sanitary. Steerage passengers were promiscuously crowded together and
furnished their own food; and the ship's crew, the captain, the agents
who negotiated the voyage, and the sharks who awaited their arrival in
America, all had a share in preying upon the inexperience of the
immigrants. Arrived in America, these Germans were not content to
settle, like dregs, in the cities on the seacoast. They were land
lovers, and westward they started at once, usually in companies,
sometimes as whole communities, by way of the Erie Canal and the Great
Lakes, and later by the new railway lines, into Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Iowa, where their
instinct for the soil taught them to select the most fertile spots.
Soon their log cabins and their ample barns and flourishing stock
bespoke their success.

The growing Western cities called to the skilled artisan, the small
tradesman, and the intellectuals. Cincinnati early became a German
center. In 1830 the Germans numbered five per cent of its population;
in 1840, twenty-three per cent; and in 1869, thirty-four per cent.
Milwaukee, "the German Athens," as it was once called, became the
distributing point of German immigration and influence in the
Northwest. Its _Gesangvereine_ and _Turnvereine_ became as famous as
its lager beer, and German was heard more frequently than English upon
its streets. St. Louis was the center of a German influence that
extended throughout the Missouri Valley. Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit,
Buffalo, and many of the minor towns in the Middle West received
substantial additions from this migration.

Unlike the Irish, the Germans brought with them a strange language,
and this proved a strong bond in that German solidarity which
maintained itself in spite of the influence of their new environment.