18 PREFACE. 



to say, " If we had only been born thirty years sooner 

 we might have become rich." There will then be no 

 unoccupied lands ; no homestead laws ; no West to seek. 

 The country, one vast sea of cities, towns, villas, and 

 farms, will stretch out from ocean to ocean, and in 

 America, as in England, the highest claim to wealth 

 and respectability will be the proprietorship of the soil. 

 Do you ask who will live to see the country settled ? 

 I answer, thousands of men and women who are now 

 in middle life ; and even old men may yet live to see 

 the day when those rich prairie lands of ours, now to 

 be had by living upon them, will bring $50 per acre. 

 The veteran grandfather who will come West can live 

 long enough to see towns and cities spring up, and farms 

 dot the land all over where now only the wild Indian 

 and the buffalo are found. Why stick to the rocky 

 and unproductive hill-sides of the East, when the best, 

 rich, level prairie lands and beautiful homes can be had 

 for $1 per acre ? Or, if the emigrant is too poor to 

 buy, he can take up one, two, three, or four hundred 

 acres, and if he will but live on them for five years, 

 they are his and his children's after him forever. A 

 great deal of sport a few years ago was made of Horace 

 Greeley for so often repeating his advice, " Go West, 

 young man ; go West and take a farm, and grow up 

 with the country." But after living in the West twelve 

 years, I can safely say that never did any man give 

 better advice to the youth of a nation. No industrious 

 man can make a mistake in moving West, and if I had 

 a son to advise, I should by all means say to him, " Go 

 West as soon as you can ; get a good piece of land, and 



