From the first, great numbers of the immigrants have come with no other capital than strong and willing hands, stout hearts, and an unchanging land-hunger. They served for a time as laborers on the older farms, in town, in the lumber camps, or in railroad construction, saving their money, learning American ways, and acquiring some English, but as soon as money enough was saved, perhaps in a year, to buy forty or eighty acres of government land at the minimum price, a yoke of oxen or a team of horses, and a few necessary farm tools and implements, the prospective farmer moved upon new land and started out for himself. Under the Homestead Act of 1862 the amount of capital required for the beginning of operations was greatly reduced, and it was under this act that the lands of the northwestern States beyond the Mississippi were so rapidly taken up.[227] [227] "An Act to secure Homesteads to Actual Settlers on the Public Domain," _U. S. Statutes at Large_, 1861-2, 392. A typical illustration of the process described is found in Levor Timanson, who came with his father in 1848, at the age of eighteen, to Rock County, Wisconsin, where he worked for several years as farm laborer, carpenter, and mason. He visited Iowa and Minnesota in 1853 in search of satisfactory land; finding it at Spring Grove, in the latter State, he settled down there as a grain and stock farmer. In 1882 he owned 840 acres of land of which 550 acres were under cultivation.[228] A study of the histories of counties and townships in eastern Iowa and Minnesota, and of the biographies which usually accompany them, reveals clearly the fact that the larger part of the Scandinavian farmers resident in those counties in the sixties and seventies spent from one to five years in Wisconsin or Illinois before moving into the Farther West.[229] They were in turn apprentices and journeymen, and finally attained to the full dignity of masters of their own estates. [228] _History of Houston County, Minnesota_, 481. [229] _History of Goodhue County, Minnesota_; _History of Houston County, Minnesota_; Sparks, _History of Winneshiek County, Iowa_. See the numerous biographies in Nelson, _History of the Scandinavians_, I, II.