The Yazoo Delta.
The assistant land commissioner of the Illinois Central Railroad, Major G. W. McGinnis, in a recent interview on the subject of immigration to the Yazoo Delta, spoke as follows:
“I believe that the time has now come for the introduction of white labor. Our road, besides having agents all over the Northwest, have men in Germany and also in Holland, gathering families together to settle up our land. There are many residents of Dakota and other Northwestern States who want a milder and a better climate, with a soil more fertile than that of the Northwest. All these advantages are possessed by the Delta.
“The greatest interest is manifested in the movement. Scarcely a day passes but what we receive from fifty to seventy-five letters of inquiry.
“The colonists who have already taken advantage of our offers and settled along the Delta, are making money hand over fist. They are raising cotton, corn, vegetables, stock and fruit. The largest peaches I ever saw in my life came from the Delta.
“When our work is done we will see every man his own landlord, and by the way, these foreigners are apt to steer clear of that condition, so prevalent in the South, of being land poor. They want no more land than they can cultivate with the aid of their families, say forty acres. In fact, some of them buy no more than twenty. They make up the greatest population for agricultural districts possible to imagine. They have made the Northwest what it is.
“When the movement is once fairly started there will be no stopping the rush of immigration. Northern people all move in bodies. When one comes all come.”