Fischer Thesis

JCWisc at aol.com JCWisc at aol.com
Mon Aug 26 21:38:02 PDT 2002


Miachael Perelman:
> The only quibble I have is that I think that Scotch-Irish culture was
> different from the German.

Yes, agreed. A sentence that I cut from Turner mentioned this in passing:

"The Scotch-Irish had been accustomed to the life of cattle-raisers and fighters. The Germans brought with them less of the militant spirit and more of a thrifty, balanced agricultural life."

There's been some interesting work in rural sociology of the upper midwest on differences between communities that persist to this day depending on whether they were first settled by Yankee migrants from New England and upstate NY or German immigrants.

To revert to the original question, it may be that one reason I don't find much evidence of firearms in the early upper midwest is that the English-speaking settlers were Yankees coming out of a much less violent culture than the backcountry, or indeed the tidewater. I've always just assumed without thinking about it very much that hunting here before the Civil War was mainly a gentleman's pastime. When whites arrived here in numbers, they devoted their attention to cash farming, hogs in the first years, and then wheat, as fast as they could plow up the prairie. They didn't need to hunt to supplement their diet, and I think few would have done it recreationally. There were bounties on wolves, but I think that early on they were usually trapped, not shot. I haven't had time to get any deeper into the Bellesiles debate, but I wonder if the issue of regional differences has come up in it?

Jacob Conrad



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