CHAPTER FIRST.
FURTHER INFORMATION FOR THE HOME-SEEKER.
COME TO THE GREAT WEST!
The Western States and Territories afford unexampled inducements to the surplus energy and capital of the East and Europe; and the field which they spread out so invitingly to the emigrant's choice is as wide as it is magnificent. Hundreds of millions of acres of rich land—embracing bottom and prairie, timber and running water—are open for settlement. Counties are to be populated, and towns built, all over the new States and Territories. Each of these latter is an empire in itself. Great Britain could be set down within the borders of any one of them, and yet leave room for some of the German principalities. The records of the Agricultural Bureau at Washington show that, wherever the new soil has been cultivated, both the yield per acre and the quality of the crops produced are better than in the older States. The balance of power is moving westward, and the capital of the nation, it can scarcely be doubted, must eventually come also.
There is no reason why people should starve in the great cities of this broad and heaven-favored land of ours. Business men, so often besieged and worried with applications for positions in their stores and counting-rooms, might with advantage tack up a copy of the Homestead Law by their desk, and keep a further supply on hand for distribution. Every few months some poet sings of the ill-paid seamstress in the crowded town, or some hideous murder brings to light the heroine of the garret-stitched shirt. Yet, meanwhile, at Denver City, house-girls have been getting from six to ten dollars per week, and thousands could find comfortable homes throughout Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado, with remunerative wages. Abroad, men toil, and women work in the fields, and in one year pay out from the scanty earnings which they wring from a stingy soil more than enough to purchase one hundred and sixty acres of good land in the great and growing West.
SHOULD THERE NOT BE COMPULSORY EMIGRATION?
Except in the case of the very decrepit, or totally disabled, there can be no excuse for begging, in a country which offers every pauper a quarter-section of as rich land as the sun shines upon. I suppose the millennium will commence when laws compel the cities to drive from them the idle and vicious, and make them tillers of the soil in the wilds. Instead of brooding in the dark alleys, and breeding vice to be flung out at regular intervals upon the civilized thoroughfares, these germinators of disease and crime would be dragged forth from their purlieus and hiding-places, and disinfected in the pure atmosphere of the large prairies and grand forests. Granting that it might be a heavy burden upon their shoulders at the outset, the present generation of reformers would have the satisfaction of knowing that the sores were cleansed, and that moral and physical disease was not being propagated to suffocate their children; and even although some of the present multitude of evil-doers might not be reclaimed, most of their children certainly would be. It is more profitable to raise farmers than convicts. Instead of building jails to hold men in life-long mildew, our artisans might be building steamers and cars, to carry their products to the seaboard.
"GET A GOOD READY."
Of the immense and almost boundless tracts of Western land that invite the emigrant's choice, the larger part can be homesteaded and pre-empted, and the remainder purchased on favorable terms from the different railroads. The competition among the latter for immigration has induced low prices and superior facilities for examination.
Where a number of families are coming together, the best way, as a rule, is to select commissioners from the number, to go in advance, and spy out the land, which can be done at comparatively trifling expense. On giving satisfactory proof of their mission, such representatives are nearly always able to secure low rates of fare and freight. In this way, two or three reliable agents can select a district in which a colony may settle, and make all the necessary arrangements for its transportation, and each family save a number of dollars, which will give back compound interest in the new home.