Perhaps you have a mistaken idea in regard to the Mississippi Valley. There are no bottom-lands on the Upper Mississippi. The prairie borders upon the river. You will find the land on the east side better adapted to grazing than for raising wheat. The company do not hold their lands along the branch at so high a figure as on the main line. Some of my Minnesota friends say that stock-growing on the light lands east of the Mississippi is quite as profitable as raising wheat. Cattle, sheep, and horses transport themselves to market, but you must draw your grain. If you are going into stock-raising, you can afford to be at a greater distance from a railroad station than the man who raises wheat. It would undoubtedly be for the interest of the company to sell you their outlying lands along the branch line at a low figure, for it would enhance the value of those nearer the road. You will find St. Cloud and Anoka thriving places, which, with St. Paul and Minneapolis, will give a good home demand for beef and mutton, to say nothing of the facilities for reaching Eastern markets by the railroads and lakes. "Do the people of Minnesota use fertilizers?" No; they allow the manure to accumulate around their stables, or else dump it into the river to get rid of it! They sow wheat on the same field year after year, and return nothing to the ground. They even burn the straw, and there can be but one result coming from such a process,--exhaustion of the soil,--poor, worn-out farms by and by. The farmers of the West are cruel towards Mother Earth. She freely bestows her riches, and then, not satisfied with her gifts, they plunder her. Men everywhere are shouting for an eight-hour law; they must have rest, time for recreation and improvement of body and mind; but they give the soil no time for recuperation. Men expect to be paid for their labors, but they make no payment to the kind mother who feeds them; they make her work and live on nothing. Farming, as now carried on in the West and Northwest, is downright robbery and plunder, and nothing else. If the present exhaustive system is kept up, the time will come when the wheat-fields of Minnesota, instead of producing twenty-five bushels to the acre upon an average throughout the State, will not yield ten, which is the product in Ohio; and yet, with a systematic rotation of crops and application of fertilizers, the present marvellous richness of the soil can be maintained forever. "Do the tame grasses flourish?"