We wish that this concluding chapter of our pamphlet may be read
carefully, and thought well over by intending immigrants.
We wish it for their benefit, and our own benefit and protection. It is,
we might say, a fearful responsibility to advise another in a matter
which contemplates a change in his habits, mode of life, and home, and
such a change should never be undertaken, especially by a man of family,
without a most thorough investigation, not alone as to the place he
intends going to, but likewise as to his own fitness for the change.
When you have examined this pamphlet from cover to cover, then commence
an examination of yourself, not forgetting your wife, if you have one,
who is part of you, and a very important part in connection with this
question of your going upon land.
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.
They were both decent, intelligent men, and, had they remained, taken
land, gone to work, opened a farm, and seen their first crop ripening,
you could no more have got them back to Philadelphia than you could get
them into the penitentiary.
Now, we say to those for whose benefit this pamphlet has been written,
if you come here you must come fully prepared to feel the effects of a
great change. If you come from a city, you will, doubtless, feel lonely
for a while, until you get accustomed to prairie life; you will miss
many immediate comforts; you will have to put up with discomforts, with
disappointments, with trials. The man who feels he can stand up against
all such difficulties in the present, and look bravely to the future for
his reward, let him come to Minnesota. The man who feels within him no
such strength, who is easily disheartened and inclined to listen to the
idle talk of every man whom he meets, let him stop away and listen;
better to listen now, where you are, than after going to the expense of
coming here.
To the family man we say: We would much prefer that you should come on
here in the spring and see for yourself before breaking up your present
home and bringing on your family.
If you settle down, you can send or go for your family; if you are not
pleased with the change, there will not be much harm done.
Another very important piece of advice we give to you: If your wife is
very much opposed to going upon land, do not come out. A discontented
wife on a new farm is far worse than the Colorado beetle. But if she
urges you to come, if, in this matter, she thinks of your welfare and
that of her children, rather than of the society of the gossips she will
leave behind her; if she says to you, "we will have the children out of
harm's way anyhow," then come with a brave heart and the smile of the
true wife and mother shall be as a sunbeam in your prairie home.