ON TOUR FOR THE CAUSE 175wave, swarms of mosquitoes, and a cholera epidemic. The results
for the Arbeiterbund, however, were meager.
Weitling moved on to Waukesha, Watertown, and Madison,
where he stayed with Fritz Anneke and the feminist leader who
was his wife. He noted with satisfaction that Wisconsin permitted
immigrants to vote after one year's residence in the state. Madison,
at that time a beautiful, lake-rimmed village of 2,000 souls, proved
very attractive. The fishing was good, and the itinerant propagan
dist forgot his mission long enough to go hunting in the surround
ing woods. His friends the Annekes were counted among the
intellectual leaders of the community. They had organized a read
ing club, and Anneke was employed as cataloguer of the law books
in the state library. Weitling was reluctant to leave his generous
and interesting hosts.
In Watertown he found that most of the Germans seldom had
more than a dollar in cash except after harvest time, and as he
went from village to village, bouncing along in a stagecoach over
the rough roads of frontier Wisconsin, he was more and more im
pressed with the prevailing scarcity of circulating money, and
with the system of "store pay," which had been developed as a
substitute. In the stagecoach which carried him through the state
there were nine adults and three children, a veritable melting pot
of English, German, Irish, Norwegian, and American travelers.
Several times the stage was mired in the bottomless roads and had
to be pulled out by ox teams.
The fare from Milwaukee to Galena, Illinois, was $10, includ
ing food. En route, the travelers passed a number of lead mines. By
October, Weitling was in Communia, Iowa. "For the first time in
my life," he wrote exuberantly, "I stand on the sacred soil of a
communal brotherhood." He added, quite truthfully, "This land,
as far as the eye can see, belongs to us," for on the preceding day he
had taken the fateful step of amalgamating the colony with the Ar¬
beiterbund. That transaction will be described in detail in a later
chapter. It had unhappy consequences for Weitling personally
and for his entire movement, but at the moment he could think