ABSTRACT
The speech of Samuel Clarke, probably written in 1894, is included here because it reflects on the past 50 years, after the English immigrant settled on the Wisconsin prairie back in 1842. It reveals how others joined him, how they took up government land, and how his father ‘was a Strong Primitive Methodist and this minister had been in that neighberhood in England preaching and had Stoped at his Fathers house’. That is, these were religious chains at work, and altogether it is a classic pioneering story about English immigrants. Another letter by Samuel Clarke, dated a year later, is also included. It talks of the old English settlers and how they established their farms and coped with hard winters. Finally, there is another excerpt, apparently of Clarke’s reminiscences of 1842, which adds more details about their original migration from England to Wisconsin – their settlement and adjustment to American life. Altogether, these documents reveal how an English immigrant looked back on his migration after a half-century in America, and they do not seem to have much nostalgia in them.
