Part 1

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTORY. AGRICULTURAL LIFE. RELIGIOUS AND MORAL VIEW OF THE QUESTION OF IMMIGRATION TO THE LAND. A STATEMENT IN REGARD TO THE RELATIONS WE HOLD TOWARDS IMMIGRANTS. WHAT THEY MAY EXPECT. MINNESOTA. GENERAL STATE STATISTICS. CROP STATISTICS. FARM STATISTICS. GENERAL REMARKS. CATHOLIC COLONIES IN MINNESOTA. SWIFT COUNTY COLONY. GRACEVILLE COLONY. ST. ADRIAN COLONY. AVOCA COLONY. THE BEST TIME TO COME. A CHAPTER FOR ALL TO READ. HOW TO SECURE GOVERNMENT LAND. ADVERTISEMENTS. Transcriber's Notes.

CATHOLIC COLONIZATION IN MINNESOTA.

REVISED EDITION.

PUBLISHED BY THE CATHOLIC COLONIZATION BUREAU OF MINNESOTA.

UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE RIGHT REV. JOHN IRELAND, COADJUTOR BISHOP OF ST. PAUL.

ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA, JANUARY, 1879. THE PIONEER PRESS CO.

INTRODUCTORY.

The increase in the number of our Catholic Colonies in Minnesota, and the changes which population and other causes have brought about, make it necessary to publish a revised edition of the Immigration Pamphlet, issued by the Catholic Colonization Bureau of Minnesota, in 1877.

We are pleased to notice the increased interest which is manifested all over the country, by Catholics, in the matter of Catholic immigration from the cities to the land.

The sympathy, aid, and words of cheer, we are continually receiving from friends totally unconnected with our local work, assure us of this pleasing fact; which we attribute, in a great measure, to the honest, intelligent advocacy, and generous support our Catholic newspapers have given to the question.

For ourselves, we are glad to gratefully acknowledge the liberal support the Catholic editors have given to our work: the confidence which they placed, from the very beginning, in the purity of our motives and the soundness of our business arrangements, is an indorsement of which we are justly proud.

They have recognized that our aim is to do good to the many; and in all cases where our advice has been taken, our instructions followed, our warnings heeded, we do not fear that we have injured one.

The approbation of our co-religionists, conveyed to us from all parts of the country, the success which God has been pleased to give to our humble labors, are cheering guarantees that we are on the right road; and we pray God that He will continue to bless our efforts, enlighten us in our present task, and keep our ardor in the cause we have espoused strictly within the bounds of truth.

It is an axiom that "they who own the soil own the country."

Happily, in this country, the people's title to the land is recognized, they are invited to take possession of their own, and the tall, luxuriant grasses of the broad prairie are the messengers it sends forth from its virgin bosom, telling of the wealth it has in store to reward honest, patient labor.

There is no angry contest here for the possession of the soil, but there is, and should be, a noble, wise emulation among the various races that have emigrated to these shores, for their just portions of it. The surplus populations in our cities, the depression of business, the scarcity of employment, the poverty, suffering and discontent attending thereon, the magnitude of labor strikes, and the dread of their repetition, have made the question of immigration to the land from our over-crowded cities of pressing, national interest. The policy of our people immigrating in large numbers to the lands of the West, is no longer a theory to discuss, but a necessity, calling for the active support of every good, intelligent Catholic.

It is not necessary to review the many causes which have heretofore retarded the immigration of our people to the land. Among those causes was one which should endear them to every Catholic heart, and which stands out in bright contrast to the irreligious indifference of the age.

_They feared that if they came West, they would be beyond the reach of church and priest._

The danger of a Catholic settling in any of the Western States now, and finding himself entirely isolated, by distance, from his church, is scarcely to be apprehended, for the West has now its handsome churches, its priests and Catholic schools; but it might come to pass, that coming undirected, and without any Catholic organization to which he might apply, the Catholic immigrant might find himself settled in a locality inconveniently distant from church and priest, and where he and his family would be separated from Catholic associations.

