CHAPTER VII.

IRISH SETTLERS IN THE WEST.

THE contrast between city life in New York and country life in Minnesota is, indeed, remarkable. It was hard to keep from the mind's eye the squalor and poverty of the crowded haunts of the Irish in the eastern cities, as I journeyed up from Chicago to St. Paul, and surveyed the fine lands which had already been entered into and possessed all along the Chicago and North-Western Railway.*

At St. Paul, the capital city of the north-west, I became acquainted with the Right Rev. Dr. Ireland, coadjutor-Bishop of Minnesota, who gave me every facility for investigating the system of colonization which is now connected with his name.

The plan of emigration which is now being advocated as a means of re-distributing the Irish

* This is one of the most important railways of the west, and has no less than ten divisions. The road is in capital order, and runs through Omaha to the west, and St. Paul to the north-west. No better route can be taken for general purposes.

population of the United States, was first put into practice by two French bishops of the north-west. The names of these first apostles of Catholic colonization in America were Mathias Loras, the first Bishop of Dubuque, and Joseph Cretin, the first Bishop of St. Paul, Minnesota.

Bishop Loras' see, in 1837, when he was consecrated, embraced the whole region now forming the states of Iowa and Minnesota. By great energy and considerable enterprise he planted several small colonies, and made the conditions of soil and climate known to the world by means of a large correspondence with the American and European press. He wrote a series of letters, I believe, to the Dublin Freeman's Journal upon the subject in 1853, and his descriptive accounts of the country and his unceasing efforts to attract settlers were so successful, that in a single year, 1856, the Catholic population of Minnesota was doubled; and in no other state is there relatively such a large number of Irish farmers as in Iowa and Minnesota.

The Civil War put an end to the western stream of emigration for many years. It was not until after the commercial crisis of 1873 that vast multitudes of American citizens went out west and took possession of the land. Ever since that period the wave of emigration has continued unabated. It is esti

mated that two millions of people have gone from the older states westward during the past six years.

The sales of public and railway lands have been proportioned to this movement. The General Land Office of the United States from 1875 to 1877 disposed of from 3,500,000 to 4,000,000 acres of land a year. For the year ending June 30, 1878, the quantity disposed of was over 7,000,000 of acres, and for the year ending June 30, 1879, it was 8,650,000. The sales of one railway company, the Burlington and Missouri Railway, in Nebraska, for 1878, were 511,609 acres. Population is moving westward en masse, and the Pacific Ocean is the only stopping-point of the great line of invasion.

It is with a strong appreciation of this great and important fact that the Catholic clergy of America are now urging the necessity of the Irish race in America taking steps to join in this property absorbing movement. In twenty years it will be too late, and the Irish population will be condemned to remain for ever the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, the drudges, the factory hands of the American Republic.

Some years ago there was abundance of cheap land in Minnesota, nearly all of which belonged to railroad corporations, the Government lands having been, for the most part, disposed of to older settlers.

In 1876 Bishop Ireland opened his first colony in Swift County, and his plan, which he has pursued in every succeeding case, was very simple. He selected a tract of land of some thousands of acres, the exclusive right to dispose of which was given to him by the railroad company. Having thus obtained the locus in quo, Dr. Ireland formed a bureau and obtained a secretary to work the organization, by which he brought the land, with full details as to price and conditions, under the notice of Catholic families who desired to secure homes in the west.

The first person to enter the colony is the priest, selected with a special view to his knowledge of country life, who is to be the pastor of the flock. He is on the ground to receive the first family, who find at once in him a friend and help. The church is the first building put up, and around this the earliest colonists choose their lands. Town sites are laid out at proper distances along the line of railroad, and in a few weeks the colony is in working order, with a post-office and a large general shop. No public-house is allowed to be opened. The temperance society is the first organization formed, and total abstinence is inculcated as one of the first axioms of prairie life. Timber to build the cottages of the settlers is brought by the railroad to the scene of operations at a reduced rate, and farms

are selected in advance for those who, with good recommendations, apply to become part of the new colony. The country being a plain, there are no trees to be cut, no roads to be made, and, as there is a herd law in Minnesota, no fences are built. When those who have bought farms so desire the priest has some twenty acres of each farm ploughed the summer before their arrival. This is absolutely necessary if wheat is to be sown; not so in the case of flax, Indian corn, and oats. The roots of the prairie grass that has been growing for centuries hold the earth in such a tangled, complex mass that it is only after frost and thaw that it yields sufficiently to allow of a crop of wheat to be raised.

The St. Paul Catholic Colonization Bureau, as it was called, did nothing in a pecuniary sense for the new settlers, except to bring organization to bear upon their transportation and acquisition of land. The movement was purely religious and philanthropic, the only material advantage being the original right of pre-emption of railway lands, which Bishop Ireland secured at a fixed rate for so many years, so that the advancing value of real property did not affect the incoming occupants. The railroad terms for the sale of land are not so easy as those of the Irish-American Colonization Company, but they offer terms for the ultimate purchase of the fee simple