Twenty or thirty miles east of St. Louis, in Madison County, Illinois, was founded a Swiss colony named Highland. The plateau, called the Looking-Glass Prairie, was settled by the families Köpfli and Suppiger, in October, 1831. They became the permanent owners, though Americans had settled there ten years before. Proximity to St. Louis was an advantage for the disposal of their products. Alton, in the same county, was the most important commercial city in the state, in the early thirties, and interested enthusiasts predicted that it might sometime surpass St. Louis. It attracted many Germans at that time; indeed all the cities that rose up and gave promise of a great future received a good contingent of German immigrants at the very beginning of their hopeful career. Such were Vandalia, Peoria,' Quincy, Springfield, Peru, and Chicago. With the building of railroads the country opened more and more toward the Northwest, and the centre of population moved in that direction. Chicago in 1848 had scarcely ten thousand inhabitants. The Germans were there early and grew in numbers and influence. The "Illinois Staats-zeitung" was started in 1848 as a weekly paper, while St. Louis already had two German dailies in the same year. The years 1850-1854 mark the crest in the wave of the German immigration of the nineteenth century before 1880. The largest part of the flood

1 G. F. Müller was the first German settler in Peoria (1836); he was an alderman of the city in 1852.

2 A Tunker named Georg Wolf, a native of the lower Rhine, settled there in the summer of 1822, a year after the first settler, John Wood (later governor), from whom Wolf bought his land. Cf. Der deutsche Pionier, vol. xi, p. 222, etc. ("Highland, Illinois," von A. E. Bandelier.) Cf. also: Geschichte der Deutschen Quincys, von H. Bornmann. Deutsch-Amerikanische Geschichtsblätter, Erster Jahrgang.

Mannhardt: Die ersten beglaubigten Deutschen in Chicago, Deutsch-Amerikanische Geschichtsblätter, Bd. I, Heft 1, pp. 38, 46.

poured into Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Iowa. In Chicago the German spirit had its first awakening in 1844, when a meeting was held in opposition to nativistic influences. But these beginnings cannot be compared with the political influence of the Chicago Germans in the days of Franz A. Hoffmann, merchant and banker, who, an ardent supporter of Lincoln, became lieutenant-governor of Illinois in 1860.

The settlement of the state of Iowa came late, but was very rapid when once begun. In May, 1842, the newspapers of St. Louis announced that during the first three months of that year 529 steamers had arrived in the harbor of St. Louis with more than thirty thousand passengers destined for Iowa. The causes for this rapid filling-up of the new territory were: the good soil, the fine climate, and the discovery of lead-mines in the neighborhood of Dubuque.' Along with native Americans, many Germans were drawn from Missouri and Illinois toward pastures new in Iowa and Minnesota. Since the avenue of entrance was the Mississippi River, there were soon established on its banks the cities Keokuk, Burlington, Davenport, and Dubuque. Iowa City was built on the Iowa River, Des Moines on the river of the same name, and on the Missouri rose the town of Council Bluffs. New cities sprang up like mushrooms and new immigrants were always at hand to link their fortunes with new localities. Dubuque, once first, now second city in size in the state, contained a population more than one half of German blood. There were among them Germans, Swiss, Alsatians, and Luxemburgers. In 1880 there were two large Ger

1 The first white man to come to Dubuque, after the French fur traders left, was, in 1832, the German, Peter Weighle, whose descendants still reside in Dubuque. A year later came the Swiss, Nikolaus Hoffmann. Eickhoff, p. 352.

man Catholic, one Lutheran, one German Presbyterian, and three or four small German Protestant congregations. Five of the ten state councilmen and two or three county supervisors were Germans. In state politics the latter were likewise very influential, as for example J. H. Thedings (b. in East Frisia, Prussia), who was in turn justice of the peace, mayor, president of the county council, and head of the school system.