Bearing this in mind, the religious welfare of those coming to our colonies, was one of the main features to which Bishop Ireland devoted his attention when organizing the Catholic Colonization Bureau. Before the arrival of any of our immigrants, the rule was established that whenever we opened a colony and invited our people to it, the resident priest and church should go in with our first settlers, be their number small or large. To this good rule we attribute, to a great extent, not alone our success in bringing settlers to our colonies, but likewise their general contentment in their new homes and brave cheerfulness in meeting the trials, hardships, and set-backs, which are incident to new settlements.

No question is so frequently asked by our correspondents as, "How near can I get land to a Catholic Church?" In no portion of any of the Catholic Colonies of Minnesota, established by the Catholic Bureau, under the auspices of the Right Rev. Bishop Ireland, shall a settler find himself beyond the easy reach of church and priest.

AGRICULTURAL LIFE.

ADVANTAGES OF AGRICULTURAL LIFE OVER CITY LIFE, TO THE MAN WHO MAKES HIS LIVING BY THE SWEAT OF HIS BROW.

INDEPENDENCE ON THE LAND.

GENERAL PROSPERITY OF CATHOLIC SETTLEMENTS IN MINNESOTA.--INDIVIDUAL PROSPERITY.

WHAT OUR EARLY SETTLERS HAD TO GO THROUGH--HOW THEY GOT THROUGH IT AND CAME OUT AT THE TOP OF THE HEAP.

THEIR BRAVE BATTLE FOR INDEPENDENCE--THEIR BOUNTIFUL REWARD.

"It's na' to hide it in a hedge; It's na' for train attendant; But for the glorious privilege Of being independent."

Thus sung Robert Burns long ago in praise of independence. This is one of the rewards which the land holds out to the honest, hard-working, persevering settler; and never does it break its promise to industry and perseverance.

In the city, dangers surround the poor laboring man; temptations arise on every side to drag him down; insurmountable barriers oppose his advancement.

Well, he may avoid the dangers--we wish to give the best view of the case, and, thank God, there are thousands of instances to sustain it--spurn the temptations, and even surmount some of the outward barriers to his advancement. He may be respectably housed and clothed; he may have a good boss. Ah, there is the rub, good or bad--

HE HAS A BOSS,

a man at whose nod he must come and go. He may have money in a savings bank honestly managed; but if a spell of sickness prostrates him, how much of his hard-earned savings will be left when he rises from his sick bed? And suppose he feels that he has his death sickness, can you, by going into sorrow's counting-house, attempt to estimate the agony of the poor Catholic parent when he thinks of the fate which may await his children, left fatherless in a sinful city?

There are other pictures of a poor man's city life, which we care not to draw. But we will take this prosperous workingman, with a good boss, from the city, and place him in his first rude house on his own land. He misses many things, many comforts. He misses the society of friends who used to come round from time to time--the milkman's bell, the butcher's cart: everything was so handy in the city.

He is lonely: a feeling of desolation comes over him as he stands at the door of his new home, and looks around at the unimproved land. The land is rich and good, and the scene is fair to look at; but the reality is so different from the mental picture he made before setting out for the West, that he feels sad and disappointed. Then as he looks around him _at his own_,

HE MISSES THE BOSS.

At the thought, the spirit of independence which has led this man thousands of miles, perhaps, to seek a new home, and which sadness and disappointment--the first effects of a great change--for awhile subdued, leaps in his heart, and sends the red blood surging through his veins.

NO BOSS.

His eyes grow bright with pride as he looks out upon the land, a wide circle of which he calls his own.

THE BOSS HAS DISAPPEARED,

And the man, the owner of a wide stretch of real estate, conscious of a great awaking of self-respect in his being, stands erect at the door of his own house, on his own property, and feels that no one better than he is, shall pass him by all day.

How the consciousness of independence, the feeling of self-respect, will sustain this man through many hardships, disappointments and trials!

