The dailies of Chicago, Minneapolis, and Duluth, in particular, publish every week scores of communications from subscribers in all parts of the Northwest, in a department devoted to neighborhood news or gossip. The old settler writes his reminiscences, sometimes a brief letter called out by some event, sometimes at great length, like the Rev. J. A. Ottesen's "Contribution to the History of our Settlements and Congregations," which ran through eleven numbers of the weekly paper _Amerika_, from April to September of 1894, and gave very minute details of immigrant families unto the third and fourth generation, as they had passed under the kindly eye of the patriarchal old pastor in his service of forty years among them.[301] Great numbers of these communications relate to the conditions and prospects of local settlements as viewed from the settler's standpoint--crop conditions, market prices, wages, opportunities for labor, nature and prices of nearby land, schools, religion. As a revelation of the real mind of a community or of an element of the population, showing the inducements and motives operating upon the immigrant, and his response, they are exceedingly valuable, and in some important respects almost unique. [301] "Bidrag til vore Settlementers og Menigheders Historie." The editors and business agents of the larger and more enterprising Scandinavian papers very early began making journeys about the country, especially into the newer parts, in the interests of their papers; incidentally they were spying out the land for themselves, but indirectly they were furnishing first-hand observations of frontier conditions to the hundreds who were moved to reinvest themselves and their small accumulations. One of these "circuit riders" was Johan Schröder, editor of _Fædrelandet og Emigranten_, founded at La Crosse, in 1864, who published a little book of information for immigrants in 1867, after one of his extensive journeys among the settlements.[302] Three years later he made a trip into Minnesota as far as Otter Tail County--"En Snartur i Nordvesten"--and was deeply impressed with the possibilities of that fertile section, to which many men of his nationality were already looking, as the Newtown folk in Massachusetts Bay looked in 1636 toward the Connecticut country, with a "strong bent of their spirits to move thither." Such words as these were as seed sown in good soil: "So far as I have journeyed about in the prairie counties of Minnesota and Iowa, I have not yet met with any county which in multiplicity of natural resources can come up with Otter Tail. Immigration this year is very strong. Both newcomers direct from Norway, and older farmers from Iowa, Wisconsin and Southern Minnesota take their various ways thither."[303] The "America fever" of the Old World was now the "West fever," and again more of the "West fever."[304] These articles were not mere generalizations, but often, as in those just