Land in Illinois and Iowa can be purchased for a dollar an acre, but corn is at times of so little value as to be consumed for fuel. The wheat crop is annually decreasing in its acreable product, because no one values or applies manure. The West may be the paradise of the European immigrant, who, having abandoned friends and home, may with propriety settle in one spot as well as in another; because, go where he will, he will be sure to find none but strangers. But for residents of our cities who go thither, very few acquire property by legitimate farming, even after sacrificing all the tender associations of relatives and friends whom they leave behind, and enduring hardships and trials of double severity with those they need encounter if they would consent to suffer them on lands within thirty miles of their birthplace. If they become rich, it is by hazardous speculation, or by the rise in value of their lands. So far as real, practical farming is concerned, it will be found that the East is incomparably superior to the West; but, so far as small farmers like myself are concerned, it would be folly to deny this superiority.
I say nothing as to the superior ease with which corn and wheat are produced in the two sections, but refer only to the amount of money that can be realized from an acre there and an acre here. Beyond question, there are certain crops that are produced with greater ease in the West than in the East; but of what value is this superior facility if it does not pay? I have cleared from a single acre of tomatoes more than enough to buy a hundred and sixty acres in Iowa. If I had located there, who would have been ready to buy my abundant crop of berries? The truth is, that it is population that gives value to land,--population either on it or around it,--to convert it into lots covered with buildings, or to consume whatever it may produce. The West is a glorious region for the foreign immigrant, or for him who was born upon the rugged hill-sides of the Eastern States, but it is not the proper location for the class for whose instruction these pages have been written.
Few persons who have been nurtured and educated all their days in Eastern cities, and who have probably never been more than fifty miles from home, have any correct idea of what this gigantic West really is until they reach the spot itself. Why leave the privileges of a long-established civilization,--the schools, the churches of home,--the daily intercourse of acquaintances and friends,--merely because land producing twenty bushels of wheat per acre can be purchased for a dollar, when that producing twenty times as much in fruit or vegetables can be had for fifty, and often even for less? I doubt not there must be many in that region who now wish themselves back in their old homes.