Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/13

 important consideration to all settlers, including the Yankees. In another connection I have shown, from the records of land entries, that the Yankee settlers in a prevailingly prairie township of Racine County took up first every acre of forested land, together with the prairie lands and marsh lands adjoining the woods, while they shunned for some years the big, open, unsheltered prairie where farms would be out of immediate touch with woods. Rather than take treeless lands near the lake shore, these settlers preferred to go farther inland where inviting combinations of groves, meadows, and dry prairie lands, or openings, could still be found in the public domain. Only gradually did American settlers overcome their natural repugnance to a shelterless, timberless farm home—a repugnance justified by common sense, but springing from the habit of generations. When, for economic reasons, they began to settle on the open prairies, the planting of quick-growing trees about the farmsteads was always esteemed a work of fundamental utility.

Yankee agricultural settlers found special inducements for going inland in search of ideal farm locations, in the glowing advertisements of Yankee speculators who early pioneered the open country far and wide. These speculators concerned themselves primarily with water powers for sawmill and gristmill sites and town sites. Yet power and town sites both depended for their development on the agricultural occupation of the surrounding country, and this made the speculators careful to locate their claims in areas of desirable lands which would soon be wanted. It also made them doubly active in proclaiming to immigrants the agricultural advantages of their chosen localities.

One may take up at random the land office records of townships in the older Wisconsin, and in practically every case find proof that the speculator was abroad in the land