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Show CASH SALES, 1840-1862 217 The quantity of cheaper lands in the more distant communities drained off those who could not find what they wanted in Illinois and, indeed, for the next 20 or 25 years they continued to attract farm laborers, tenants, or mortgage-ridden farmers from states farther east who despaired of ridding themselves of their burdens. By 1870-80 the frontier in Dakota and Montana was drawing the less successful from parts of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri, as well as Illinois. If the public land served as a safety valve (Fred Shannon was emphatically convinced it did not), it did so by the opportunity afforded those who had not quite succeeded in becoming landowners, to try again on a newer frontier. By the late seventies and eighties central Europeans, Poles, and eastern Germans were coming to Illinois in noticeable numbers and were taking over the tenancies of discouraged older Americans who were going in droves to the new frontier farther west. Special trains carried thousands of these older American tenants, and with them went the agrarianism that might have flourished in the middle border but was now to be centered in Kansas, Nebraska, and Minnesota. As the pioneer land grant railroad, the Illinois Central established the precedents and set the example for other land grant railroads to follow. Soon the Hannibal and St. Joseph was following in its footsteps trying to draw settlers to its 611,000-acre grant in Missouri. By the sixties numerous other railroads were vying with each other to attract immigrants from abroad and to obtain their share of the continued stream of people moving out of the hill areas of the Northeast. Before the emigration promotion work of the land grant railways was completed, it could almost be said that there was scarcely a rural hamlet in the British Isles, Northern Europe, and the northeastern states from Maine to Maryland that had not seen their posters in public buildings, or experienced visits from their traveling agents or lecturers. Supplementing the work of the railroads were the activities of official emigration agents appointed by Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, and later other western states, who prepared brochures somewhat similar to those of the Illinois Central giving information about their localities and offering counsel. It is small wonder that Illinois added more people in the fifties than any other state, even including New York, and that Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri were among the most popular states with immigrants, especially those from England, Ireland, the Scandinavian countries, and Germany.93 Railroad construction greatly extended the areas in which it was possible to conduct agricultural operations on a commercial scale. By 1860 Illinois had been crossed by seven east-west lines, and boasted a mileage greater than any other state but Ohio. Southern Wisconsin was crossed by three lines which had also considerable branch mileage. Missouri had completed the Hannibal and St. Joseph across the state by 1859 and was pushing four other lines rapidly to completion; by 1860 the state had 817 miles of railroad. No railroad had been built across Iowa but there were 655 miles of lines in operation within the state in I860.94 In summary, it may be said that in these four states where speculators were active, the acreage of land in farms increased markedly, partly because individuals were selling off surplus land, partly because moneylenders were active in the time entry business, partly because some speculators were also developers but, above all, not because the speculator 93 Kate Asaphine Everest, "How Wisconsin Came By Its Large German Element," State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Collections, XII (Madison, Wis., 1892), 299 ff.; Marcus L. Hansen, "Official Encouragement to Immigration to Iowa," Iowa Journal of History and Politics, XIX (April 1921), 159 ff. 94 Frederic L. Paxson, "The Railroads of the 'Old Northwest' before the Civil War," Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, Vol. XVII, Part 1 (October 1912), 243 ff.; Paul W. Gates, "The Railroads of Missouri, 1830-1870," Missouri Historical Review, XXVI (January 1932), 126 ff.; Henry V. Poor, Manual of the Railroads of the United States, 1867, p. 21. |