History -- not quite what we thought

Hamlin Garland is not now a household word, if he ever was, and his late-Victorian writing style hasn't helped. But those seeking a realistic portrait of pioneering in the upper Midwest (Wisconsin, Iowa, South Dakota) will enjoy reading A Son of the Middle Border. He spent his boyhood, youth, and young manhood pioneering and ended in 1893 telling his father Richard,

Father, you've been chasing a will-o'-the-wisp. For fifty years you've been moving westward, and always you have gone from certainty to uncertainty, from a comfortable home to a shanty. For thirty years you've carried mother on a ceaseless journey -- to what end? Here you are - snowbound on a treeless plain with mother old and crippled.... You must take the back trail.

This message may be unwelcome to many 21st-century genealogists, as it was to the old Civil War veteran. But it's closer to real life than the sentimental sketches in the mug books being published around the same time.

Hamlin Garland was a man of his time. He maintained, and probably believed, the fiction that the Indians just "melted away" before white settlement. His critique of pioneering had nothing to do with the immorality of white people's stealing Indian land; it had to do with the resultant quality of life for the white people themselves.


A completely different approach to a similar subject is a recent working paper by economists on the results of the 1832 Cherokee land lottery, in which land recently "acquired" from Indians was offered at random to white settlers. The economists compared those who received the windfall with those who did not, using 1850 census data, and found that most of the benefits accrued, not to the poorest, but to middling and wealthy.

Almost two decades after the lottery, winners were, on average, $700 richer than a comparable population that did not win the lottery. The gains in wealth, however, are not evenly distributed among the lottery winners. Indeed, the poorest third of lottery winners were essentially as poor as the poorest third of lottery losers.

History is rarely what we expect; no wonder the future is so surprising.




Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (New York: Macmillan, 1917).

Hoyt Bleakley and Joseph Ferrie, "Up from Poverty? The 1832 Cherokee Land Lottery and the Long-run Distribution of Wealth," National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, 21 June 2013 version (http://home.uchicago.edu/~bleakley/Bleakley_Ferrie_Up.pdf : viewed 5 July 2013).


Harold Henderson, "History -- not quite what we thought," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 10 July 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]  

The Pioneers Had Major Government Help: Lessons from La Crosse

I'm looking forward to reading Skidmore College historian Eric J. Morser's Hinterland Dreams. It looks like he has landed another roundhouse punch on the myth of the government-free pioneers. From the very beginning, prosperity and growth depended on federal, state, and local government activism. Morser builds each episode up from an individual story, and summarizes the book's thesis in his prologue.

The federal government
* "built military outposts that shattered indigenous resistance in southwestern Wisconsin,"
* "made Indians dependent on American traders for their welfare," and
* "financed explorers who advertised the commercial possibilities of the region."

State government in turn
* "invested in transportation projects that drew settlers to the middle western frontier,"
* "built a legal system that helped lumbermen flourish in places such as southwestern Wisconsin," and
* "granted municipal leaders in La Crosse potent new regulatory and financial tools."

Local government used those powers and
* built and policed "urban railways, electrical lights, and the local telephone system."

Lawmakers and judges
* "enabled organized workers and women in town to participate in La Crosse's commercial growth in new ways and to help redefine its political economy."

Rugged individualism -- actually, the pioneering work of linked families -- was real too, and took place within this framework. Our family stories ignore it at their peril.



Eric J. Morser, Hinterland Dreams: The Political Economy of a Midwestern City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

Harold Henderson, "The Pioneers Had Major Government Help: Lessons from La Crosse," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 2 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

What is pioneering, really?

Utne Reader points to Eula Biss's precise, thoughtful reflections on urban "pioneering" in Chicago's northeasternmost neighborhood, Rogers Park.

The word pioneer betrays a disturbing willingness to repeat the worst mistake of the pioneers of the American West [including today's Midwest] — the mistake of considering an inhabited place uninhabited. To imagine oneself as a pioneer in a place as densely populated as Chicago is either to deny the existence of your neighbors or to cast them as natives who must be displaced. Either way, it is a hostile fantasy.

Her reflections are coupled with reflections on those earlier pioneers, as presented by Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose children's books don't duck away from confronting the racism ("The only good Indian is a dead Indian") that dominated her childhood environment.

Victoria Freeman's book Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America is longer, a bit less nuanced, and focused more on New England, but makes some of the same points explicitly in the context of her ancestors, including interpreter-general Thomas Stanton and John Eliot, the apostle to the Indians. This is genealogy concerned with understanding the past, not glorifying it.

Illinois' winter quarterly with German pioneers

The centerpiece of the Winter 2007 isue of the Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly is part 2 of Gary Beaumont's "German Immigrant Farmers in Illinois," featuring letters from Jacob Menke, who settled near Beardstown (Cass County) in the 1830s, and a diary by Johann Konrad Dahler, who settled near Mount Carroll (Carroll County) in the 1850s.

"Around us there are about 20 German farmers," wrote Menke, "including three medical practitioners with a degree, jurists, theologists, mechanics, even a mayor of Giesen, foresters etc. -- very educated people with whom we have a very pleasant contact.... We are likely to establish a reading or literary circle and a club..."

Dahler on the winter of 1856-57: "From beginning to end there was deep snow, on which smooth ice three inches thick had formed. When we needed firewood and went with the oxen to drag it in, they would go perhaps three paces on the ice and then break through.... We lost our 2 cows, which had cost 30 dollars apiece. We had a log stable for them and slough hay for feed but we lacked straw for bedding in the extreme cold."

Other articles:

"Illinois Resources: Where From to Kansas? Illinois!" by Cherie Weible

"Alderman Protects Family Graveyard," by Jeanie Lowe

"The Digital Revolution in Genealogical Research: What's Coming from Family Search, Part 1," by Susan A. Anderson

"Six Degrees of Separation or Two: Applications for 'Cluster Genealogy' and 'Genealogy Buddies,''' by Margaret M . Kapustiak

"Are You Killing the Things You Love?" by Patricia L. Miller

"Ask the Retoucher!" by Eric Curtis M. Basir

"Richard F. Sutton's Story: A Revolutionary War Soldier, Part 1," by Raleigh Sutton