hey stopped over
night at, who advised them not to go out and settle on a prairie. He
told them, too, that "he was fifteen years in Minnesota and never could
get a dollar ahead."

Now here were men, rational to all appearance, having traveled two
thousand miles or so to settle upon land, when they came within sight of
the land, as we may say, losing all desire to visit it, all courage, all
confidence in disinterested, experienced friends, and in the information
they gave to them; in everything but the word of a loafer, who never did
a day's good in his life, nor never will, and who was anxious to shuffle
off the onus of his slipshod condition from himself to the country.

Here is another case, which occurred a few months after Swift Colony was
opened and while the country around looked still wild and lonely.

Two men arrived here from Philadelphia. They went on to the Catholic
colony in Swift County, and in a day or two returned, saying that they
had made up their minds to go back to Philadelphia. Why? Did they not
find everything as it was reported to them? "Oh, yes, the land was good,
and there was a good chance for a poor man to make a home on it, if he
could content himself, but it was too lonely for them."

Lonely, to be sure it was; with the noise of the city still ringing in
their ears, with its crowds and its gaslights still in their eyes, these
men found the prairie lonely, and without pausing to consider all the
circumstances, they turned their back upon it.

They were both decent, intelligent men, and, had they remained, taken
land, gone to work, opened a farm, and seen their first crop ripening,
you could no more have got them back to Philadelphia than you could get
them into the penitentiary.

Now, we say to those for whose benefit this pamphlet has been written,
if you come here you must come fully prepared to feel the effects of a
great change. If you come from a city, you will, doubtless, feel lonely
for a while, until you get accustomed to prairie life; you will miss
many immediate comforts; you 