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| Lake Street, Downtown Chicago |
Courtesy, Chicago Public Library
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Frontier Pathways
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Wayside Excursion: What Did They Leave Behind?
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| While America was considered the "Golden Land," a place of freedom and opportunity, it could not have been easy for people to leave their homes, friends, and families to start a new life in Colorado. Knowing what the conditions were like across the ocean or across the country can help us understand why the uncertainty of a new life along Frontier Pathways may have been preferable to the old life in Europe or in the big cities of the United States. |
| For many, Europe was a place of extreme danger. Whether one was a tenant farmer, a factory worker, a fisherman, or a quarryman, making a living was difficult and often physically dangerous. Many could find no jobs, and fathers often left their families in search of work, sometimes not returning for several years. In Ellis Island Interviews (1997), Peter Coan collected the memories of immigrants from all over Europe and the Middle East. Interviewees remember eating nothing but beans or potatoes all winter long. Others recall a diet of apples and beets, or standing in line for hours for a loaf of bread. Peter Mossini, who emigrated from southern Italy in 1921, recalls getting his first pair of shoes at age 16, after years of saving. Thomas Rogen, who emigrated from London in 1902, remembers sitting in darkness, night after night, because there was no money for the gas needed to fuel the lamps. |
| Other dangers abounded. Epidemics of cholera, influenza, and smallpox were common. Political upheaval made life intolerable, whether because of civil strife, revolution, or war. Religious and ethnic persecution were rife. Jewish immigrants tell of routinely being beaten up on the way to and from school, of hiding in dark cellars or airless attics to avoid pogroms, of having their homes destroyed by soldiers. One Russian immigrant speaks of seeing men yanked from their homes or jobs by Cossacks and then lined up and shot. |
| Coan writes, “They were driven—by pain and fear and hopelessness; by poverty and hunger; by religious persecution; or the simple need to survive.” But for many immigrants, their first home in the United States left much to be desired. As large numbers of immigrants passed through the Port of New York, they crowded into tenements. Whether old homes subdivided into tiny apartments or new buildings built to house new immigrants, tenements were characterized by lack of light, ventilation, sanitary facilities, and space. Jacob Riis, in The Battle with the Slum (1902), tells of one 8x8-foot room with a curtain down the middle that housed two families. One city block might have a population of more than 3,000 people. People lived in cellars where the river tides seeped in, in sheds behind buildings, and in tiny rooms used for cooking, eating, sleeping, and working. It is no wonder that life in Colorado looked attractive to some! |
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