A Bureau of Emigration is to be established by the company, which will be of invaluable service to the emigrant.
Many persons in the Eastern and Middle States are desirous of moving to the Northwest, but it is hard to cut loose from old associations, to leave home and friends and strike out alone upon the prairie; they want company. The human race is gregarious. There are not many who care to be hermits, and most of us prefer society to solitude.
This feature of human nature is to be kept in view, and it will be the aim of the Bureau of Emigration to offer every facility to those seeking new homes to take their friends with them.
Upon the completion of every twenty-five miles of road, the company will be put in possession of forty sections of land per mile. The government will hold the even-numbered sections, and the company those bearing the odd numbers.
The land will be surveyed, plotted, and the distinctive features of each section described. Emigration offices are to be established in our own country as well as abroad, where maps, plans, and specifications will be found.
One great drawback to the settlement of the prairie lands of Illinois and Iowa has been the want of timber for the construction of houses. Persons with limited means, having only their own hands, found it hard to get started on a treeless prairie. Their first work is to obtain a house. The Bureau propose to help the man who is anxious to help himself on in the world, by putting up a portable house for him on the land that he may select. The houses will be small, but they will serve till the settler can get his farm fenced in, his ground ploughed, and two or three crops of wheat to market. The abundance of timber in Minnesota will enable the company to carry out this new feature of emigration.
It will be an easy matter for a family from Lowell, another from Methuen, a third from Andover, a fourth from Reading, a fifth from Haverhill, to select their land in a body and start a Massachusetts colony in the Seat of Empire.
Far better this method than for each family to go out by itself. Going as a colony they will carry the moral atmosphere of their old homes with them. They will have a school in operation the week after their arrival. And on Sabbath morning, swelling upward on the summer air, sweeter than the lay of lark amid the flowers, will ascend the songs of the Sunday school established in their new home. Looking forward with ardent hope to prosperous years, they will still look beyond the earthly to the heavenly, and sing,—
"My heavenly home is bright and fair,
Nor pain nor death shall enter there."
This is no fancy sketch; it is but a description of what has been done over and over again in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and all the Western States. The Northern Pacific Railroad Company want their lands settled by an industrious, thrifty, energetic people, who prize everything that goes to make up the highest grade of civilization, and they are ready to render such help as no colonies have yet had.