of the average New England farmer--who was, by force of circumstances, more of a mechanic and woods worker than a cultivator of the soil. His house, especially in winter, was a busy workshop where clapboards, staves, hoops, heading, ax handles, and a variety of other articles of utility and salability were always in course of manufacture. All the farm “tinkering” was additional thereto.

In his contest with the forest for a livelihood, the Yankee farmer was gradually changed from the eastern New England village type to that of the American “pioneer.” His axmanship was unrivaled, his skill in woodscraft, his resourcefulness in the face of untried situations were equal to the best. When the time came for taking agricultural possession of broad spaces in the northern and western interior, the Yankee was the instrument, shaped by four generations of American history, to achieve that object.[12]

This general “handiness” was gained not without a partial loss of such acquired knowledge and skill in agriculture proper as the first immigrants brought from England. Close, careful cultivation was impossible among the stumps and girdled trees of new clearings; the amplitude of natural meadows and the superabundance of “browse” relieved settlers from the sharp necessity of providing artificially for the winter feeding of cattle; the mast of oak trees and the wealth of nuts, supplementing summer “greens,” roots, grass, and wild apples, supplied most of the requisites for finishing off pork. Under these conditions farming even at best was an entirely different thing from what it had been at home. At its worst, it was a crude process, affording a vegetative kind of existence, but nothing more. In fact, farming in the New England states hardly attained the status of a business until the nineteenth century, though in some portions it gave the farmer and his family a generous living and afforded a few luxuries. It made thousands of persons independent proprietors who could not have reached that station at home; it gave the farmers as a class a commanding influence in politics and society; “embattled,” it enabled them to wrest their country’s independence from the awkward hands of a bungling monarchy. In short, it contributed incalculably to their importance as men in history. The indications are, however, that as farmers the fourth generation of _Mayflower_ descendants were decidedly inferior to the original Pilgrims and Puritans.

The third generation were probably less skillful than the fourth. For, by the time of the Revolution there were farming areas in southern New England that were looking up. Timothy Dwight, near the end of the century, found and recorded some of the evidences of a movement to improve cultivation, to fertilize the soil, to better the character of farm livestock--a movement which had been going forward under impulses communicated from England, where the eighteenth century was peculiarly fruitful in agricultural development. Dwight was enough of an idealist to appreciate the limits of the improvement thus far reached. Yet he did insist, with evident justice, that the farming of the Connecticut valley and of eastern Massachusetts was at least respectable. Fields were well cleared and carefully cultivated, clover began to be used as a feeding and green manure crop, the beginnings had been made of a system of rotation of crops, livestock was of relatively good quality--especially in certain Connecticut towns which were already noted for the weight of the bullocks they furnished to the commissary department of Washington’s army. By that time, also, leading men in New England lent their influence toward the building up of the agricultural interest; agricultural societies were organized and essays on agriculture came to have considerable vogue. Some importations of purebred livestock from England took place. The first merino sheep were brought in from France, then larger numbers from Spain by Consul William Jarvis. In 1810 Elkanah Watson established his Berkshire County Agricultural Society, with the county fair which became the model for subsequent county and state fairs the country over.

When Tom Paine predicted in 1776 that an independent America would prosper “as long as eating continues to be the custom of Europe,”[13] he assumed one point about which some doubt might in future arise: Would Europe always have the wherewithal to purchase American foodstuffs at prices which would compensate our people for growing them and delivering them to the market? During the continuance of the long revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Europe managed to make good Paine’s prophecy, and prices at the close of the wars ruled high. There followed the great expansion era which spread American farmers over the New West, both south and north, into which Yankees entered to a large extent.

The good prices did not hold. Food could be raised cheaply, but markets were costly to reach, even with the new wizardry of the steamboat, and something gigantic was called for in the way of internal improvements. The answer was at first canals, afterwards railroads. At the same time, something had to be done by the farmer himself if the entire structure of American agriculture, now becoming conscious of its own embarrassments, was not to go down. The answer to this was _better farming_. It was in 1819, the panic year, that John S. Skinner founded at Baltimore the _American Farmer_, first of the distinctively farm journals which almost immediately had a small group of successors. Among them were the _New England Farmer_, the _Albany Cultivator_, the _Pennsylvania Farmer_, the _Rural New Yorker_, the _Vermont Farmer_, the _Ohio Farmer_, etc.

Yankeedom was a good social soil for these journals. The all but universal literacy of the people, their curiosity, their love of argument and disputation, their habit of experimentation, all tended both to give currency to the new ideas presented and to sift the practical and valuable from the merely theoretic and futile. Thus was introduced, in a period of prevailing “hard times,” a meliorating influence destined to reach a very large proportion of the settlers in those sections, particularly Vermont, western New York, northern Pennsylvania and Ohio, from which the bulk of the Yankee pioneers of Wisconsin were drawn a quarter of a century later. The effect of county and state fairs was to deepen and fructify the influence of the new agricultural press.