hat tracks and trains were useless without passengers
and freight; without a population of farmers and town dwellers. He
therefore organized publicity in the Virginias, Iowa, Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, Wisconsin, and Nebraska especially. He sent out agents to tell
the story of Western opportunity in this vein: "You see your children
come out of school with no chance to get farms of their own because the
cost of land in your older part of the country is so high that you can't
afford to buy land to start your sons out in life around you. They have
to go to the cities to make a living or become laborers in the mills or
hire out as farm hands. There is no future for them there. If you are
doing well where you are and can safeguard the future of your children
and see them prosper around you, don't leave here. But if you want
independence, if you are renting your land, if the money-lender is
carrying you along and you are running behind year after year, you can
do no worse by moving.... You farmers talk of free trade and protection
and what this or that political party will do for you. Why don't you
vote a homestead for yourself? That is the only thing Uncle Sam will
ever give you. Jim Hill hasn't an acre of land to sell you. We are not
in the real estate business. We don't want you to go out West and make a
failure of it because the rates at which we haul you and your goods make
the first transaction a loss.... We must have landless men for a manless
land."

Unlike steamship companies stimulating immigration to get the fares,
Hill was seeking permanent settlers who would produce, manufacture, and
use the railways as the means of exchange. Consequently he fixed low
rates and let his passengers take a good deal of live stock and
household furniture free. By doing this he made an appeal that was
answered by eager families. In 1894 the vanguard of home seekers left
Indiana in fourteen passenger coaches, filled with men, women, and
children, and forty-eight freight cars carrying their household goods
and live stock. In the ten years that followed, 100,000 people from the
Middle West and the South, responding to his call, went to the Western
country where they brought eight million acres of prairie land under
cultivation.

When Hill got his people on the land, he took an interest in everything
that increased the productivity of their labor. Was the output of food
for his freight cars limited by bad drainage on the farms? Hill then