The Four Horsemen of Immigration
I’ve been learning about the Land Run of 1889, Oklahoma and Indian Territory’s for the last nine years and I’m still blown away by the things I learn every day. I promise, it’s not the story you think you know. It’s nowhere near being the story you remember from grade school. The story you read about in Oklahoma history books is like describing one snowflake in a blizzard. There’s just so much more to it.
I wanted to know who were the people that came to the territories? Where were they from? Why did all those people come here?
The Answer: why does anyone leave their home? They hope to escape something in search for something better.
A year after the Land Run of 1889, 47.8% of the population of the United States was made of immigrants or first generation Americans. People who were born in another country or their parents were.
Now, where did they come from?
In 1907 the U.S. Congress created a committee to study the past hundred years of immigration. This table gives you an idea.
Immigrants who identified themselves as German came to the US in droves with millions coming to America nearly each decade.
- Side note: Being German doesn’t necessarily mean you are from Germany. For more information on the confusing history of Germany to help you understand I found this great 4 minute video on YouTube.
This YouTube channel has several animated histories that are really great. Things like this help us to understand that Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland weren’t recognized as countries in the early decades indicated on the table. It’s tricky, keeping track of how people identify themselves.
Do you identify yourself as American or Oklahoman? Do you recognize your families’ ethnicity? How many generations does it take to become American?
The congressional committee learned that Germans settled on the fringes of the frontier and helped America expand to both coasts. Remember that term “Manifest Destiny” from school? Yeah, the German immigrants were predominately the settlers of these new areas opening across the country. Many of the political and social structures of society in the Mid-West today is based in German culture.
Did you notice the other significant immigrant group in that table?
Immigrants from Ireland make up the second largest group. These people supplied the labor that built America. These guys dug the tunnels and built the bridges. They are the ones that laid the tracks for the railroads crossing the countryside carrying those German immigrant families. There were a handful of other ethnic groups and immigrants that labored on the railroads, including the Chinese and African-Americans but the Irish made up the majority.
Now, why did they come?
The Immigration Committee identified four main reasons that spurred immigration in throughout the majority of the 1800s.
1 Political Turmoil
2 Religious Turmoil
3 Poverty
4 Access to jobs
1. Political Turmoil — Every year in the 1800s in Europe has at least one uprising, rebellion, revolt or all-out war. It is estimated that up to 6 million people died in the Napoleonic Wars. That only covers the period between 1803–1815. Now, imagine how many others died or were injured in the smaller clashes raging through Europe.
1820 Revolutions in Spain and Italy
1821 Revolution in Greece
1825 Uprisings in Russia
1830 Revolution in France
1831 Revolution in Poland
1848 Revolutions in France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, the Danish States, Hungary, Serbia, Wallachia, & Moldova
2. Religious Turmoil — Another large group of immigrants during this period were Jewish. These numbers aren’t reflected in the country of origin table above. The 1800s saw a huge increase in Anti-Semitic laws being passed. So, many came to America in hopes of being able to practice their religion without the threat of death or persecution.
3. Poverty — Wars also result in economic depression. Economic struggles throughout Europe were exaggerated by famines and years of poor crop yields. In short, people were starving!
1811–1812 famine in Madrid killed 20,000 people
1845–1857 The Irish Potato Famine killed nearly 1.5 million people while nearly 2 million emigrated.
1879 Ireland was hit again with another famine
Many Irish departed Liverpool to arrive in New York City.
4. Access to jobs — These wars and revolutions dramatically changed these countries. Many deposed or even assassinated their Kings or Emperors in favor of republics and struggled to create a system that was more democratic. This was a long, arduous, and tense process. Countries were dissolved, the land was reorganized and new countries came to be in the 1800s. The Nobility lost their titles, money, and land. With no patrons to buy goods and services, the artisans and merchants had no money to buy food from the farmers. This cascading affect pushed the wealthier middle and upper classes to emigrate. They were the ones that could afford to make the trip overseas with their families.
These four factors are the main contributors to emigration from Europe and immigration to the U.S. each person, family, or ethnic group experienced these in varying degrees but it was enough to leave in search of something better, something safer, something more for their families’ future.
In Oklahoma, census records show that in 1910, 8+% of the population were recent immigrants or children of immigrants. However, we’ve already seen how drastic the immigration flowed into the US for the decades prior. If we were to go through the history of all the people we know were here in 1910, how many of our new Oklahomans were grandchildren of immigrants? Some of our museum docents are the grandchildren of immigrants and children of people who made the run to Oklahoma. How many of the others were the same?
Population of Oklahoma in 1910, 3 years after Statehood in 1907
Total 1,657,155
137,612 African-American 8.3%
74,825 American Indian 4.5%
40,084 Immigrants 2.4%
94,044 1st generation* 5.7%
*1st generation = Americans are children of foreign born parents. The majority of these parents were German in Decent.
What is your family story? When did your ancestors arrive in Oklahoma? Where do they hail from? How many generations removed are you from that first generation American? What were they in search of? Why did they leave their home country to settle in the US? Were they starving? Were they merchants looking to start a business?
I like to call the people who made the run, “economic opportunists”. They were people looking to find a way to provide for their families, to feed their kids instead of watching them starve, to send them to school instead of sending them to war.
In 1850, 10% of the population was born in another country. How many of those people moved out west, then brought over their families, had children fight in the Civil War, and then had grandchildren who made the run?
Going back through our personal histories and then piecing them together with everyone else, we will find that many of the people that made the run were not very far removed from those immigrants or from those 1st generation Americans. Three generations is some cases. Four and Five generations are probably more common than we know or could feasibly count.
