2o6 EMIGRACJA
history. In the War of Independence, apart from Tadeusz Kosciuszko and
Kazimierz Pulaski, whose exploits are known to every schoolboy, there were
Poles such as Karol Blaszkowicz, a naval cartographer, who fought for the
Loyalists, and others such as the New England privateer, Feliks Miklaszewicz,
who fought for the Revolution. On the western frontier, there were Poles such as
Henry Lyons Brolarski of St. Louis, who worked as a leading entrepreneur on the
overland trails to California and Oregon in the 1840s and 1850s. On the west
coast, there were Poles among the Russians from Siberia who first developed
Alaska, and who in 1811 built Fort Ross on San Francisco Bay. In 1848, a surgeon
of the US Army Medical Corps, Dr Paul Wierzbicki, born at Czerniawka in
Volynia, wrote a book which shook the continent. His California as it is, or as it
may be, or a Guide to the Gold Region was the first volume printed west of the
Rockies, and served as the standard guidebook for thousands of hopeful prospec-
tors in the Gold Rush of 'Forty-nine. In the Civil War, there were Poles such as
General Kacper Tochman of Virginia, a veteran of the November Rising and a
noted racialist, who served on the Confederate staff, and others, like General
Wlodzimierz Krzyzanowski (1827-87), a Posnanian, who served the Union.
Oddly enough, both Tochman's Polish Brigade and Krzyzanowski's Polish
Legion, which distinguished itself at the second Bull Run and at Gettysburg, con-
sisted largely of Germans. These early Polish names belonged, of course, to accid-
entals, and there were those among them whose Polishness was doubtful, if not
downright spurious. Tochman's wife, for example, who called herself Apolonia
Jagiello, turned out, in reality, to be a Ms Eisenfeld of Vienna. There were several
supposedly Polish royals in circulation, including a Jan Sobieski (1842-1927),
who was a ranking officer in both the Union and Mexican armies. What exactly
were the Polish connections of Lorenzo Sobieski Young, whose name is recorded
in Salt Lake City among the 143 founders of the Mormon colony, it is difficult to
say.^6
The main influx of Poles to the United States began after the Civil War. But
then they came in force, and they kept coming until they penetrated every state
of the Union. Their arrival coincided with the growth of the industrial towns of
the Midwest and the north-east, and it is there, in Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit,
Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, that the greatest
concentrations still reside. Others headed straight for the countryside of New
England or for the open prairies. Prosperous Polish farming communities can be
encountered in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, no less than in
Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois. The names of Warsaw
(Alabama), Kosciuszko (Mississippi), and Pulaski (Tennessee), like hundreds of
similar small towns, betray the provenance of their founders. As usual, statistics
are controversial. But the records from the US Immigration and Naturalization
Service would suggest that the over-all parameters for immigrants identified as
Polish either by 'race' or 'people', or by 'country of birth' must lie between a
minimum total of 1,486,490 and a maximum total of 1,823,540. (See Table
opposite.)