The first public domain after the formation of the Union extended from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi. This area was enlarged and pushed to the Rockies by the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and was again enlarged and extended to the Pacific by the acquisition of Oregon (1846) and the Mexican cession (1848). The total area of the United States from coast to coast then comprised 3,025,000[[29]] square miles, of which over two-thirds were at one time or another public domain. Before the close of the Civil War the Government had disposed of nearly four hundred million acres but still retained in its possession an area three times as great as the whole of the territory which had been won from Great Britain in the Revolution.
The public domain was at first looked upon as a source of revenue, and a minimum price was fixed by law at $2 an acre, though this rate was subsequently (1820) lowered to $1.25 an acre. The West always wanted liberal land laws, but the South before the Civil War, fearing that the growth of the West would give the North superior strength, opposed any such generosity. When the North dominated Congress, the Homestead Law of 1862 provided that any person, twenty-one years of age, who was a citizen of the United States or who had declared his intention of becoming one, could obtain title to 160 acres of land by living upon it five years, making certain improvements, and paying the entry fee of ten dollars.
The Government laid out its vast estate in townships six miles square, which it subdivided into sections of 640 acres and quarter sections of 160 acres. The quarter section was regarded as the public land unit and was the largest amount permitted for individual preëmption and later for a homestead. Thus was the whole world invited to go west. Under the new law, 1,160,000 acres were taken up in 1865.[[30]] The settler no longer had to suffer the wearisome, heart-breaking tasks that confronted the pioneer of earlier years, for the railway and steamboat had for some time taken the place of the Conestoga wagon and the fitful sailboat.
But the movement by railway and by steamboat was merely a continuation on a greater scale of what had been going on ever since the Revolution. The westward movement was begun, as we have seen, not by foreigners but by American farmers and settlers from seaboard and back country, thousands of whom, before the dawn of the nineteenth century, packed their household goods and families into covered wagons and followed the sunset trail.
The vanguard of this westward march was American, but foreign immigrants soon began to mingle with the caravans. At first these newcomers who heard the far call of the West were nearly all from the British Isles. Indeed so great was the exodus of these farmers that in 1816 the British journals in alarm asked Parliament to check the "ruinous drain of the most useful part of the population of the United Kingdom." Public meetings were held in Great Britain to discuss the average man's prospect in the new country. Agents of land companies found eager crowds gathered to learn particulars. Whole neighborhoods departed for America. In order to stop the exodus, the newspapers dwelt upon the hardship of the voyage and the excesses of the Americans. But, until Australia, New Zealand, and Canada began to deflect migration, the stream to the United States from England, Scotland, and Wales was constant and copious. Between 1820 and 1910 the number coming from Ireland was 4,212,169, from England 2,212,071, from Scotland 488,749, and from Wales 59,540.
What proportion of this host found their way to the farms is not known.[[31]] In the earlier years, the majority of the English and Scotch sought the land. In western New York, in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and contiguous States there were many Scotch and English neighborhoods established before the Civil War. Since 1870, however, the incoming British have provided large numbers of skilled mechanics and miners, and the Welsh, also, have been drawn largely to the coal mines.
The French Revolution drove many notables to exile in the United States, and several attempts were made at colonization. The names Gallipolis and Gallia County, Ohio, bear witness to their French origin. Gallipolis was settled in 1790 by adventurers from Havre, Bordeaux, Nantes, La Rochelle, and other French cities. The colony was promoted in France by Joel Barlow, an Ananias even among land sharks, representing the Scioto Land Company, or Companie du Scioto, one of the numerous speculative concerns that early sought to capitalize credulity and European ignorance of the West. The Company had, in fact, no title to the lands, and the wretched colonists found themselves stranded in a wilderness for whose conquest they were unsuited. Of the colonists McMaster says: "Some could build coaches, some could make perukes, some could carve, others could gild with such exquisite carving that their work had been thought not unworthy of the King."[[32]] Congress came to the relief of these unfortunate people in 1795 and granted them twenty-four thousand acres in Ohio. The town they founded never fully realized their early dreams, but, after a bitter struggle, it survived the log cabin days and was later honored by a visit from Louis Philippe and from Lafayette. Very few descendants of the French colonists share in its present-day prosperity.
The majority of the French who came to America after 1820 were factory workers and professional people who remained in the cities. There are great numbers of French Canadians in the factory towns of New England. There are, too, French colonies in America whose inhabitants cannot be rated as foreigners, for their ancestors were veritable pioneers. Throughout the Mississippi Valley, such French settlements as Kaskaskia, Prairie du Rocher, Cahokia, and others have left much more than a geographical designation and have preserved an old world aroma of quaintness and contentment.
Swiss immigrants, to the number of about 250,000 and over 175,000 Dutch have found homes in America. The majority of the Swiss came from the German cantons of Switzerland. They have large settlements in Ohio, Wisconsin, and California, where they are very successful in dairying and stock raising. The Hollanders have taken root chiefly in western Michigan, between the Kalamazoo and Grand rivers, on the deep black bottom lands suitable for celery and market gardening. The town of Holland there, with its college and churches, is the center of Dutch influence in the United States. Six of the eleven Dutch periodicals printed in America are issued from Michigan, and the majority of newcomers (over 80,000 have arrived since 1900) have made their way to that State. These sturdy and industrious people from Holland and Switzerland readily adapt themselves to American life.
No people have answered the call of the land in recent years as eagerly as have the Scandinavians. These modern vikings have within one generation peopled a large part of the great American Northwest. In 1850 there were only eighteen thousand Scandinavians in the United States. The tide rose rapidly in the sixties and reached its height in the eighties, until over two million Scandinavian immigrants have made America their home. They and their descendants form a very substantial part of the rural population. There are nearly half as many Norwegians in America as in Norway, which has emptied a larger proportion of its population into the American lap than any other country save Ireland. About one-fourth of the world's Swedes and over one-tenth of the world's Danes dwell in America.