A Paper presented at the Northern Great Plains History Conference, 7-9 October 1999
Organized group settlements, usually but not always labeled colonies, were vital to the settlement of the northern Great Plains. Their presence in the promotional literature and on the landscape is at odds with the traditional images of plains settlement, and an important factor in the social and economic development of the region. Even for the majority of people who did not settle within defined colonies, the prevalence of the idea shaped their expectations of the landscape and their ideas about the communities established there. Anchored in previous migrant experiences, colonies suited the economic, ecological, and social contingencies of the region. Colonies and the instant, lasting civilization they proffered were attractive to settlers and land sellers alike. This paper, rather than explore the particularities of specific colonies, outlines the ways in which group settlement was important during the promotional period in particular, in other words 1870 to 1890. It demonstrates the power of the idea of colonization and suggests ways in which colonies may have had a lasting regional effect beyond their own persistence on the landscape.
Northern Plains settlement occurred during several intense waves or booms along transportation networks that worked to obliterate the geographic distances they were opening up. Competition amongst different states and nations for settlers was fierce, with railroads and speculators doing their best to promote their own lands at the expense of others. At a time when a Minnesota governor could claim that his state suffered because it lacked the publicity accruing to Bloody Kansas and Nebraska during the slavery debates, the most immediate concern was to secure actual settlers by what ever means necessary. Colonies offered relatively less expensive recruiting mechanisms and a promise of greater permanence. They suited the promotional techniques developed by the railroads’ land departments while promising financial gain to a broad range of settlement promoters.
In the autumn of 1872, George Harris and his clerks in the land department of the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad in Nebraska set about discovering the names of every farmer between Wisconsin and Pennsylvania who might be interested in moving west. The railroad had three million acres of land to dispose in Nebraska alone and no expense would be spared in selling it. First the department’s clerks wrote to the County Clerks in Wisconsin, asking the names of post masters in every township. When these answers were received, another set of letters was sent to the postmasters, asking for lists of all the farmers in the townships, with the potential settlers marked off from the rest. Clerks were offered money for their time, typically seventy-five cents per hundred names, but the office usually paid more if the clerk insisted. When lists came back illegible, or with the names of interested parties only and not a full census, Harris and his clerks wrote again for new copies compiled according to their original instructions. If no response was received within a few weeks, a follow-up letter was sent. As the winter passed, the campaign moved east, until clerks and post masters in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania had received their form letters, too. By the spring of 1873, Harris had in his possession what amounted to a rural census of the Old Northwest, a locally derived indication of just how many farmers contemplated leaving an old frontier for a new one. Then Harris fell ill, and the economy collapsed, and the project was abandoned and the lists were lost. One more settlement scheme in the great nineteenth century railroad settlement campaigns fell through.
Harris’s plan was only the most comprehensive, if not the most costly in dollars and staff hours expended, of a broad array of sales projects conceived by Plains railroad executives in the years after 1869. Harris himself was hired because of his previous experience selling land in Missouri according to a model worked out by the Illinois Central railroad in the 1850s. Colonies or group settlements were vital to these plans precisely because they enabled the land department to rely on the labor and enthusiasm of others in selling the railroad’s own land. To encourage settlement and identify group organizers, railroads bought thousands of dollars worth of advertising and even the newspapers in which the advertisements were published. The Union Pacific, the Great Northern, the Burlington and Missouri: all paid for journalists, editors, and travel writers to ride their lines and then write favorable publicity for the railroads’ parcels of land. State immigration agencies received funding and personnel from the railroads. Produce at county fairs as far afield as England arrived from Nebraska and Dakota Territory because the railroads paid for its collection and transit. Brochures were written, engravings and then photographs commissioned, broadsides posted to bring the settlers in. Transience rates somewhere between thirty and seventy percent, defaults on contracts made under generous ten-year credit terms, meant the campaign could never entirely cease. Under these conditions of continual outlays in dollars and time, group settlement schemes offered an efficient and rapid means of filling up the country.
