Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/24

 virtually served to blockade that district against settlers of their type.

But if the Germans declined the rôle of foresters, by refusing to settle in a partially isolated town like Eagle, the Yankees did the same. New Yorkers and New Englanders were scarcer there than Prussians or Hanoverians. The town was occupied mainly by families from Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, Indiana—with a few from Virginia and North Carolina; in short, by men who had enjoyed or endured a recent experience as frontiersmen in heavily wooded regions. So many belonged to the class described by Eggleston in The Circuit Rider, The Hoosier Schoolmaster, and The Graysons, that the name "Hoosier Hollow," applied to one of the coulees, seems perfectly normal.

To the Yankee, we may be sure, the heavy woods in the town of Eagle were a sufficient deterrent to settlement there. The Germans shunned it either because they disliked heavy clearing when it could be avoided and when no compensating advantages offered, as was the case near the lake shore; or because they disliked the risk and the expense of crossing the river to market; or for both of these reasons combined. Probably either reason, singly, would have sufficed.

By way of summary, we may say that as a land seeker the Yankee's range exceeded that of the German. Both clung to the lake ports as their market base. But the Yankee's optimism painted for him a roseate future based on an experimental knowledge of material development for which the German's imagination was largely unprepared. The New Yorker had witnessed, in his home state, the almost miraculous transformation of rural conditions through the construction of a system of canals; and canal building affected Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Ohio only less profoundly than the Empire State. To the Yankee, therefore, who cast his lot in the favored lands of Wisconsin it seemed