water to New York and the Atlantic, Milwaukie caries off no small share
of the export wheat trade of the North-west. Behind it lie the rolling
prairies of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, the three wheat-growing
states of the American Union. Scandinavia, Germany, and Ireland have made
this portion of America their own, and in the streets of Milwaukie one
hears the guttural sounds of the Teuton and the deep brogue of the Irish
Celt mixed in curious combinations. This railway-station at Milwaukie is
one of the great distributing points of the in-coming flood from Northern
Europe. From here they scatter far and wide over the plains which lie
between Lake Michigan and the head-waters of the Mississippi. No one
stops to look at these people as they throng the wooden platform and fill
the sheds at the depot, the sight is too common to cause interest now,
and yet it is a curious sight this entry of the outcasts into the
promised land. Tired, travel-stained, and worn come the fair-haired crowd
of men and women and many children, eating all manner of strange food
while they rest, and speaking all manner of strange tongues, carrying the
most uncouth shapeless boxes that trunk-maker of Bergen or Upsal can
devise--such queer oval red-and-green painted wooden cases, more like
boxes to hold musical instruments than for the Sunday kit of Hans or
Christian--clothing much soiled and worn by lower-deck lodgment and spray
of mid-Atlantic roller, and dust of that 1100 miles of railroad since
New York was left behind, but still with many traces, under dust and
seediness, of Scandinavian rustic fashion; altogether a homely people,
but destined ere long to lose every vestige of their old Norse habits
under the grindstone of the great mill they are now entering. That vast
human machine Which grinds Celt and Saxon, Teuton and Dane, Fin and Goth
into the same image and likeness of the inevitable Yankee--grinds him too
into that image in one short generation, and oftentimes in less; doing it
without any apparent outward pressure or any tyrannical law of language
or religion, but nevertheless beating out, welding, and amalgamating the