prices on food products and clothes, which put flour at $12 a barrel, coffee at 60 cents a pound and ordinary sheeting at 85 cents.
During the Civil War and After.But the war, even with its attendant prosperity, was not an unmixed blessing. Enthusiasm and patriotism, everywhere rife, was further encouraged among the Bohemians by their newspaper The Slavie, then published in Racine, Wis. Many entered the volunteer army, and when later a draft was ordered, large numbers of farms were left without men. There remained usually a large family with only a mother, and perhaps a fourteen-year-old son, to carry on the work of the place, an outlook calculated to overwhelm the most courageous of women. Yet our Bohemian wives were not disheartened and it is remarkable that in all that war-time not one mortgage was foreclosed in Kewaunee county, and not one of these brave women forfeited the homestead that was given into her care.
After the war, the material progress of the farmers was steady. To-day, were you to travel through their settlements, you would find large, well-ordered farms, with only here and there a stump or disused log-house to remind you of pioneer days. In Kewaunee county, farm land is now worth from $25 to $50 an acre, five times its original value.
Very little was done during the early years toward education. Schools were widely scattered, hard to reach, and there was work for the children at home. The Catholic church, in the few places where it was established, had in connection with it no parochial school. Only a very few children learned even the beginnings of English. Some, however, were taught at home in the mother-tongue, which enabled them to read the Bohemian newspaper.
The Schoolhouse and Other Beginnings.When, later, more roads were opened, and pioneers had overcome their first difficulties, schoolhouses sprang up and children were given from seven to ten months tuition each year. It would seem that once the "little red schoolhouse" was built, the way toward American citizenship would have been clear. But even here there were difficulties. The small Slavs insisted on talking Bohemian out of school hours, and the distracted schoolmaster could do nothing to stop them. As a consequence, they learned English slowly; other branches of knowledge, still more so. In communities where there were a few Irish and American children, conditions were somewhat better, but even here "recess-language" was Bohemian. The minority of little Americans were overcome. It was a common complaint among their parents that even at home they spoke to each other in Bohemian and a strange, unnatural language it must have seemed to these English-speaking parents.
These beginnings belong to the past. It would be hard in our day to find a Bohemian of the second generation in Wisconsin who cannot read and speak English. The older people do not learn English so readily. Their children and neighbors can speak with them in the mother-tongue, the village merchant provides Bohemian clerks of whom they can buy, and for reading they have the Bohemian newspapers. Those who can speak German adapt themselves somewhat more readily: for having a knowledge of one foreign language, they find it less difficult to master a second which is allied to it.
Higher Education.In the matter of higher education, the Bohemians of Kewaunee county have a remarkably good record. Within the last twenty-five years the local high school has sent to college fifty-nine young men and women and of these thirty were Bohemians. It is plain, then, that there is no lack of ambition in the children of our pioneers, and this ambition is upheld and fostered by progressive Bohemians of the West. Two years ago a council of higher education was organized at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which, in the words of its constitution, is "to encourage the Bohemian youth to acquire higher education, to inform our people concerning the manner in which they may secure such education for their children, and the advantages whioh various educational institutions afford, and to aid promising students, who lack the material means necessary to higher education, by honorloans, without interest."
