military power, hundreds of thousands of these energetic young men
thought it safest and best to make new homes in the young Republic
beyond the seas. The United States therefore received a migration of the
highest character and of inestimable benefit to the country.

Somewhere near 150,000 of these went to Missouri. They had none of the
antipathy of Northern Americans to a Slave State. They were like their
Gothic forebears, to whom it was sufficient to know that the land was
good. Other matters could be settled by their strong right arms. The
climate and fertility of Missouri pleased them; they saw the State's
possibilities and flocked thither. Possibly one-half settled in the
pleasant valleys and on the sunny prairies, following the trail of good
land in the Southwest clear down to the Arkansas line. The other half
settled mostly in St. Louis, and through them the city experienced
another of its wonderful transformations. Beginning as a trading post
of the French with the Indians, it had only as residents merchant
adventurers from sunny France, officers and soldiers of the royal army
and the half-breed voyageurs and trappers who served the fur companies.
Next the Americans had swarmed in, and made the trading post a great
market for the exchange of the grain and meat of the North, for the
cotton and sugar of the South. Its merchants and people took their tone
and complexion from the plantations of the Mississippi Valley.

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Now came these Germans, intent upon reproducing there the
characteristics of the old world cities beyond the Rhine. They brought
with them lager beer, to which the Americans took very readily, and a
decided taste for music, painting and literature, to which the Americans
were not so much inclined. German signs, with their quaint Gothic
lettering and grotesque names, blossomed out on the buildings, military
bands in German uniforms paraded the streets, especially on Sundays.
German theaters also open on Sunday represented by astonishingly good
companies the popular plays of the Fatherland, and newsboys cried the
German newspapers on the streets. Those who went into the country
were excellent farmers, shrewd in buying and selling, and industrious
workers. They dreamed of covering the low hills of the western part of
the State with the vineyards that were so profitable on the Rhine and
of rivaling the products of Johannesburg and the Moselle on the banks of
the Gasconade and the Maramec.

17