INTRODUCTORY. 



Thousands of temperate, frugal, law-abiding people, skilled in the 

 arts needed for the development of a country, have found, after years of 

 exhausting toil and exposure to the sudden and extreme changes of an 

 inclement climate, that they can at the best get but a bare subsistence 

 in the North. Farmers see the interest of the mortgages on their farms 

 increasing rapidly, to in time drive them from their homes despite their 

 most earnest efforts. Those who have courage to calmly consider their 

 situation see that their future offers little or no hope. Competition from 

 the virgin fields of the West is too keen. Steam has made the farmer 

 of the deep, rich land of Dakota and Kansas close neighbor of the 

 man who grinds his life away on the barren soil of the East. Each 

 short summer spent in the attempt to raise enough to support the fam- 

 ily through the long, stormy, and cold winter only adds to the burden 

 the hopeless strugg'e has brought. 



To such people, tired of pinching along year after year in dreary al- 

 though respectable poverty, these pages will be of interest, for they 

 offer sure, safe, and speedy relief. They will be of value to young men 

 who have wisdom to carefully look ahead, intelligence to see that life in 

 the old and crowded fields affords little encouragement to legitimate ef- 

 fort, and courage and enterprise to seek new fields where competition is 

 not sharp, and whe~e by a little toil and forethought they can quickly 

 secure all the comforts and most of the luxuries of civilized life. To 

 all such homes are offered in a country with'n easy reach, where the cli- 

 mate is more temperate and pleasanter than in the most favored spot in 

 the United States, and where there is freedom from many if not from 

 all of the diseases most dangerous to human comfort and life. There 

 the days are not hot, dry, and dusty, and the nights cold; the summers 

 are not blistering in their droughts and the winters terrible in their 

 blizzards; but the temperature ranges from sixty to ninety degrees .F 

 throughout the entire year. Nearly everything that can be grown in 

 the United States can be more easily and cheaply raised there, and many 

 valuable crops can be produced there which can not be profitably cul- 

 tivated where frosts are known. 



Most of the testimony given in the following pages has been gath- 

 ered from witnesses who could have had no object in favoring, since 

 they certainly could have had no knowledge of our purposes. Much of 

 this evidence was given thirty years ago. Several of the witnesses were 



