The American character came from land

Years and years of labor by settlers went into making the land of today what it is. This area around Big Elk Creek Church in the Town of Wheaton, Chippewa County was originally settled in the 1850s by Norwegian immigrants. They cleared the land and broke the soil. Today, modern conservation practives are employed here to protect and enhance form lands for which early settlers worked long hours.

     The land made America. It wasn't so much what people took from it, but what they had to put into it. The land molded American character.
     It was the lure that drew settlers to America long after dreams of easy gold had been dashed. It was the motivation of men and women who built this nation.
     The land sustained them and gave them hope. It also made them tough. It freed them from bonds of Europe's class society and swallowed up Old World traditions.
     "Where there is store of gold," Sir Walter Raleigh had warned, "it is in effect nedeless (sic) to remember other commodities for trade."

Took it and ran

     Those who found quick wealth took it and ran. Those who didn't stayed and looked for deeper value. It was the American farmer who found it, built a nation and made it free.
     Farmers cleared the land and made it pay. They beat off starvation and made America the breadbasket of the world. Today farming is still the biggest industry with assets of more than $520 billion and sales last year of $93.5 billion.
      But more importantly, farmers were the first to appreciate freedoms to be found in America. Even religious refugees chose America because there was land to support them in the only trade they knew.
      Farmers earned and defended their own independence and then their country's. Great planters like George Washington or small yeomen like the embattled farmers at Concord bridge, who fired "the shot heard 'round the world," won the war and created a nation and its government.
     They made us what we are today.

Roots were deep

     Roots of Americans' passion for freedom stretch back to the manors of medieval England were serfs were assigned little strips of land which they could farm but never own. They also worked the lord's demesne, the church's glebe, the sexton's mead and maybe even the barber's furlong.
     Each autumn the peasant went to the manor house to give up part of his crop in tribute. If accused of any mischief, he would be tried in the same hall. He was a captive and his life a numbering drudge.
     There was little escape. The husbandman knew no other trade. There was no open land to homestead and small chance he could ever save enough money to buy land even if he could find any for sale.
     By the 17th century, when England was planting its colonies, serfdom had given way to tenant farming. There was no more forced labor, but the old fees were demanded and few farmed land they owned.

Forced off land

     At the same time old common fields were being enclosed by lords who learned they could make more money from sheep than crops. Farmers were forced off the land or reduced to small holdings which could not support them.
     Then came America with more than two billion acres of land in what would be the United States. And a man willing to buy or earn it could actually own a piece of land.
     Those who had money bought passage to America. Others sold themselves into bondage with a land grant at the end of the rainbow, usually seven years' service.
     But centuries of farming as their fathers had farmed, and lack of incentive and opportunity, had made poor farmers even of the professionals. Their old ways did not work in the "new world."

Produced no grain

     When the first settlers at Jamestown stopped prospecting for gold long enough to put in a crop in 1607, they planted English wheat. It grew higher than a man's head in the rich Virginia soil but produced no grain.
     The following winter half the population died of starvation and disease. The second summer the settlers planted four acres of English seed, but this crop also failed.
     It was not until their third season that the English succeeded in founding their agriculture in America, and then it was at instruction of native farmers. Two Indians taken prisoner in the spring of 1609, while still fettered, "did double tasks and taught us how to order and plant our fields."
     The English already knew of Indian corn. Begged, bought or stolen, it became their staple after their own supplies ran out. But they knew nothing of how to raise it.
     

Indians good agrarians

     Indians, on the other hand. were better agrarians than the more-civilized whites. They already had perfected corn, the white potato, sweet potatoes, peanuts, lima and kidney beans, squash, melons, pumpkins, tomatoes and more.
     Fully four-sevenths of the total crop production of the United States today consists of plants first domesticated by Indians. But corn was their great gift to the world.
     The white man learned to love it, and it was about the only thing that kept them alive. They ate it roasted, on the ear, as grits, hominy and cornbread. And in time they taught the Indians a new twist - corn liquor.
     When the Pilgrims came over in 1620 they landed in the dead of winter, and like the Jamestown group, half of them died. But in the spring they didn't waste their time hunting treasure.
     "As many as were able," said their future governor, William Bradford, "began to plant their corn."
     Being less proud and a lot more sensible than Virginia gentlemen, they turned right away to the Indians. A brave names Squanto taught them corn culture, fertilizing and deep planting, in place of the European method of broadcast seeding.
     "Squanto stood them in great stead, showing them both the manner how to set it and after how to dress and tend it," Bradford said. "...Some English seed they sewed as wheat and peas, but it came not too good.
     In the fall they gathered their first harvest, a time Americans still use to give thanks to God and the farmer.

Extracted from the Eau Claire Leader Telegram
Special Publication, Our Story 'The Chippewa Valley and Beyond', published 1976
Used with permission.