hat the later colonization to the
newer parts of the Mississippi Valley derived much of their traits, and
from whom large numbers of them came.

The North Central States as a whole is a region comparable to all of
Central Europe. Of these States, a large part of the old
Northwest,--Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin; and their
sisters beyond the Mississippi--Missouri, Iowa and Minnesota--were
still, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the home of an
essentially pioneer society. Within the lifetime of many living men,
Wisconsin was called the "Far West," and Minnesota was a land of the
Indian and the fur traders, a wilderness of forest and prairie beyond
the "edge of cultivation." That portion of this great region which was
still in the pioneering period of settlement by 1850 was alone about as
extensive as the old thirteen States, or Germany and Austria-Hungary
combined. The region was a huge geographic mold for a new society,
modeled by nature on the scale of the Great Lakes, the Ohio Valley, the
upper Mississippi and the Missouri. Simple and majestic in its vast
outlines it was graven into a variety that in its detail also had a
largeness of design. From the Great Lakes extended the massive glacial
sheet which covered that mighty basin and laid down treasures of soil.
Vast forests of pine shrouded its upper zone, breaking into hardwood and
the oak openings as they neared the ocean-like expanses of the prairies.
Forests again along the Ohio Valley, and beyond, to the west, lay the
levels of the Great Plains. Within the earth were unexploited treasures
of coal and lead, copper and iron in such form and quantity as were to
revolutionize the industrial processes of the world. But nature's
revelations are progressive, and it was rather the marvelous adaptation
of the soil to the raising of corn and wheat that drew the pioneers to
this land of promise, and made a new era of colonization. In the unity
with variety of this pioneer empire and in its broad levels we have a
promise of its society.

First had come the children of the interior of the South, and with ax
and rifle in hand had cut their clearings in the forest, raised their
log cabins, fought the Indians and by 1830 had pushed their way to the
very edge of the prairies along the Ohio and Missouri Valleys, leaving
unoccupied most of the Basin of the Great Lakes.

These slashers of the forest, these self-sufficing pioneers, raising the
corn and liv