in their heads a more or less accurate knowledge of the land of their desires.  At this time the German bookshops were teeming with little volumes giving, in the methodical Teutonic fashion, conservative advice to prospective immigrants and rather accurate descriptions of America, with statistical information and abstracts of American laws.  Many of the immigrants had further detailed information from relatives and friends already prospering on western farms or in rapidly growing towns.  This was, therefore, far from a pauper invasion.  It included every class, even broken-down members of the nobility.  The majority were, naturally, peasants and artisans, but there were multitudes of small merchants and farmers.  And the political refugees included many men of substantial property and of notable intellectual attainments.[27]

Bremen was the favorite port of departure for these German emigrants to America.  Havre, Hamburg, and Antwerp were popular, and even London.  During the great rush every ship was overcrowded and none was over 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.