| Abstract: | Frederick Jackson Turner described the American frontier as the great democratizer, a place where people from diverse backgrounds came together, shook off the shackles of their former cultures and blended into the American nation. Detailed study of nineteenth-century rural settlement in the Upper Middle West reveals a more complex picture. A marked spatial clustering of groups from the same country, province and even parish is readily observed. Often these groups were bound together in a close-knit community through the agency of a common church. This paper traces through four decades the farming behaviour and economic fortunes of several such groups who settled on the prairie of Kandiyohi County, Minnesota. The findings indicate that the ethnic community, especially where it consisted of people from a relatively restricted district in the old country, did help to make the frontier experience of its people rather different from that of their neighbours. |