Railroads promoted colonies because they offered the best guarantee of economic stability on an otherwise transient frontier. Colonial supporters absorbed the labor costs of promotion, taking upon themselves the time-consuming work of identifying likely settlers and answering the voluminous correspondence generated by newspaper advertisements. The railroads secured colony promoters through several avenues. First were the national organizers of religious, ethnic, or benevolent campaigns who saw in the west the opportunity to re-create or re-form the social fabric of the urbanizing east and of Europe. Together with these prominent promoters, the most famous of whom were the Catholic Bishops and the Russo-German Mennonites, self-styled group leaders contacted railroad executives asking for perquisites in return for their location on that railroad’s land. In return for volume discounts or commissions on sales to the colony’s inhabitants, a promoter would organize the advertising campaign. But besides these individuals who acted consciously to promote explicitly defined colonies were the general land agents who acted as a whole to promote group settlement by people moving west.
From Wisconsin to Massachusetts and in the county towns of Great Britain and in Northern Europe, railroads hired agents to distribute their pamphlets and stir up excitement for Plains migration. Typically the agent would use his local influence to direct settlers in a particular direction in return for a stipend to cover expenses and travelling costs plus a salary or commissions on sales. These agents created a market in which the better-known forces of chain migration – migration shaped by kinship or neighborliness – emerged. Railroads encouraged people to bring their extended families and neighbors with them onto the Plains through their agency networks. Agents were dispatched to excite interest in specific, often narrow regions of the Plains amongst equally carefully defined areas in the East. These narrow assignments arose from the disputes arising among different agents for the commissions earned by multiply-claimed sales. Thus the entire agency system established by the railroads in the 1870s presumed a sort of loosely affiliated chain migration, in which a county agent in Wisconsin or Illinois was offered exclusive selling rights to a specific parcel of land in Nebraska or Dakota Territory. Some but not all of these agents intended to migrate themselves: in the winter months leading up to migration, a future migrant could distribute pamphlets supplied by the railroad, complete contracts with neighbors going west, and thereby earn a commission on the sale of land to kin or neighbors. The railroad’s records did not note whether agents ever rebated their commissions to the friends to whom they sold, and the issue was not addressed by the colonial promoters in their separate advertisements. In some cases, lots within colonies’ proposed towns were set aside to fund collective goals such as churches, schools, or even provisions such as lumber, fuel, or machinery. In the absence of concrete evidence, it is impossible to separate those agents who pursued colonization strictly for profit from those who may have used their railroad commissions to assist settlement by the group as a whole.
The goals of public colonization promoters are more easily described. Religion appears to have been a dominant motive throughout, from the organized national campaigns of the Catholic bishops in the 1870s to the efforts of individual ministers in the 1900s. Religious colonies promised coherent communities of like-minded people to pay pastors’ salaries at a time when the lack of ministerial leadership was considered a western crisis. For immigrant groups, religion was only part of the attraction of ethnic colonies generally. German Catholics and Swedish Lutherans who formed colonies set themselves apart not only from the native-born settlers around them but also their compatriots of other faiths. Church leaders were especially enthusiastic proponents of colonization because it offered some hope of religious persistence. Concentrated settlement by Congregationalists, for example, might thwart the spread of Baptist and Methodist practice, with their different means of doing without resident professional ministers. Temperance was another advertising lure tendered by religious colonial organizers: in the absence of any straight-forward theological tests, one’s willingness to espouse temperance and practice moderation in social life was considered sufficient grounds for inclusion in the settlement. In this concern for temperance, the agricultural plains set themselves apart from the supposed lawless fast living of cattle and mining towns on the "true" plains; still, both forms of town life took root at roughly the same time. A missionary zeal seems to have informed colonial efforts: aspects of western life that remain part of the region’s self-image even today – it’s bars, its low rates of religious observance – were identified in the first years of settlement. Colonization was the most visible attempt to counter what were seen as these western deviations from the so-called eastern norm.
