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.