we hear there's a settlement on the jim
In the James river valley, as one would naturally say in New England -- in the Jim, as they would say out here -- fifteen hundred miles of railroad are projected, and nine hundred miles of it completed, in a single year, and this through regions comparatively unknown twelve months before. It is marvelous to see how the work goes forward. Great, mammoth machines are used, to each of which are attached twelve span of mules or horses, these machines tearing into the ground and throwing up an embankment for a railroad bed for more than a hundred miles in length, while in other places squads of men work with their plows and scrapers. Once in about a dozen miles a town site is projected. Depots, hotels, stores, saloons, blacksmith shops, carpenter shops, dwelling houses and the like go up like magic.

For the time being, great railroad kings seem to rule in these new regions, and everybody cheerfully submits to the new order of things.

At a point similar to scores of places, the sanctuary for the Sabbath is a little rough structure of one room, containing a bed, a cooking stove and a family of six persons, while it serves as a public house also, where no less than thirty or forty people take their meals, and eight or ten men crowd up to their bunks for the night in a little attic so low that they can not begin to stand up straight, and where railroad magnates, homesteaders, bricklayers, carpenters, well diggers, and missionary pack themselves away for sleep and rest, all good natured, and all glad to get as good quarters as this, even.

It is a wonderful departure in the settling up of a new country. The most gigantic railroad building, with nothing but the right of way, which sometimes has to be purchased, goes in advance of civilization, and challenges the world to come and select free farms where a market is furnished before there is time to raise a crop, and where facilities for a speedy transit to the great centers of the East are provided at once.

Then suddenly does the engine whistle wake the prairies where hitherto the Indian war whoop and the crack of the red man's rifle have been the principal music.

Surely a nation is born in a day. The wild prairies quickly blossom like the rose.

The ground strewn with the bleaching bones of the buffalo soon exhibits fruitful fields of wheat and corn; and the antelope and deer give way to herds of cattle and flocks of sheep.

Thousands of farms are everywhere taken, as a gift from Uncle Sam.

--Stewart Sheldon, Territorial Superintendent, Report of the Home Missionary Society, Missionary Congregational Churches, Dakota
- posted by pioneergirl at 2:59 AM