Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/15

 possibly he deemed that information unnecessary. For, although the German sometimes bought warrants of the brokers in order to save the difference between the price of such warrants and the land office price of government land, he did not in the early years of the immigration speculate in farm lands.

Therein was one of the outstanding differences between him and the Yankee. The German could not be tolled into the interior by golden promises of unearned increments from the sale of city lots, of mill sites, or of choice farm lands which were going rapidly. His caution and his phlegm were a protection. He was not particularly responsive to the optimistic prophecies of the development of this region or that region in which this company or that prominent individual had interests. For these reasons, the German's motives as a land seeker were more legitimately economic and social than were those of the Yankee, and on the basis of such motives we can explain his settlement in the woods.

In his homeland the German villager loved the forest for its shelter, its recreational hospitality, and the benefits it conferred in necessary fuel, timber, bedding, and forage. A large proportion of the early German immigrants came from south German provinces dominated by such famous old forests as the Schwartzwald and the Odenwald. From considerations both of habit and of economy it was natural that in the New World they should make sure of an abundance of timber on the lands they sought for future homes. Yet, there is no reason to assume that the German, any more than the Yankee, courted the grilling labor of clearing heavily forested land—a labor to him the more formidable for the want of the Yankee's training in axmanship and his almost unbroken tradition of winning fields from forests. Some German pioneers who were self-helpful struck for the openings and the prairies, and like the Yankee chose for