It is amazing that over five million people emigrated from Germany to the United States in the 1800’s, a huge percent to Texas. Not all at once. About 600,000 between 1815 and 1848, and between 1845 and 1860, over one million alone. These are numbers given by Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias , and while they don’t all agree, their estimates are similar. For many reasons, exact numbers are not possible.
My purpose is not to explore the question why they emigrated as lots of people have written about that.
My interest is in the hardships, difficulties, and financial cost for these millions of people, like all four of my great grandfathers.
These folks traveled by steamers, the cost of the trip $30 for steerage, which was the cheapest and most unpleasant way to travel. That may seem cheap by modern standards, but you could build a one-room house in the 1800’s for $25, according to online encyclopedias.
Bigger factors than travel accommodations were a place to live and earning enough to live on. You could buy land for $1 acre, a horse for $150, a plow for $12, and with these you could farm cotton. But only if you could come up with the cash to do so. Small buggies cost from $50 to $135, and a 4-room house would cost you $700. A saddle sold for around $60.
One of my great grandfathers was a tailor in Germany, making and selling men’s suits. A tailor could get $4 or $5 per handmade suit in Germany . But how many men would want a three-piece suit in sweltering-hot Texas? On the frontier? Great Grandpa had to farm cotton. About which he knew nothing. Land. Plus horse or mule. Plus plow. And this was not farmland. It was primitive prairie land.
What a lot of newcomers like my great grandfather learned was that you can plow about a an acre per day with a horse-pulled plow (plows were invented in 2000 BC in China), but you could plow 15 acres per day with a tractor-polled plow (yes, there were steam operated tractors in the 1800’s and a gasoline tractor came out about 1892, and lots of tractors in the early 1900’s). But who could afford a tractor?
Even after tractors replaced horses and mules, many German American farmers continued the older ways, no doubt cost being one factor and opposition to change another.
On the frontier, there were no doctors. Herbalists and midwives instead. When it didn’t rain, there was no food except for wild animals. In the winter, snow often sifted in between the cracks in the logs of your house. Life was not easy. You wonder how they survived and even thrived.
Ray Spitzenberger is a retired WCJC teacher, a retired LCMS pastor, and author of three books, It Must Be the Noodles, Open Prairies, and Tanka Schoen.