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.