Page:The Government of Iowa 1911.djvu/33

Rh the population numbered 102,388. And in the ten years from 1846 to 1856 it increased four times over. A writer in 1854 states that "immigrants to Iowa wait days to get a chance to be ferried across the river. They come in crowds a mile long, from every land, and the cry is 'still they come,' the immigration to northern Iowa exceeds anything ever seen or heard of except the stampede to California." The population of the State continued to gain up to 1900 when it numbered 2,231,853. In 1905 the returns showed but 2,210,050 — a decrease of 21,803 since 1900. The Federal census of 1910 shows a population of 2,224,771, an increase of 14,721 since 1905, but a decrease of 7,082 since 1900. In the ten years since 1900 the population has decreased in seventy-one counties of the State and increased in but twenty-eight. Cheaper lands in Canada, the far west, and the southwest have been attracting the young men of Iowa, as the Iowa country in the forties and fifties attracted their grandfathers from the older States.

Ethnic Elements. — The earliest settlers were mostly native born, that is, born in the United States, of English, Huguenot, Scotch-Irish, and Dutch extraction. During the fifties the Germans and Irish came direct from their native countries to Iowa in considerable numbers. The first settlement of Dutch was made at Pella in 1847. Since the Civil War large numbers of Slavs, Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians have come to the State. The mingling of these various ethnic elements in Iowa has produced a vigorous, industrious, and intelligent people, who have