New York or Boston, Cleveland or Chicago. In the 1860s and 1870s, seamen settled down in the harbor cities, and many of them became carpenters, construction workers or painters. In Maine, the quarries had large numbers of Finns, and hundreds more worked in the lumber camps and sawmills. Before the turn of the century, rural settlements of Finns appeared in central New York state, especially around Van Etten and Spencer. Fitchburg, Massachusetts, Detroit and Chicago have been centers of Finnish settlements from the time the immigration waves began, and in those cities the Finns were mostly factory workers. The Finns in the Middle West arrived as unskilled laborers for the most part, and they went to work in forests and mines, but economic depressions, labor strikes, and their own desire for independence made farmers of many of them, while others followed the rapid march of the lumber camps and sawmills westward to the Pacific. 86 Swedish-speaking Finnish fishermen from Ostrobothnian coastal towns and from the Aland Islands tended to seek out new homes along the water, so that they could continue their former occupation, and there were many of them on the shores of the Great Lakes.

Mining operations throughout the United States attracted a great number of Finns. Early in the century there were over a thousand of them in the gold and silver mines in the Black Hills of South Dakota. In Montana and Wyoming they mined coal; in Utah, Colorado, Nevada and Idaho, silver and coal. And so there were centers of Finnish population in Red Lodge, Sand Coulee, Belt and Stocket in Montana, Rock Springs, Hanna, Carbon and Cumberland in Wyoming. Butte, Montana, has always had a good number of Finns. Grays Harbor, Aberdeen and Hoquiam in Washington were early centers where Finns worked in forests and sawmills. The first Finns left the Michigan copper mines for Oregon and Washington in 1877-79, but reports about frightening Indian attacks in Pendleton interrupted a bigger push to the west, but at the turn of the century and even later whole trainloads of Finns moved into Oregon. 87 Along the west coast, in Oregon, Washington and California, they worked as fishermen and lumberjacks, but changing times made farmers and orchard keepers out of them. And in the years following World War II, a very unique kind of Finnish colony has been growing in Florida: it is made up almost entirely of older Finns who have spent most of their lives working in northern mining areas and farming cen

86. Kolehmainen and Hill, op. cit. p. 73. 87. S. Ilmonen, op. cit. II, p. 194.

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