whose experiences and talents were not of the sort that
make pioneering successful. Frederika Bremer, the noted Swedish
traveler, has left a description of the little cluster of log huts and
the handful of people who "had taken with them the Swedish inclination
for hospitality and a merry life, without sufficiently considering how
long it could last." Their experiences form a romantic prelude to the
great Swedish migration, which reached its height in the eighties.
Today the Swedes form the largest element in the Scandinavian influx,
for well over one million have migrated to the United States.

Nearly three hundred thousand persons of Danish blood have come into
the country since the Civil War. A large number migrated from
Schleswig-Holstein, after the forcible annexation of that province by
Prussia in 1866, preferring the freedom of America to the tyranny of
Berlin.

Whatever distinctions in language and customs may have characterized
these Northern peoples, they had one ambition in common--the desire to
own tillable land. So they made of the Northwest a new Scandinavia,
larger and far more prosperous than that which Gustavus Adolphus had
planned in colonial days for his colony in Delaware. One can travel
today three hundred miles at a stretch across the prairies of the
Dakotas or the fields of Minnesota without leaving land that is owned
by Scandinavians. They abound also in Wisconsin, Northern Illinois,
Eastern Nebraska, and Kansas, and Northern Michigan. Latterly the
lands of Oregon and Washington are luring them by the thousands, while
throughout the remaining West there are scattered many prosperous
farms cultivated by representatives of this hardy race. Latterly this
stream of Scandinavians has thinned to about one-half its former size.
In 1910, 48,000 came; in 1911, 42,000; in 1912, 27,000; in 1913,
33,000. The later immigrant is absorbed by the cities, or sails upon
the Great Lakes or in the coastwise trade, or works in lumber camps or
mines. Wherever you find a Scandinavian, however, he is working close
to nature, even though he is responding to the call of the new
industry.

It is the consensus of opinion among competent observers that these
northern peoples have been the most useful of the recent great
additions to the American race. They were particularly fitted by
nature for the conquest of the great area which they have brought
under subjugation, not merely because of their indomitable industry,
pers