SETTLEMENT AND COLONIZATION IN GREAT LAKES STATES 85 
obtained in the community. With its active selling campaign, the 
company was generally able to find a buyer for any settler who 
wished to move out. Far be it from the settler who wanted to sell 
out to run down his own farm or the community to a prospect. 
The field men making this survey took records in one township 
where the company had been operating formany years. They found 
82 settlers who had been able to stick to their holdings. The net 
worth of these 32 settlers at time of settlement averaged $1,730, a 
rather high average. It will be remembered that the company did 
not want its purchasers to move in till they had $1,000 of working 
capital available. At time of settlement, these settlers were in debt 
an average of only $192. This means that most of them had their 
land all paid for before moving onto these holdings. At the time of 
the survey they had cleared an average of 1.84 acres per year and 
brushed only 0.49 acre. This is a very poor showing, especially for 
sandy land. It indicates that the settlers had been working off their 
farms a great deal. In the year 1919-20 they had earned an average 
of $220 per year at outside work. Their net gain, aside from the 
increase due to land clearing, averaged only $73 per year. 
Even this degree of progress must be interpreted in the light of 
the fact that these 32 settlers were those who actually succeeded in 
surviving. No record was available of the number who had come 
and gone. Presumably these permanent settlers were far above the 
average in ability to survive under the difficulties and discouraging 
conditions by which they were confronted. It should also be pointed 
out that most of the settlers had been on their land long enough to 
make a fair experiment of the possibilities of the region. All but 
four had been developing their farms for five years or longer. 
Nearly a third had been on the land 10 years or more. 
These facts probably give the clue to the methods of this company. 
It employed a highly-developed selling organization, one of the most 
efficient in the United States, to sell, at $15 to $30 an acre, raw land of 
low grade that the concern purchased in wholesale lots for a very 
small price per acre, much of it at tax sale. 
Information received from outside sources indicates that the 
money obtained from initial payments and later payments on the 
principal averaged about 3314 per cent above selling costs. About 
half of this was required for general overhead expenses of the or- 
ganization, and the rest was profits. It also appears that the in- 
come from the interest on contracts not abandoned by the purchaser 
paid the running expenses of the office. 
In short, this concern had deliberately chosen to sell lands of very 
low quality in spite of the fact that land much superior for coloniza- 
tion purposes was to be had in the Lakes States. Furthermore, they 
employed their strong selling methods to sell this land to a class of 
people unfit to judge of its quality and probably on the whole ill- 
fitted to make a success of pioneer farming. As their volume of 
sales had been large, they are without doubt guilty of doing a vast 
amount of harm not only to their unfortunate victims, but also to the 
work of those land settlement agencies engaged in more legitimate 
methods of selling land. 
LAND SETTLEMENT FROM STANDPOINT OF PUBLIC INTEREST 
In this discussion an attempt has been made to give a fairly com- 
plete picture of the agencies engaged in land settlement in the Lakes 
