Broadly speaking, then, the real problem of the Northwestern frontier after 1850 was: how to put more and ever more men of capacity, endurance, strength, and adaptability into the upper Mississippi and Red River valleys, men who first break up the prairie sod, clear the brush off the slopes, drain the marshes, build the railroads, and do the thousands and one hard jobs incident to pioneer life, and then turn to the building of factories and towns and cities. Not every sort of man who could hold a plow or wield a hoe would do: Chinese coolies, for example, would hardly be considered desirable, even with all their capacity for hard work, persistence, and patience. Furthermore, it is plain now, that the West could not have looked to the Eastern States alone to send out an industrial army sufficient in numbers and spirit for the conquest of the new empire and the extraction of its varied resources at the desired speed. The demands were too severe, the rewards too remote and uncertain for the average prosperous native-born citizen. The aliens from the western side of the Atlantic, as it were by regiments and battalions, must re-enforce the companies westward-bound from the older States; in such a situation the Scandinavians were all but indispensable to rapid material progress in the Northwest after the middle of the last century. It is not easy to realize how attractive to the Northland immigrants were the broad, level lands of the West, to be had from the United States Government on the easiest of terms, both before and after the passage of the Homestead Act of 1862. Scarcely in their dreams had they conceived of soil so fertile, so readily tilled, and so cheaply acquired. To speak to a Norwegian from Thelemarken, to a Swede from Smaaland, or to a Dane from the misty, sandy coast of Jutland, about rich, rolling prairies stretching away miles upon miles, about land which was neither rocky, nor swampy, nor pure sand, nor set up at an angle of forty-five degrees, about land which could be had almost for the asking in fee simple and not by some semi-manorial title--this was to speak to his imagination rather than to his understanding. The letters from immigrants to their old friends in Europe continually dilated on these advantages, sometime with a curious mingling of humor and pathos. One of these communications, which was printed as a small pamphlet in 1850, sets forth in large letters, that the land was so plentiful that the pigs and cattle were allowed to run at will.[186] What more could be asked of Providence by a poor peasant or "husmand," owing to his landlord, for the little strip of land on which he lived, the labor of two or three days each week?[187] [186] A copy of this interesting little pamphlet, without signature, was found in the National Library in Stockholm.