Northwest of Dubuque there was the German Catholic town of New-Wien (New Vienna), and to the west of it, on the Mississippi, the town of Guttenberg, founded by Germans from Cincinnati. In Clayton County, on the socalled "Potato Prairie," there was a colony of communists, founded by Heinrich Koch in 1847, after his return from the Mexican War, in which he had served as captain. Another communistic society, the "Icarians," settled at Corning, Iowa, after leaving Nauvoo. They had first bought the deserted properties of the Mormons, who were driven out of their Illinois settlement, Nauvoo, in 1850. The Frenchman Etienne Cabet was their leader until his death in 1856, and their removal to Adams County, Iowa. They called their new settlement, at Corning, the Icaria Commune in reminiscence of Cabet's book "Icarie." Although most of the members were French, the most influential of them after Cabet's death were Germans.

The three leading cities, Des Moines, the capital of the state, Dubuque, and Davenport, the city third in size, received large German populations, Davenport getting a large contribution from Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark. From Davenport as a centre grew a number of German colonies; such as, Avoca, Minden, Walcott, Wheatland, Dewitt, etc.1

1 Cf. Eickhoff, p. 355.

The northern and western parts of Michigan long remained untouched by the American pioneers, because of the cold climate and the presence of hostile Indian tribes. The German blood is nevertheless represented in the early history of Michigan, through the distinguished service of Friedrich Baraga, the Indian missionary. He was born in Carniola, Austria, in 1797. His mother was an aunt of the noted German poet Auersperg (whose pseudonym was Anastasius Grün). Of noble birth and with every advantage of social influence and education (he studied jurisprudence at the University of Vienna), Baraga entered the priesthood, contrary to the counsels of relatives. In 1830 he decided to enter the missionary service among the American Indians. Stopping long enough in Cincinnati to learn the language of the Ottawas from an Indian in a Catholic school of that city, he traveled by way of Detroit to the northern part of the Michigan peninsula, and established himself at Arbre Crochu. There he taught the Indians of the Lake Superior region (including the Ottawas, Pottawottomies, Chippewas, or Ojibwas) how to read, write, and count, and also the simple principles of Christianity. He would not use the books of the French in the Algonquin language, but prepared his own text-books and catechisms in the Chippewa language, with materials from the Old and New Testaments; he wrote a grammar of the Chippewa dialect, and compiled a reader in the Ottawa language. In 1853 Baraga was made bishop of the Northern Indian Missions, his residence being Sault Sainte-Marie, and later Marquette, on Lake Superior. He died at Marquette in 1868.1

If we look again at the census maps, we find that, with

1 A sketch of his life can be found in Der deutsche Pionier, vol. i, pp. 291295. ("Ein Vorkämpfer der Civilisation.")

the exception of the district around Detroit, Michigan was practically uninhabited when the census of 1830 was taken. In 1840 the region to the north of Detroit and the area extending westward to Lake Michigan were settled, though not densely. There are proofs that the Germans had come during the interval. In 1839 the Catholic priest and missionary Dr. Hammer wrote concerning the Germans as follows:1

Real German life as it is found in many American states, one can find in Michigan only in three places, for in all other places our people [meaning the Germans] are too scattered to form congregations that might support a German preacher: (1) In Detroit, there are two large German congregations, the stronger being Catholic and having built a cathedral, the other, also having a church of its own, being Protestant (the Reverend Mr. Schade). The members of the two congregations live in harmony with one another, and never allow their religious differences to interfere with their social intercourse. At marriages and baptisms they are never concerned about which preacher they should choose, but that they should have a good time in the German fashion. A large number of the Germans remain in the city only so long as to earn money enough to buy land outside and establish farms. (2) The second German colony, and the most prosperous, is that near Ann Arbor. The Germans there come largely from Würtemberg, and are under the Protestant preacher, the Reverend Mr. Schmid. Their grain and cattle are unsurpassed in Michigan. (3) The third German colony is that on the Grand River, in the neighborhood of Lyons, Ionia County, under the Reverend Mr. Kopp, from Westphalia. The colony is called Westphalia.

The German traveler, J. G. Kohl (in 1855), adds a few more facts about the Ann Arbor Germans.

The first were some few who came from the villages near Stuttgart about 1830. It was just the time when Michigan was 1 Eickhoff, pp. 376-377.