158 S. H. TAYLOR
it extremely difficult for emigrants to subsist the first few months. Some of our folks say they never before found "exist- ence so much a problem." Some of them, men heretofore well to do in the world, have dug potatoes for every 3Oth bushel; some have worked for $2.00 a day, with board, and paid $4.80 a bushel for potatoes the price when we came. I sold a good log chain for five squashes. A neighbor sold a good wagon for 100 hills of potatoes, and got the worth of the wagon, $80,00, and I sold one for 100 Ibs. of flour and 750 Ibs. or \2*/2 bushels potatoes. Oxen are worth, by the yoke, but $100 to $160 and cows from $75 to $100 each. The diffi- culty of obtaining food is increased 100 per cent by the vora- cious wolfish appetites of all new comers. People eat till they are themselves astonished, and oftener thus than till they are satisfied. I presume four-fifths of those who have been here but three months, experience great trouble in getting enough to eat. It is a hard thing to say of the country, but it is true ; and tell your readers if they do not wish to realize it, to stay at home. When a man gets to raising and selling agricultural products, or becomes established in any other business -the profits of which are three or four times the profits of labor, he can prosper but not till then. That is too true. And you can tell them that if people were not made over, or rather half unmade, by the dehumanising processes through which they go from Kanesville here, they would never submit to the con- ditions of this country. They would never submit to living in such houses, with such an absence of the conveniences and comforts of eastern life, and such a destitution of intellectual and moral opportunities, if they had not already learned on the plains to submit to anything. You can tell them that too ; and tell them they can never, in living here, get paid for corning over the plains. I am not homesick; I am not prejudiced; I only tell you facts. And it is in fulfillment of a pledge to many of your readers, to tell them facts, that I telJ them much more than half of those, in this country of mild winters, of a fruitful soil and mines of gleaming gold, are dissatisfied and
