[12] Michel Chevalier, Society, Manners, and Politics in the United States (Boston, 1839), chap. x, 112-113, 117, says: “Loading a wagon with a plough, a bed, a barrel of salt meat, the indispensable supply of tea and molasses, a Bible and a wife, and with his axe on his shoulder, the Yankee sets out for the West, without a servant, without an assistant, often without a companion, to build himself a log hut, six hundred miles from his father’s roof, and clear away a spot for a farm in the midst of the boundless forest.... He is incomparable as a pioneer, unequalled as a settler of the wilderness.”
[13] See his Common Sense (Philadelphia, 1791).
[14] See Captain Basil Hall, Travels in North America in the Years 1827 and 1828 (Edinburgh, 1829), i, 130.
[15] American Agriculturist, i, (1842), 115 ff.
[16] Captain Robert Barclay, Agricultural Tour in the United States ... (London, 1842), 41.
[17] American Agriculturist, i, 311.
[18] Germania (translated slightly differently in University of Pennsylvania Translations and Reprints), 11.
[19] J. H. von Thünen, Der Isolierte Staat (Berlin, 1875), 103 ff., “Ueber die Lage der Höfe in Mecklenburg.”
[20] In southwestern Wisconsin, about 1870, a respectable German farmer announced to his relatives the marriage of his daughter to a man who had arrived but recently and had the status of a mere laborer. To parry all questions about the suitability of the groom, who was known to be addicted to liquor and other vices, the farmer added: “I’m very willing to give him my daughter, for he is the best ‘grubber’ I’ve ever had on my farm.”
[21] When John Kerler settled near Milwaukee in 1848, he bought a farm on which was no provision for sheltering livestock other than work animals. He built a barn at once, refusing to permit, for a single winter, the cruel American practice of leaving cattle out in the cold. His case is typical.