376 



THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



AMERICANS FOR AMERICA. 



Settlers for the West. 



Where did you come from ? Did you come from 

 some good old homestead back in Indiana, or Ohio ? Are 

 jou one of the Hoosiers who, in the prime of young 

 manhood answered the call of the Great West, and have 

 devoted the energy to which you are heir, as an Ameri- 

 can more than any other nationality under the sun, to 

 the development of that locality in which you chose to 

 carve out your new domicile? 



We have all read stories, love stories and other 

 kinds, of young men who have gone West, first from 

 the New England States to the Middle Western States, 

 and in the story we usually find them having reached 

 middle age and become successful men, men of affairs, 

 and perhaps leading in the political life of the new 

 States to which they have emigrated. 



It is but a short time since Indiana was thus 

 settled, so short a time that the writer's own grand- 

 father was one of the new settlers who took up wild land 

 in Indiana, only 69 years ago, or in 1838. In coming 

 west he landed at Fort Dearborn on the southern shores 

 of Lake Michigan, a locality where now stands Chicago, 

 one of the greatest cities in the world. This settler, be- 

 ing a New Yorker, passed over the land which Chi- 

 cago now occupies, because it was so wet and low, and 

 traveled by foot and horseback down into Miami Coun- 

 ty, Indiana. 



The sons of these settlers who bought wild lands in 

 Indiana in the 30's are now, many of them, in States 

 further west and have there carried on the same devel- 

 opment of our country which their own fathers accom- 

 plished in the Middle States. 



But I am digressing. The idea I really want to 

 bring out in this article is, that there is a vast popula- 

 tion of pure Americans that can still be drawn on for 

 peopling the new irrigated districts in the West, and the 

 cause which has brought this subject to my attention is 

 the frequent agitation in the various parts of the West 

 to secure foreign immigration. These calls for immi- 

 grants from any country under the sun, merely as an 

 endeavor to get our great West thickly populated with- 

 out delay, seem slightly premature to me. It is hardly 

 of vital importance that there be not a foot of unoccu- 

 pied land left west of the Mississippi River by the end 

 of this year or next year, for unless America degenerates 

 and President Roosevelt's preachings on anti-race sui- 

 cide are unheeded, our own nation of 80,000,000 people 

 will have a posterity of fully equal numbers, and we hope 

 much greater, and they would not be greatly inconven- 

 ienced nor displeased to have some opportunities left for 

 them somewhere within the boundary of their native 

 country. I do not by any means mean to say, my dear 

 reader, that I think your community should be held back 

 for the benefit of posterity, but I do think that in 

 "booming" it, and in your efforts to secure new citizens, 

 you should call first the people from the thickly popu- 

 lated districts of our own eastern States., 'There are 

 many people who would scarcely be missed should they 

 leave the villages in which they now quietly live, and 

 come to your locality, and still they might prove very 

 desirable citizens. 



The writer certainly has none of the anti-foreign 

 feelings which characterize some countries less highly 

 civilized than America ; indeed, I reflect that originally 



all Americans came from across the water, and that we 

 are all, more or less, English, Irish, Scotch, German, 

 etc., and we can use and welcome still all of those people 

 who will emigrate to our shores. But from purely pa- 

 triotic instincts, somehow, for years I have felt that 

 ihe opportunities for homes, for free farm lands, and 

 for wealth to be had in the mining and lumbering dis- 

 tricts of the great West have not been properly pre- 

 sented to the peoples of the thousands of country cross- 

 roads, villages, towns and cities of our Middle West and 

 Eastern States. And certainly it seems to me, if there 

 are still districts calling for settlers to come and make 

 themselves homes, and take up the rich lands, or to earn 

 the high wages which, as a rule, are paid for labor in 

 the West, no people have a better right to know these 

 things and to answer the call than Americans of the 

 above-mentioned Eastern States. For, inevitably, the 

 time will come, unless the world ends too soon, when 

 America will be fairly thickly populated, and the 

 era of free or cheap lands will come to an end. Should 

 not, then, Americans of the present day have the first 

 opportunities in the West? 



I do not think that these assertions will meet with 

 one single dissenter. Therefore, I will proceed to give 

 my reasons for thinking that there are still plenty of 

 American communities to draw upon for settlers in the 

 West. Fifty-seven thousand Americans, principally 

 from the Middle States, went to Canada in the summer 

 of 1906 to take up free, wheat land in that great new 

 country. Is there any western irrigation farmer or 

 fruit grower who thinks that they will find better oppor- 

 tunities and better conditions in western Canada than 

 they would in his locality? If so, he is a "knocker" 

 and should move back east. Why, then, did these 

 Americans from the Central States, who were willing to 

 emigrate, go to western Canada instead of our own 

 Western States? The answer is, purely and simply be- 

 cause the energetic publicity managers of the Western 

 Canada immigration movement have been very active in 

 the past few years and have presented their opportuni- 

 ties to American farmers. That was all that was neces- 

 sary. The Americans went, they saw, and they stayed. 



Do you know what the Canadian people think of 

 the settlers that have been coming from the American 

 Central States? I know, for I have spent some time 

 touring the whole of western Canada, and I met both 

 the native Canadian people and the new settlers from 

 the States. Many Canadian public men, and those in- 

 fluential in developing western Canada, prefer American 

 settlers even to their own fellow subjects to the British 

 crown, Englishmen, Irishmen or Scotchmen. They 

 pay that the Americans are the most energetic and that 

 they get immediately busy on their new land, and, hav- 

 ing experience as practical farmers, the communities in 

 which they settle are, in a very brief time, prosperous 

 nnd up to date localities. Indeed, western Canada owes 

 its development in no small measure to the enterprize 

 and capital of Americans. You meet them everywhere, 

 in business, publishers of papers, real estate men, and 

 farmers. There are so many Americans in western 

 Canada that one scarcely realizes he is out of his own 

 native land. 



Recently in an exchange from Arizona I read an 



f-ditorial, suggesting that an attempt be made to secure 



the discontented wine growers of southern France for 



Fettlers on the irrigated lands in a certain district in 



(Concluded on page 379) 