Although most organizers published their own broadsides or lectured in sending regions, the majority of all colonies’ promotional materials came from the railroads themselves. A series of pamphlets and brochures, many published for the first time in 1872 and 1873 and translated into German, Norwegian, and Swedish, were distributed to promoters and agents for dispersion among interested parties. Traveling lecturers would go from town to town describing the west, ostensibly providing entertainment in the form of a travelogue but usually subsidized by one state or railroad company to emphasize the benefits of a particular region. Editorial excursions were commonplace during peak settlement years. Editors from key sending states were invited west to tour available lands and extol their virtues to potential settlers back east. All these forms of direct advertisement coordinated by the railroads enabled agents and promoters to benefit from a region’s general reputation and bestowed some of the railroad’s reliability on the individual colony proposed. Railroads did not draw up new promotional materials for each colony. Instead, the land itself and its characteristics were the main selling points. Pamphlets emphasized the fertility of the soil, the healthfulness of the climate, and the economic promise of the region in question. Railroads devoted pages to a careful description of the homestead and soldier’s land acts; settlers were encouraged to secure both kinds of land for themselves.
Land departments tried many methods of advertising their lands but repeated only a few basic pieces of information regardless of forum. Once a region had been described and its manifest benefits extolled, most pamphlets and broadsides concluded with a section explaining the "Advantages of Colonization." These pamphlets defined colonies broadly. They declared, as in this broadside distributed in England in 1871:
Let a small community, embracing as many families and individuals previously acquainted as possible, of various trades and professions, and intending to follow various pursuits, emigrate and settle together, then society, mutual help, comfort, security, and economy will be at once secured, the anticipated hardships and trials of an emigrant’s life will vanish away, and the whole colony, bound together by a community of interest, will rapidly grown in strength and prosperity.
During a time of rapid urbanization, settlers on the plains were taking a step outside of the mainstream of American life, appearing to reject the many benefits of an industrializing society. Railroad executives encouraged the idea that settlers could be spared the disillusionment and cultural isolation of their move west if they settled in groups. Colonies offered a way for western settlers to preserve the benefits of town life to which they were accustomed back east or in Europe while at the same time securing the abundant, inexpensive, and fertile land which the settled regions now lacked. Furthermore, colonists could be assured of the homogeneity of their communities; in the words of more than one pamphlet, they would "know their neighbors." Unlike homesteaders, colonizers could be assured of neighbors who held common ethnic backgrounds, common religious beliefs, and common farming practices. This was one claim that became less true as time passed and homestead land became more scarce, because the railroad’s land grants were assigned in alternating sections and interrupted by the claims of pre-emptors to the land. Nevertheless, the main arguments for settlement and colonization, composed and disseminated in the very earliest years of railroad promotion, were recycled and reused with few changes in wording well into the twentieth century.
Typically advertisements, pamphlets, and broadsides alike closed by encouraging interested parties to contact local agents or the railroad’s land and emigration officers in Lincoln, Chicago, and St. Paul. The best evidence, then, for settlers’ interest in colonies comes from the hundreds of letters preserved in various railroad archives, letters to and from parties interested in purchasing land on the plains. In their letters of inquiry, people asked not only about soil quality, rainfall, and timber, but also about the amenities of town life, the land’s proximity to markets and to schools. In reply, clerks used stock responses which suggested that colonies best provided the benefits of civilization, especially of churches and schools with their reliance on local funding. Most letters therefore encouraged settlers to bring their friends and families with them; at different times, the standard letter of the Burlington & Missouri land department offered to pay commissions of 1.5 percent to anyone who would bring six or twelve other families to the same area where they bought land. In broadsides published in England, the Burlington & Missouri’s agents suggested that as few as four families settling at the corner of their sections would combat the region’s isolation and save on the costs of wells and machinery. Larger colonies, besides pooling their resources, also had the clout to secure assistance from the colonies’ corporate sponsors. The organizer of a Catholic colony in Howard County, Nebraska, complained that a competing colony promoter had received town lots from the railroad and asked that a similar grant be made to him so that the colony could erect a church. The land department of the Burlington & Missouri regularly provided lumber for colony schools and even paid the cost of bell casting for a new academy at Crete. The St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Manitoba railroad performed similar services among Red River Valley settlements. These expenditures were justified as advertising for the region: settlers would pay higher prices to live in areas that already offered the amenities of home.
