For such reasons the feeling of separate interests and lack of unity and national identity have tended to continue; and when the "Cajan" representatives attend the State legislature at Baton Rouge, they address the House in eloquent English, but among themselves, discuss their program in a French patois.
Oklahoma, due to its peculiar history, is one of the cosmopolitan States. When the territory was thrown open to settlement in the great land rush of April 22, 1889, speculators from all parts of the United States were attracted to the scene. But most of the settlers in the northern part came from Kansas or Missouri and in the southern, from Texas or Arkansas. In the next year, when the territory was formally organized, one-third of its population was Indian or Negro. Subsequent land allotments and colonization tended to perpetuate this dual origin of the settlers, but after the State became a famous oil field, in the early years of the present century, the population became so mixed that this distinction was partly lost. Meanwhile the Indian population was not only swamped by the Whites, but largely intermarried with them, partly because Indian women had titles to valuable oil land. At present Oklahoma is still credited with nearly 30 per cent of all the Indians in the United States, though it is supposed that not more than one-fourth of these are full-blood, and many of those who are legally counted as Indians have but a negligible amount of Indian heredity. The Creeks and a few others have mixed to some extent with Negroes, but this has not been general.
Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Kansas are still the principal sources of Oklahomans, in the order named; but there is not a State in the Union which is not represented here, many of them with large contingents. The foreign stock is of equally cosmopolitan background, but makes up only one-sixteenth of the whole. Considering the geographical location, it includes a surprisingly large number of Canadians.
Texas contains nearly half a million people of foreign stock, the German element being by far the largest. Second in importance among the foreign stocks is a Czechoslovakian population which has settled largely in the southeastern part. The Germans are mainly to the west of them. The State began to attract Italians just before the World War. The British element is important, while Galveston has long been largely dominated by Jews.
North Texas enjoyed a boom in 1875 and 1876 when a flood of homeseekers poured in with their emigrant wagons. Many of these were farmers from the Middle West who had been impoverished by the great grasshopper plague.
Western Texas was settled late, and periods of drought, such as that at the time of the World War, largely depopulated some sections, farmers packing up what they could carry and abandoning everything else to move into a region where nature was less reluctant to aid them.
Texas is still the offspring of the lower Mississippi Valley States, but commercial development and the oil industry have brought in many Northerners, particularly from the Central States. On the other hand, the State's contribution to Oklahoma dwarfs all the other streams that have gone out from it; but it has also contributed liberally to New Mexico and Arizona and in recent years to California.
Turning back now to the East North Central States, which comprise those originally carved out of the Northwest Territory of 1787, one again encounters the full tide of the so-called "new immigration." Here the old native stock is scarcely more than a numerical majority—fourteen million out of twenty-five, to be more exact; a striking contrast to the Southern States, which we have just been considering, where it still forms nine-tenths or more of the total white population.
Five millions of the later arrivals in the North Central States are Nordics, but a number almost equally large are Alpines. Half a million Mediterraneans are present in the Italian immigration, while the area from which the congress of the Confederation, as one of its last acts, declared that Negro slaves should be forever excluded, has acquired nearly a million free Negroes.
Ohio is still two-thirds native, and its great industrial development has drawn population from all sides, though four out of five of its citizens still find their names on the birth records of the State itself. Besides giving population to all its neighbors it has, like the other States of this region, sent a stream westward, not merely to such places as Kansas and Colorado, but particularly to the Pacific Coast.