Ethnic Group Settlement on the Great Plains

Abstract

T he importance of foreign-born immigrants and their children for the settlement of the Great Plains has been largely overlooked by historians of the frontier and of the trans-Mississippi West. While an extensive literature exists treating Indian history and Indian-white relationships, white populations have usually been treated as homogeneous. In such a classic study as Walter Prescott Webb's The Great Plains, ethnic groups of European origin are scarcely mentioned. More recent interpretations of the region note differences between Indians, Chicanos, Orientals, and blacks, but fail to distinguish European ethnic groups, such as Norwegians, Germans, and Czechs from each other or from the native-born populations. 1 Analysis of census data for the nineteenth century, however, reveals that the foreign-born and their children often constituted a majority of the frontier population of the Great Plains states. In 1870, when the fringe of settlement moved onto the eastern reaches of the Great Plains, 25 percent of the 123,000 persons in the newly created state of Nebraska were foreign-born. Together with the second generation, they accounted for 54 percent of all inhabitants, excluding Indians. Even as late as 1900, immigrants and natives of foreign parentage formed 47 percent of the state's

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