Over time, the earlier methods of sales and promotion began to lose their effectiveness. The information distributed in pamphlets and reiterated by travelling lecturers, many of them secretly funded by the railroads, entered the general consciousness even as the railroads’ reliability in general fell. Meanwhile, letters published in newspapers and passed from family to family spurred chain migration and contributed to the clustering or transplantation of eastern and European communities on the Plains. Railroad land departments encouraged this practice, soliciting letters from new settlers and forwarding them to interested editors or agents. These letters were beneficial both because they were typically published for free and because they carried the aura of impartiality essential at a time of enormous real estate hype. In 1880, according to letters written to James J. Hill, England was rife with schemes by men whose "preference for any given part reveals some hidden or patent interest in such part." In the face of this growing and widespread skepticism about land promoters, the St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Manitoba Railroad sent form letters to its land agents in the Red River Valley. The agents were to survey the region’s farmers, collecting concrete figures for operation and living costs, soil quality and crop productivity as well as general advice for prospective settlers. The materials from the standardized surveys would then be used in railroad brochures and news items submitted to editors in sending regions. One of the primary reasons why railroads continued to offer agency commissions was because they believed that local people would be more successful placing these news items in their local papers, an essential form of free advertising designed to supplement the simple block ads placed for a fee by the land department.
Typically when historians imagine colonies on the plains, they identify well-researched, tightly defined communities: the Irish Catholic colonization schemes of Bishops Ireland and O’Connor in Minnesota and Nebraska; the Russian German colonies that grew up in the Dakotas and Nebraska after 1871, especially those of the Mennonites; and the British bean colonies of southeastern Minnesota. But these colonies are dismissed as aberrations, not least because so many of them failed to maintain lasting communities, and thus outside the mainstream settlement experience of the region. That so many discrete colonies failed does not, however, imply that colonization as an idea had no lasting influence on the region. Even a colony’s failure to persist during a time when towns were platted, a few buildings erected, and then disappeared; and homesteads were claimed only to be abandoned or sold, make colonization not a marginal experience but part of the mainstream. In any case, my focus in this paper has not been on the success or failure of any given colony but rather on the remarkable prevalence of the colonization idea and its persistence in the region. Real estate agencies operating in the Dakotas in the first decade of the 1900s often called themselves "Colonization Agents." Railroad executives continued to field inquiries from colony organizers well into the 1910s. These colonies were not the same as those promoted at the beginning of the 1870s, any more so than the 1870s colonies resembled earlier colonization attempts in Ohio, upstate New York, or indeed in Connecticut, Massachusetts, or Virginia. From one point of view, the settlement history of America was forged by people travelling in groups who disassociated themselves from their communal origins as soon as it was economically feasible.
Colonization, in whatever guise it appeared to Plains settlers, implied certain characteristics about the landscape on which it would occur. It promised recognizable patterns of civic community on a landscape already standardized by the survey system of the Northwest Ordinance. It offered corporate assistance at a time when settlers relied on outside businesses not only for merchandise but for the timber and fuel necessary to build their homes and survive the region’s harsh winters. It shaped people’s expectations about where they personally might settle by repeatedly emphasizing the value of going to a place where one was already known. Colonization established the idea that groups of settlers could band together to secure concessions from the railroads and the state, even as it fostered the idea that the region was dominated by outside interests. The implications for the region’s development, what it meant for gesellschaft institutions to have laid the foundation for gemeinschaft life, are matters too great to take up here. This paper has attempted to demonstrate instead that group settlement, colonization broadly defined, played a lasting and central role in guiding the settlement of the Northern Plains.
http://www.oocities.org/jodyseim/papers/ngphc.htm