In a short time one or two cows take the place of the dingy cans of the milkman, and some young grunters in the hog pen represent the meat-market.

After some years are past we visit the scene again. There is no loneliness here now, for it is harvest time, and the farmer and his sons are busy in the fields, his wife and eldest daughters busy in the house preparing for the keen appetites the men will bring in with them. The first rude shanty has given place to a nice two-story frame house, well sheltered from sun and wind by the healthy young trees the farmer planted with his own hands, and in the rear are the snug barn and granary.

Where once the wild prairie grass waved, comes the cheery clatter of the harvester, and swath after swath of the golden grain falls down before it.

By and by the younger children return from school, rosy and hungry, and a small skirmisher is thrown out and enters the pantry; he is repulsed and falls back on the main body; then, taking advantage of the "good woman," being obliged to run to the oven to keep the bread from burning, the whole force advance, a pie is spiked and carried off in triumph.

As the shades of evening fall, a herd of cattle march lazily into the farm yard, and then from the field come the farmer and his sons. Lonely, indeed! Why the noise of Babel is renewed here. Dipping his hot face in a basin of cool water, the farmer splutters out his directions; seizing a jack towel, he scrubs his face, and continues to halloo to Mike, and Tom, and Patrick. Why, _the boss has come back_. Ay, but

THE MAN HIMSELF IS THE BOSS NOW.

All things come to an end, so does the farmer's supper; and as we sit with him on the porch outside we say,

"You have a splendid place here."

"It will do," he answers quite carelessly; but he can't fool us. We know that he is proud of his success.

"I had to work hard for it," he continues, "but God has been very good to us."

We are not romancing. We have drawn a picture from the original, which can be duplicated a thousand fold in this State.

It is not individual success alone we can point to, but likewise the success of whole farming communities, where the people commenced poor--many of them, perhaps the majority, with scarcely any means at all--under disadvantages that would now appear to us, with railroads and markets on every side, almost insurmountable, and where to-day we cannot find one exceptional case of failure without an exceptional cause for it.

Thoroughly acquainted with the Catholic settlements in Minnesota, we cannot call to mind a case where a hard-working, industrious, sober man failed to make a comfortable home for his family. We know of many cases where such a man met with reverses, lost his crop, his cattle, his horses; but never a case where a man met his reverses with a brave heart and trust in God, that he did not overcome them, and come out of the battle a better and prouder man.

Let a poor man in the city find his all swept away from him, and what does he do? He slinks into its alleys and lanes, his pleasant, decent rooms are changed for one foul room in a tenement house, from whence, after a little, charity carries him to a pauper's grave.

We have spoken of the general prosperity of our Catholic settlements in Minnesota, and we have not to travel far from its capital to find some of them--only into the adjoining county, Dakota, one of the very finest in the State.

Fully two-thirds of the lands of the county are owned (mind, _owned_.) by Catholic settlers, Irish and German.

Some twenty-five years ago, a few poor Irishmen settled in the timber in this county. It was very generally supposed, at that time, that people could not live on a prairie in Minnesota; but by and by, those who had settled in Dakota county found out their mistake, and commenced making claims on the adjoining prairie, Rosemount prairie, to-day the garden of Minnesota.

But not before Hugh Derham, of the County Meath, Ireland, now the Honorable Hugh Derham, came along and put up his shanty on the prairie. "I had seven hundred dollars," he said to us some time ago, "when I came on here; oxen were dear then, and when I had a yoke bought, together with a cow, and my shanty up, I had little or none of the money left. But I went to work, broke up all the land I could, got seed, put in my first crop, and lost every kernel of it."

To-day this man owns four hundred acres of improved land, in a circle round his house. Fifty dollars an acre would be a low value to put on his land. Some four years ago his neighbor, a man of the name of Ennis, bought one hundred and twenty acres of land adjoining, for something like ten thousand dollars.

When Hugh Derham settled here there was not a railroad nearer than two hundred miles of him, now passengers on the Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad, passing within half a mile in front of his house, point from the windows of the cars to his place, as a model home of a thrifty farmer.

