But the movement by railway and by steamboat was merely a continuation on a greater scale of what had been going on ever since the Revolution.  The westward movement was begun, as we have seen, not by foreigners but by American farmers and settlers from seaboard and back country, thousands of whom, before the dawn of the nineteenth century, packed their household goods and families into covered wagons and followed the sunset trail.

The vanguard of this westward march was American, but foreign immigrants soon began to mingle with the caravans.  At first these newcomers who heard the far call of the West were nearly all from the British Isles.  Indeed so great was the exodus of these farmers that in 1816 the British journals in alarm asked Parliament to check the “ruinous drain of the most useful part of the population of the United Kingdom.”  Public meetings were held in Great Britain to discuss the average man’s prospect in the new country.  Agents of land companies found eager crowds gathered to learn particulars.  Whole neighborhoods departed for America.  In order to stop the exodus, the newspapers dwelt upon the hardship of the voyage and the excesses of the Americans.  But, until Australia, New Zealand, and Canada began to deflect migration, the stream to the United States from England, Scotland, and Wales was constant and copious.  Between 1820 and 1910 the number coming from Ireland was 4,212,169, from England 2,212,071, from Scotland 488,749, and from Wales 59,540.

What proportion of this host found their way to the farms is not known.[31] In the earlier years, the majority of the English and Scotch sought the land.  In western New York, in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and contiguous States there were many Scotch and English neighborhoods established before the Civil War.  Since 1870, however, the incoming British have provided large numbers of skilled mechanics and miners, and the Welsh, also, have been drawn largely to the coal mines.

The French Revolution drove many notables to exile in the United States, and several attempts were made at colonization.  The names Gallipolis and Gallia County, Ohio, bear witness to their French origin.  Gallipolis was settled in 1790 by adventurers from Havre, Bordeaux, Nantes, La Rochelle, and other French cities.  The colony was promoted in France by Joel Barlow, an Ananias even among land sharks, representing the Scioto Land Company, or Companie du Scioto, one of the numerous speculative concerns that early sought to capitalize credulity and European ignorance of the West.  The Company had, in fact, no title to the lands, and the wretched colonists found themselves stranded in a wilderness for whose conquest they were unsuited.  Of the colonists McMaster says:  “Some could build coaches, some could make perukes, some could carve, others could gild with such exquisite carving that their work had been thought not unworthy of the King."[32] Congress came to the relief of these unfortunate people in 1795 and granted them twenty-four thousand acres in Ohio.  The town they founded never fully realized their early dreams, but, after a bitter struggle, it survived the log cabin days and was later honored by a visit from Louis Philippe and from Lafayette.  Very few descendants of the French colonists share in its present-day prosperity.