Patterns of Migration: Where Ozark Settlers Came From
Most settlers in the first waves of Ozark settlement were
white people from the states to the east, most of them immigrants or
the children of immigrants from the British Isles. This is how the United
States was settled, first on the Atlantic seaboard, and then moving
westward as those communities filled and property had all been claimed
and sold at a high price. Since Native Americans did not believe in
the ownership of land by individuals, virtually all of the land to the
west was as yet unclaimed except by individual European countries who
had made government-sponsored explorations of some parts.
The Spanish had explored much of the Southeast, South
and Southwest, and the French had gone far inland by way of Canada and
New England. The United States claimed much of the French occupied territory
after the French and Indian War, and acquired the rest in the Louisiana
Purchase. Spain had focused its colonization in the South and Southwest,
occupying most of what is now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.
Through territorial expansion, the United States seized those territories
in the Mexican war, fought in the 1840s. Native Americans had occupied
all those lands at the time of European settlement, but had been heavily
decimated by smallpox and other diseases brought by Europeans to which
they had no immunity. Consequently, when the mass of settlers from the
east moved into those lands, they encountered almost no opposition from
the lands' former inhabitants.
When white settlers arrived in the Ozarks, the Osage were
using the Ozarks as their hunting ground. The U.S. government eventually
persuaded the Osage to move west to Oklahoma, under threat of force,
beginning in about 1832. Then several other Indian tribes who were being
pushed from the east, like the Delaware Indians, the Cherokee and others,
moved through the Ozarks. By the time of the Civil War, Missouri and
the Ozarks were populated almost entirely by first or second generation
Europeans. By then, settlers from the British Isles had been joined
by immigrants from other European countries. Some Ozarks communities
today are populated by people whose ancestors are mostly from Italy,
Poland, France or Spain.
The Tennessee hill folk of the Appalachian Mountains
and Cumberland Plateau were especially attracted to the Ozarks. Many
of them had originally come from northern Ireland and were known as
"Scotch-Irish." Irish from southern Ireland were often drawn to cities,
where they found work in factories or in the mining towns of the northeast
and southwestern Ozarks. Many Germans also came to the Ozarks, and settled
along its northern and eastern edges along the big rivers in towns such
as Hermann. The French, the first Europeans in Missouri, settled in
the eastern Ozarks, where many towns have French names, like Bonne Terre.
Pulaskifield, in southwest Missouri, was settled by Poles, and its next
door neighbor, Freistatt, was settled by Germans. A few miles south,
in the northern Arkansas Ozarks, is Tontitown, settled by immigrants
from Italy. Before 1860 settlers came mainly from Kentucky, Tennessee
and Virginia, in that order. Some also came from the Midwest states
of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. From 1860 to 1900 settlers came mainly
from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky, along with some from Tennessee.
Patterns of Migration
