THE OCCUPATION OF THE LAND 157 



pitality unstinted/ His children were more numer- 

 ous than his cattle, and today there are in Michigan 

 approximately 100,000 inhabitants reporting French 

 as their mother tongue. The total immigration into 

 the State seems not to have been extensive. Families 

 were large generation after generation. During the 

 past century, however, there has been some innuigra- 

 tion from Canada, from the eastern states, and from 

 France itself. Inquiries regarding motives for their 

 coming to ]\Iichigan elicit the "rentier" system in 

 Quebec, whereby the eldest son of the family is en- 

 gaged to work the homestead and provide for his 

 parents, necessitating that the other children seek 

 their fortune elsewhere; or that it was the attrac- 

 tiveness of work in the woods or surface labor about 

 the mines (one does not find many underground 

 workers among the French) ; or it was to escape 

 military service in the occupied portions of Alsace 

 and Lorraine that brought the normally non- 

 migratory Frenchman overseas and to Michigan. Not 

 many of these have gone into farming, nor are they 

 regarded as an agriculturally important stock. Ob- 

 servers, even among the French themselves, state 

 that they are too conservative, too easy-going. With 

 exquisite humor James Hoar of Lake Linden relates 

 how Farmer Buckwheat from the thither-side of 

 Torch Lake engaged the reverend father of the parish 

 to employ priestly rites for the banishment of the 

 grasshopper, and when results did not approximate 

 '"Census of 1910, Population by Mother Tongue," 980. 