His handsome, two-story frame house stands embowered in the orchard and shade trees, sturdy Hugh Derham planted with his own hands; his barn alone cost three thousand dollars; he has flocks of sheep, herds of cattle, and horses as he requires them; and he has a good wife, who assisted him in his early struggles, healthy, fresh and handsome still. He has had his eldest daughter at a convent school, and bought for her last year a five hundred dollar piano. It is said that he has some ten thousand dollars loaned out at interest.

Now, is Hugh Derham's an exceptional case?

If you came along, and we were inclined to brag, and show you a specimen of our Catholic farmers in Minnesota, we would bring you direct to Hugh Derham, not for his herds, and stock, and well filled granary--he is surpassed by many of our farmers in all these--but for the look of respectable thriftiness all around him. There is his next neighbor, Wm. Murphy, another well-to-do, respectable farmer, not perhaps as well off as Derham, but still able to bear some time ago a loss of five thousand dollars by fire, and to make no poor mouth about it. Another neighbor, Mich. Johnson, a prosperous man, better still, a high spirited, fine fellow, and an earnest worker in the cause of temperance. Another neighbor, Tom Hiland, as rich a man as Derham. In the next township, the Bennetts--three or four brothers that a poor but good, intelligent, widowed mother, with much struggling, managed to bring West, and locate on government land. These brothers now farm five times as much land as Derham, and raise five times as much wheat.

And as we have been led into giving individual cases of success,--not at first intended, for such cases must be always in certain features more or less exceptional--we will give one more, that of Mich. Whalen of Whalen township, Fillmore county.

His history is a remarkable one, as told by himself to us; remarkable in his brave struggle for independence, his sagacity, and final success. We give some points:

About thirty years ago Mich. Whalen landed from Ireland in New York. He was then forty years of age, and had a wife and eight children--all his wealth.

Yes, his wealth, he thought, if he could but reach with them the broad acres of the West.

So he sawed wood for seventy-five cents a cord in the city of New York: the more he sawed the less he liked the work, and making a brave effort he found himself, with wife and children, squatted on one hundred and sixty acres of government land in Fillmore county, Minnesota.

When the land came into market he was not able to pay the government price, one dollar and twenty-five cents an acre, but Capt. McKenney, the then receiver of the U. S. Land Office, managed to give him time, and the next year's crop enabled him to pay up. At this time John, his eldest of six sons, was sixteen years of age, and able to help his father.

To-day Mich. Whalen is the owner of thirteen hundred acres of land in Fillmore county. The village of Whalen with mills and a fine water power, is on his land: or rather, on the land of his son John, for as the boys get married the old man gives them title to portions of the land, on which they build. There is another mill within a few rods of the old homestead, and there is not less than from six thousand to ten thousand bushels of wheat raised on the farm each year.

"Why, Mr. Whalen," said a friend some time ago, "you got on splendidly; with such a large and almost helpless family at the beginning, I don't see how you could have managed it."

"We put our trust in God, _avourneen_!" replied the old man, "and we stuck together."

Where were the special advantages in this man's case; which enabled the poor wood-sawyer of New York to become one of the solid men of a rich county?

They are to be found in the fact that he was blessed with good children, who, as they grew up and became able to help him, remained at home and did help--and amply are they rewarded for it to day--

"THEY STUCK TOGETHER."

But it is of the general prosperity of our Catholic settlements in Minnesota that we wish more particularly to speak, for as a general rule there is no business which has not its representative successful men.

Dakota County being close to the capital of the State, (St. Paul,) and possessing the advantage of having, on the Mississippi River, a market for its produce, at a time when there was not a mile of railroad in the State, was settled up at an early day. Among its settlers were Irish and German Catholics. From that period out these settlers have not alone held their own, but, year after year receiving fresh additions to their numbers, they have advanced from township to township, buying improved farms and wild land, until, as we have stated before, two-thirds of the lands of the county belong to them.

