10 - The true history of the northern farmer

Summary

LINES AND TASKS OF SETTLEMENT

The occasional young American of the 1960s and 1970s who fled urban civilization for the hills and the woods in Maine or Colorado encountered suddenly some of the natural conditions faced in every region by its first settlers. Nor was he much worse suited to the job. French peasants along the St. Lawrence or Dutch patroons along the Hudson in the seventeenth century brought something of an older social structure; later, in New Jersey and Delaware, and much later in Minnesota and Wisconsin, Scandinavians brought some techniques of settlement in forested regions. Germans in Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century with other central European peasant stock in the Middle West and east Texas in the mid-nineteenth century had been farmers in Europe before they became pioneer settlers in the new terrain. But inexperience was acute among the main body of English and Scottish settlers along the coast from Newfoundland to South Carolina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many, if not most, of the English had been town or village dwellers, adventurers, fishermen, religious malcontents, sailors, drifters, town craftsmen. The Scotch and Welsh had been herders of sheep and cattle; many bore a traditional aversion to the slow life of plow and sickle. All the Europeans, even where they migrated as small communities, had left regions where the tasks of pioneering were buried deep in a medieval, even a neolithic, past.