The Scandinavian immigrants along the frontiers, like the other pioneers all through the prairie west, were from the first vitally interested in securing some form of cheap transportation of the produce of the farms to a good market; railroads were indispensable to the development of the agricultural areas of the Great West. Western Pennsylvania might find profit in 1794 in shipping the quintessence of its agriculture across the mountains in demijohns; the cattlemen of the South and Southwest might drive their products to market on the hoof; but at the very best these were exceptional, inelastic, and primitive methods. Many pioneer Norwegians and Swedes in Minnesota and Iowa were obliged to carry their wheat and corn forty and fifty miles to have it ground for their families, but they could not hope to haul any great amount of ordinary farm produce over the abominable roads of the West for a distance greater than forty miles and make a profit.[184] Without the hope of railroads, the vast stretches of cereal-producing land in the trans-Mississippi would long have remained virgin soil. Yet without assurance that population would rapidly increase in numbers and in complexity of life, thus giving a large traffic in both directions, no railroad company would build out into the thinly settled area.[185] [184] _Fædrelandet og Emigranten_, July 21, 1870; interview in 1890 with the Rev. U. V. Koren, the first Norwegian Lutheran minister permanently located west of the Mississippi. Miss Bremer in October, 1850, described the road over which the early settlers in Wisconsin went 30 and 40 miles to market: "the newborn roads of Wisconsin, which are no roads at all, but a succession of hills and holes and water pools in which first one wheel sank and then the other, while the opposite one stood high up in the air.... To me, that mode of travelling seemed really incredible.... They comforted me by telling me that the diligence was not in the habit of being upset very often!" _Homes of the New World_, II, 235-236. [185] It was on faith in the future of the northern zone of the Northwest, based upon observation, that the Great Northern Railroad was built without any land-grant or subsidy such as the Northern Pacific and other roads demanded and got.