Catholic Colonization in Minnesota / Revised Edition

by Catholic Colonization Bureau

This is especially necessary if you and your wife have lived for years in a city and become habituated to city life. It is a great change from city life in the East to country life in the West, especially when the part of the country one moves to is new and settlements just forming.

You are not to expect to realize the advantages of the change right off; it is through yourself, through your own grit and industry, those advantages must come.

To a Western farmer there is nothing bleak or lonely in a prairie; to a man coming fresh from a city and looking on it, for the first time, with city eyes, it may, very likely, seem both. Indeed, a sense of loneliness akin to despondency is a feeling which the newly-arrived immigrant has generally to contend against, a feeling which may increase to a perfect scare if he is a man anxious to consult Tom, Dick and Harry—who are always on hand—as to the wisdom of the step he has just taken.

We speak from experience, from facts we have a personal knowledge of. Our labors in the cause of immigration have brought to us much happiness and some pain.

To illustrate: Two immigrants arrived here last year, in high spirits, called at our office a few minutes after landing, and so impatient were they to go hunt up land that they were quite disappointed to find they would have to stop over one night in St. Paul. Well, the next morning they called at the office again, all courage, all desire to go upon land wilted out of them, and informed us that they had changed their minds and were going back to Massachusetts.

Why? Well, they had met a man at the boarding house they stopped over night at, who advised them not to go out and settle on a prairie. He told them, too, that "he was fifteen years in Minnesota and never could get a dollar ahead."

Now here were men, rational to all appearance, having traveled two thousand miles or so to settle upon land, when they came within sight of the land, as we may say, losing all desire to visit it, all courage, all confidence in disinterested, experienced friends, and in the information they gave to them; in everything but the word of a loafer, who never did a day's good in his life, nor never will, and who was anxious to shuffle off the onus of his slipshod condition from himself to the country.

Here is another case, which occurred a few months after Swift Colony was opened and while the country around looked still wild and lonely.

Two men arrived here from Philadelphia. They went on to the Catholic colony in Swift County, and in a day or two returned, saying that they had made up their minds to go back to Philadelphia. Why? Did they not find everything as it was reported to them? "Oh, yes, the land was good, and there was a good chance for a poor man to make a home on it, if he could content himself, but it was too lonely for them."

Lonely, to be sure it was; with the noise of the city still ringing in their ears, with its crowds and its gaslights still in their eyes, these men found the prairie lonely, and without pausing to consider all the circumstances, they turned their back upon it.