Page:The Yankee and the Teuton in Wisconsin.djvu/26

 like the Yankee ambitious to secure a large domain. Habituated to intensive tillage, a partly made farm having ten or twelve acres of cleared land was to him an ample equipment for making a living in agriculture. Enlarging fields meant a surplus and mounting prosperity. If he took raw land, he could count on clearing enough in a couple of winters with his own hands to raise food crops, and he looked upon the prospect of spending ten, twenty, or twenty-five years in fully subduing his 80- or 100-acre farm with no unreasoning dread or carking impatience. The remark of Diederichs characterized the German preëmptor: "If I once have land enough under cultivation to raise our food supplies, I will win through." Whereas the Yankee wanted to break 40, 60, 80, or 100 acres of prairie or openings the first year, the German contemplated the possession of a similar acreage of tillable land in ten, fifteen, or twenty years.

But once in possession of a tract of land, the German tended to hold on, through good years and bad years, as if his farm were the one piece of land in the world for him and his. The Yankee, already given to change in the East, tended in the West, under the stimulus of machine-aided wheat culture, to regard land lightly, and to abandon one tract for another on the principle that the supply was inexhaustible and that one social environment was apt to be as satisfactory as another. He had before him the great wheat plains, the Pacific coast, the inland empire and the parks of the Rocky Mountains. Latterly his range has widened to include the plains of the Assiniboin, the Saskatchewan, and Peace River. For more than half a century he was free to roam, to pick and choose land even as he picked and chose in southern Wisconsin—the slower, more cautious, or more timid German buying his farm when he was ready to sell.

It was peaceful penetration, involving no sabre rattling