There are other ways too by which our people can make homes in this well-settled colony. Non-Catholics who were settled in the county before the colony was established, will be willing to sell out. Homesteaders, too, who got their land free from the government, and made improvements, are frequently anxious to realize a little capital by the sale of those improved farms, and go still farther west. There is also a large quantity of school and State lands in the county, which will be in the market in 1879; so notwithstanding that the greater part of the colony railroad lands have passed from the control of the Bureau into the possession of settlers, and that all the government lands have been taken up, we look forward, with pleasure, to see many more of our people settling in Swift county next spring. They will find a goodly number of their co-religionists settled before them and anxious to give them a friendly welcome. There are very few of the New England or Middle States that have not representatives in the colony. From a communication received from the Register of the United States Land Office at Benson, the county seat, we find that since the Bureau opened this colony in 1876, 425 Catholic settlers have taken up government land in the colony; of these, 300 families were Irish, the remainder Germans, Poles and French. About an equal number of Catholics--a large majority Irish--have taken railroad lands--80,000 acres of which have been sold; so that we can claim at least 800 Catholic settlers, with their families, in Swift County Colony at the present writing. Driving west from De Graff to Clontarf, seventeen miles, and still eleven miles farther west from Clontarf to the _Pomme de Terre_ River, one is never out of sight of a settler's house; and some of those farm houses would be a credit to a much older settlement, for we have settlers who farm as much as five hundred acres, while others again farm but eighty acres. The general quality of the soil is a dark loam, slightly mixed with sand and with a clay sub-soil, admirably adapted for wheat, oats, &c., &c., while the bountiful supply of good water and the large quantity of natural meadow lands, scattered all over the colony--there is scarcely a quarter section (160 acres) without its patch of natural meadow--give the settler an opportunity to combine stock raising and tillage on his farm.