Rensselaer Union, Volume 5, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 June 1873 — The Westward Exodus—lts Main Spring. [ARTICLE]

The Westward Exodus—lts Main Spring.

BY PROF. J. D. BUTLER.

Lincoln, Nebraska, 1873. The West draws new settlers into its capacious bosom by its fertility, its free homesteads, and its infinite demand for labor, whether skilled or unskilled. It also drives them to take . shelter under its wings by competition. New England once raised her own breadstuff's, but she has long ceased so to do. The produce of richer and cheaper lands competed with her farmers, till it proved more than a match for their skill and energy. Many of them then turned to. manufacturers, but a still larger number were hence driven West. They made their own some of the cheap acres there, and enlisted in the ranks of the agricultural army which had vanquished them. Thus the West is constantly acting on the East with an increasing weight, and that of a larger and longer lever. Here is one secret of its rapid growth. It is forty years since the first white families entered lowa. But no more than one-third its present population were born within its limits; two-thirds have come in. Of its twelve hundred thousand to-day, about one-half were bora, in some more eastern State. Foreign countries being further than the Atlantic slope from the West, have hitherto felt its influence less —but even they were long since driven as well as drawn to send their sons thitlierj The influence exerted upon them has been of the same nature with that which has brought Westward so many from our own East. Hence one-sixtli of the population of lowa has come into it from beyond the Atlantic. Not one-sixth of the population of Nebraska were born within its limits. More than twenty-five thousand homesteaders and pre-emptors have filed claims in the land-office at Lincoln, a capital not yet six years old: —and within the last three years, about three thousand settlers have nought farms on the land-grant to the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad —on ten years’ credit and six per cent, interest, and, on contracts made since 1872.n0 installment of the principal due till the beginning of the fifth year—and -then only one-seventh. The Westward tidal wave was never so strong as to-day—but it will be stronger to-morrow. The stronger it grows the more strength it has to grow stronger. Nor can it rail to wax still more mighty till so many of the European millions have migrated that the density of population and the rate of wages shall have become well-nigh equalized on both sides of the Atlantic. ’ \ >