I was doing some fairly tedious yard work this morning, and in taking a break looked over at the huge loblolly pines in my front yard that need to be cut down, and thought about how hard the early pioneers would have had to work just to remove trees, grade the land, build a cabin etc. It seems like it would have been a life of unceasing toil, and here I am bellyaching about a few hours of grunt work.
The pioneers faced brutally hard work, unknown dangers, deadly weather and an uncertain food supply. Is modern life so soft that this just seems (to me) like a complete pain in the ass? What was the attraction to immigrants? Did they get sold a bill of goods or did they know how tough it would be? Was life in the old country really that horrific that busting your ass in the new world looked good by comparison?
Well, there was tons of land available for free, or nearly so, depending on what time frame you’re talking about. That’s a huge inducement right there.
If you were a serf in the old country, with a chance to have your own 40 acres in the new world, the workload wouldn’t be much worse, and you’d own your land. That’s a pretty good incentive right there.
My grandparents were immigrants. Whenever we asked about stories from the old country, the response was always “If we had liked it there, we would have stayed.”
I have been wondering the same thing recently. My house was built before 1760 and the room I am typing from (as well as most of the main house) is largely original. As bad luck would have it, a massive tree strike (that they planted as as seedling at that time) destroyed the back part of the house.
As part of the reconstruction, we have been forced to do undo some of what they did. A bulldozer crew and excavation crew is going to spend most of the summer filling in a hill excavation that is roughly 75 feet wide, 50 feet long, and ten feet deep. It was built before 1776 and has thousands of rocks, many hand-cut, that form a rock/earth foundation that has lasted this long. How did they do that with the tools at hand? That is just the hole itself. After that, they build an impressive barn bigger than many houses that was unfortunately left in disrepair and collapsed shortly after we bought the house. It took me and many day laborers two years to tear down.
The rest of the property is surrounded in stone walls forming isolated borders all over the place. Even the mid-sized ones weigh several hundred pounds and cannot be lifted directly by humans. The biggest ones weigh several tons and they found a way to move them. We have many hundreds of feet of these walls and I just am amazed that anyone could be that meticulous.
My ancestors that I get my last name from come from the first colony at Jamestown and arrived about 1610. They come from a then suburb of London and didn’t seem to be especially wealthy. I often wondered why they came over especially since descendents remained loyal to the British until the War of 1812. From what I read, they just had that pioneer spirit and that is what drove them to seek a mythical better place. Also, Europe isn’t that stable a region in general and has been horrific at times up to the modern day. Sometimes people just get pissed and leave especially when they believe the hype.
[Speculation, no facts]Right - all we have is the knowledge that something induced the people to come. Things apparently weren’t all that great where they came from - grinding poverty, maybe, no good employment prospects, a social system that told them that if they stayed, they could expect certain things, and wealth and social tolerance weren’t part of it.
Something induced them to come. Real-estate promotional literature, maybe.
In any case, by the time they got here and found out the truth, what could they do? In the short term, they could work to hang in there - and this wouldn’t have been too bad a place for that. Beyond that, they could try to make the best of it. Some succeeded. [/Speculation]
Many early settlers settled in villages, or on land previously occupied by the Indians/Native Americans who had died from diseases contracted from the first settlers.
But the settlers didn’t move into Native American dwellings. And the First Nations didn’t build that many stone walls in New England.
So the assertions that (a) life sucked in Europe for most people; and (b) those ex-Europeans worked their asses off for a chance at a better life remain unrefuted.
(so sayeth the descendant of a Danish stone mason, who built a few walls in Chicago and northern Wisconsin.)
The answer, of course, is the American dream. Which of course just raises the oft-debated question of just what exactly the American dream is. Personally, I’d say that it’s the notion that what you do makes a difference. In the old country, no matter what you did, your lot in life would pretty much be fixed. In America, though, you could build your own, new, life, and reach any station you worked yourself up to. Yeah, you could fail miserably, too, but even if you did, it was your doing.
This thread brings to mind a column by the late, great Chicago newpaperman Mike Royko. To the best of my recollection, it ran in the Chicago Daily News at some point in the 1970’s.
Mike describes driving home from his Wisconsin cabin, and seeing a hand-lettered sign reading “Honey For Sale”. He drives down a dirt road, and encounters a 85-year-old farmer. The man is too old to farm, so he raises bees.
Mike engages him in conversation, and learns that he emigrated from eastern Europe as a young man, and worked in Pennsylvania coal mines, until he saved a few dollars. He then bought some uncleared land in Wisconsin, cut the trees, moved the rocks, and farmed. The man tells his story in a matter-of-fact way, giving a sense that he’s apologizing for the fact that he can’t farm any longer.
Royko speaks of the man’s hands, describing them as twisted, calloused, and broken.
In broken English, the old man asks Royko what he does in Chicago. Royko answers, telling him that he works for a newpaper.
The man asks “Is that hard work, working at a newspaper?”
The column concludes: “I used to think so, but not any more.”