Travel which side you will, and you shall find evidence that one "can read as he runs" of their prosperity, intelligence and respectability; handsome houses, good offices, young orchards, ornamental planting, and the grand big wheat fields around, which have supplied the means to build up those pleasant homes.

Traveling along down the Mississippi to the eastern boundary of the State and taking a wide range of country on the Minnesota side of the river, we find many prosperous settlements of our people. Again southwest, up the beautiful valley of the Minnesota River, in Scott, Sibley, Le Sueur, Nicollet and Blue Earth counties, there are numerous Catholic settlements, both in the woods and on the prairie. So, too, in the midland counties of Rice, Steele, Waseca, Olmsted, Dodge and Mower counties, our people are settled, prosperous and happy, their valuable farms giving ample and cheerful evidence, how bountifully the soil rewards honest labor. Nor, in their prosperity, have they forgotten Him from whom all blessings flow.

Where a few years ago the Catholic settlers, few and poor, waited anxiously for the visit of the priest, and where the holy sacrifice of the mass was offered up in the settler's cabin, we now find the resident priest, the handsome church, and in many instances, the Sisters' school. In those settlements the whole atmosphere is Catholic; here, with no bad influences around them, the young people grow up pure and virtuous, with the love of their religion warm in their hearts. An ample reward to their parents, those brave men, the early settlers, who displayed such indomitable perseverance in their battle for

INDEPENDENCE.

They had to steer their way with the compass, over trackless prairies, often while the snow lay upon the ground, to blaze their way through the forest or follow an Indian trail, carrying their provisions on their backs, and when the claim shanty was put up and the provisions exhausted, the new settler would often have to return twenty, forty, sixty miles to some place where he could buy a few more pounds of flour, and with this and perhaps half a bushel of potatoes to put in the ground, he would again set off to his new claim.

But in all the privations they went through, those connected with religion they felt the most. And, praise be to God, among the earliest evidences of their growing prosperity was the erection of temples to His worship, that to-day, on every side, ornament the State. Wherever in the State there is a clustering of Catholic settlements, there you will find a clustering of Catholic churches.

RELIGIOUS AND MORAL VIEW OF THE QUESTION OF IMMIGRATION TO THE LAND.

To a Catholic, this is, after all, the most important view, and must not be overlooked; at the same time it is obvious that it cannot be done justice to in a condensed pamphlet of this kind.

There is about the same difference between the moral atmosphere of the rural Catholic colonies to which we invite our people, and the back streets and alleys of the over-crowded city, as there is between the pure air of the prairie and the foul air of the city lane.

Some time ago, a friend from the East, to whom we were showing some of our Catholic settlements, said to us,

"Why, it is not surprising that the people settled out here in the country should be moral and religious, they have much to make them so, and nothing to make them otherwise in their surroundings; but look at our poor people, huddled together in the tenement houses of New York. When you find them good, give them praise."

"And many of them are good," we said.

"Oh, yes," he answered; "but the great danger is to the children. The priest does his best, the Catholic parent grounded in his religion before he ever saw a city does his best, but his circumstances compel him to live where the foul air reeks with blasphemy, and low debauchery; vice and drunkenness are ever before their eyes."

This is a very sad picture, but a very true one. It is a fearful reality before the eyes of many a poor Catholic parent, who obliged to be continually absent from his children, knows but too well the society they are likely to fall into.

In our Catholic colonies in Minnesota a parent has no such dread. He knows where his boys are on week days; they are helping him on the farm. He knows where they are on Sundays; they are with him at church. When they are amusing themselves, he knows that they are with the young people of his neighbors, their companions and co-religionists.

Here, too, the anxious heart of the loving mother is at rest; for she sees her daughters associating with the good and innocent of their own age, and growing up pure and virtuous.

"God made the country and man made the town," is an old saying. The immigration of those of our people adapted to agricultural life from the city to the land will be a benefit, not alone to themselves, but to those they leave behind. By this healthful drain the latter will be left more room, and have more opportunities to better their condition.