286 MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY COLLECTIONS. 



afternoon, on the endless level prairie, one great sea of wav- 

 ing grass, the young man who was driving lost his nerve and 

 told me that he was lost. He did not know where he was go- 

 ing, did not know whether he was going north or south or 

 east or west, and asked me if I knew. I said, "Yes," and I 

 took the team and kept on, and finally we came to the Park 

 river, with its fringe of woods, where now is the prosperous 

 town of Grafton. There was a settler there, a woman, I re- 

 member, who had a little house, probably fifteen feet square, 

 covered with split logs (half of them turned on their backs, 

 with the bark down, and the others laid over them); and she 

 got me something to eat, and I compromised by sleeping be- 

 side a log in the grove with a mosquito-bar around me. That 

 was only eighteen years ago. Grafton now is the county seat, 

 and the assessed value of the county to-day is seven or eight 

 millions of dollars, and I am quite sure that they do not owe 

 any money. Certainly, if they do, they have enough to pay it 

 with; and there are a number of such counties. 



Now, up north of Devil's Lake, in a new country, settled in 

 1885, about ten years ago, there are railway stations whose 

 names you would not know or recognize, that last year shipped 

 a million or more bushels of wheat, and these people are com- 

 paratively well off. They got their land for nothing. There 

 are men going now and getting homesteads in that country, 

 and some are going farther west; others are buying the farms 

 of the first settlers, the farms of the homesteaders. A great 

 many people of the Society of German Baptists or Dunkards, 

 Gov. Ramsey, I have no doubt, knows the denomination, be- 

 cause many of them come from Pennsylvania, good people, 

 are settling in that country, and I am glad to say they are par- 

 ticularly prosperous. They are happy and well, and more will 

 come in this year, I believe, than in any previous year. 



Before I close my remarks, there are a few words that I 

 want to impress on those present. With a climate and soil 

 unsurpassed, we have conditions that should make us as pros- 

 perous as any other community in the West. By community I 

 mean, in the large sense, the people of a state. 



Some months ago I was down in Iowa. Riding about the 

 country, I inquired, as I drove around through the neighbor- 

 hood of Ft. Dodge, the value of land. I found that farms with 