(Royko could write. I am in his debt, as I was exposed to his writing on a daily basis from age four, until he died in 1997.)
(Random, you’ve sent me searching for my collection of Royco columns…)
astro, I think there have always been women and men compelled by wanderlust. As I read in one of my textbooks when I taught, their idea of moving on was to “call the dog and put out the fire.” It wasn’t always about free land.
As I understand European (especially British) history, around this time, there were a lot of younger sons of wealthy men with not a lot of options. I, as a landowner, would leave my land to my oldest son, and maybe have enough money left over to set up one or two more in the church or military. The rest would be on their own, with not a lot of prospects. Then, hey! Free land! Let’s go!
And it’s not like life in the colonies was all that much more arduous than life back home. People worked back then. They did hard labor for much of their life, unless they were very wealthy. That’s just the way it was. Whether it was mucking out someone’s pig stalls or clearing your own land, you’d be working. Might as well work for yourself, really.
One set of great-grandparents lived in what is now the German-Polish border. They left in the 1880s because every 10 years one government or the other would draft a bunch of farm boys to fight in a war. I suppose if I had a choice between (crappy life + war) OR (crappy life - war) I’d replace OR with < as well.
Back then, women and men alike regularly worked fourteen hours a day, six days a week. Unmarried people lived in flophouses, boarding houses, or sometimes in a nice tent near the mine. It was a pretty nasty and generally they got nothing of it but a roof and some food. Most people worked just so they could see the next day. It wouldn’t be uncommon to own little more than a couple changes of clothes, a few day’s worth of food and a couple pots and pans. Cities had their own horrors- epidemics, fires, crime, etc.
Owning land makes you a free person. Well stewarded land can support a family for generation. In theory it could last forever in a family, acting as the family business and perhaps even one day elevating that family to near royalty- keep in mind at that time period “landed gentry” was still a big deal and in Europe. Before industrialization, owning land was what seperated the rich from the poor- the people who could control their destiny from those that could not. The idea that a common person could get in on that…it’s hard to pass up.
Plain Folk is an unassuming but insightful and often gut wrenching collection of oral histories of people from a variety of class backgrounds in early 1900’s America. It’s really an amazing document and I recommend it to everyone.
Additionally, keep in mind that the majority people around the world still do live their life in unceasing toil, be it sunup to sundown farm work to live-in sweatshops.
Outside of the first world, the shops are open from when the shopowner wakes up from their cot in the back room to when they go to sleep. Restauraunts are run using an entire family and there are no shift changes. Tradesmen don’t turn away work simply because a certain hour has passed. Taxi drivers sleep in their cabs, bus driver in their busses- they have no need for homes because they don’t have time that they arn’t working to go to them. Religious services, weddings, and the occassional festival are their only respite.
Yes. Or modern life in the US, at any rate.
As Even Sven points out, there are many hundreds of millions (maybe billions) of people today who would regard the chance to work their ass off on their own large patch of land in a relatively fertile area as being well worth risking their lives for.
The OP included Australia in the question – while I’m not, course, from Australia, I think the 19th century immigration experience had similarities with that here.
A presentation I heard once on 19th century immigration patterns referred to the factors pushing migrants from their homes in the old world (Irish famine, unemployment in the cities, lack of opportunities for those who came from wealthy families). Attractive advertisements and exaggerated promises of perfect settlements drew many folk to go on the long voyages halfway across the world. Then, there were goldrushes - America in the 1840s-1850s, Australia in the 1850s, New Zealand in the 1850s-1860s.
Many didn’t make it as pioneers. They died young in their new homelands, or simply went back home. But the main driving force seemed to be that there had to be a better life on the horizon. The toil, apparently, was felt to be worth it.
Another thing to remember is that the very early settlers mostly didn’t make it. The mortality the first few years among the Pilgrims and Jamestown settlers and other early colonists was horrendous.
If someone opened up a patch of land, and was willing to give me 100 acres if I would build a house and live there, I would be hard pressed NOT to go. The idea of building a house and taming some wilderness is, to me, incredibly attractive.
Sadly, not a lot of call for that these days. There are some places in Kansas and the Dakota’s that are offering up plots of land if you’ll build a house, but they are lots like what you would find for sale in a city, and they are usually in economically depressed areas.
I can’t go out, claim some land, and log or farm or mine these days.
But I would if I could, fat gut and lazy work ethic and all.
My ancestors stood on the wrong side of Culloden field and subsequently got *sent * to the Carolinas in the late 1740’s. Not all white americans came here voluntarily. The blacks, of course, didn’t have much choice either.
Another reason for coming to america was money. Some early establishments were sponsored by businessmen back in Europe who wanted to invest in the endless resources of the new world. The failed english Popham colony in Maine was a commercial enterprise. They even built a 50-foot ship called the Virginia to show that the colony could use the magnificent old growth forests to supply England with ships. She was the first English ship built in the new world.
A lot of the immigrants fell for the hype that the new world was paved with gold. And yeah, for a lot of people in Europe life sucked so much that the danger and hard work of the frontier was way better.