50 BULLETIN 1295, U. S. DEPT. OF AGRICULTURE 
ment down on a piece of land, erect a house, and have enough left 
to last until winter. The companies that build houses usually re- 
quire a payment down about equal to the price of the house and 
other things advanced. This means that the settlers make no real 
payment on the land. The house-building plan is therefore a credit 
plan to enable settlers with small means to get started when other-.- 
wise they could not. Undoubtedly, it has enabled large numbers 
of deserving families to attain a foothold on the land. 
In effecting the settlement of people of this class, the real issue 
is not between building houses and not building houses, but between 
building houses and advancing loans for building houses or lumber. 
Three companies in 1920 were advancing building material and 
letting the settler build his house. In fact, there is less call for 
houses when saw-lumber can be cut on the land or when houses can 
be rented for a while. Many settlers, especially in Minnesota, still 
erect temporary log houses. 
Only one company of any magnitude was clearing land in advance 
of settlement. This company was brushing 2 or 8 acres around 
the houses they were erecting to protect the premises from fire 
and to make room for the first: year’s garden. ‘Two or three other 
companies had done a little brushing. Superficially, the proposal 
to clear 5 to 10 acres for each settler seems sound. It means that 
he can have some income from his place, from the start. It would 
also seem desirable to brush another 5 or 10 acres and seed it to 
clover to get a pasture and meadow started. However, all except 
one of the companies that had tried this plan had abandoned it. 
One company said it almost went bankrupt as a result of its 
experiment. 
The difficulty, they claimed, is that it costs the company so much 
more to hire land cleared than it does the settler working for himself 
that the farms can not be sold for enough more to reimburse the 
company. It is probably true that no way of clearing land has yet 
been found which is as economical as having the settler do it himself 
at odd times along with his other work, using stump pullers, dyna- 
mite, and all the other modern labor-saving devices in the proper 
manner. It would seem, however, that having a few acres cleared 
to start with is so important as to outweigh the extra cost of hiring 
it done in advance. It is likely that the matter has not been given a 
thorough trial by a company capable of carrying the experiment 
through to a conclusion. Undoubtedly, such an experiment would 
require considerable extra capital. 
An alternative to clearing land in advance for a settler who has 
only limited means, is to lend him money to live on while he is doing 
it, and money for dynamite and stump pullers. This means that 
he will be able to raise only garden crops the first year, and these 
mostly among the stumps if the timber has been thick. He will 
have to depend on wild hay for winter feed for his one cow, which 
is all he can usually afford under such circumstances unless the 
region happens to be one with abundant natural grass. Even if 
several acres of land were cleared for him in advance, he would still 
have to work out or work on his own timber a large part of the time 
for the first few years. The land clearing will merely have the 
effect of making his farm support him a year or two sooner, 
