A Social Study of the Russian German 19 
immense volumes of water down into the basin and turn the 
several individual streams into one great lake a mile or more 
broad. 
It was this tendency to floods which soon drove the earliest in- 
habitants of Lincoln back to the high ground on the east and 
gradually resigned the west side of the city to the railway and 
wholesale districts.12 The houses and stores they had built were 
then occupied by the various foreign nationalities which first came 
to Lincoln, chiefly Empire Germans and Bohemians, and by the 
poorer class of American laborers. When the Russian Germans 
began coming in the seventies, they naturally settled among 
those speaking their own tongue, and formed a nucleus about 
which later immigrants gathered. From the nineties on, when 
the Russian Germans began to form a noticeable part of the 
community, they gradually preémpted more and more of this 
territory until today few families of other nationalities reside 
within its limits. With the growth of the railroad and whole- 
sale districts, the two settlements became more and more cut 
off from each other so that now they form two distinct com- 
munities. 
The location and segregation of this group of foreigners have led 
the municipal authorities to exclude this part of the city from all 
plans for improvement. As soon as the settlements became suf- 
ficiently homogeneous to differentiate them, the newspaper re- 
porters dubbed them “ Russiatown,” “Little Russia,” or “ Little 
St. Petersburg” and “Little Moscow”; and the community 
12 The first heavy flood after the settlement on the present site of Lin- 
coln was made, occurred in 1869. Again a disastrous flood took place in 
1874, when the water rose two inches higher than five years before. In 
1878, 1881, 1883, 1891, and 1892 the whole valley was inundated. In 1893 
the creek was straightened, and it was hoped the defect was remedied; 
but another series of wet years proved as disastrous as before. In 1902, 
1903, 1907, and 1908 the same experience was repeated. The flood of 1908 
was one of the worst ever known and is a landmark in the history of the 
Russian German settlements. Aside from great property loss entailed, 
five persons were drowned by the overturning of a boat, four being chil- 
dren of one family. Other effects of this flood will be referred to 
frequently. 
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