Scarcely more than ten per cent. of the six hundred brigade made good on their homesteads. I spent many weeks one summer, after the railway had received a receiver, among the farmers around Saltcoats, trying to find customers for the lands which had fallen in to us, since the patents were granted, and the homesteads forsaken. In some cases we were glad to get a hundred and sixty dollars for land, improvements and all. If I confessed all the truth it might be not so very far removed from a story of the land-poor epoch in Minnesota, which assuredly is an opulent state of the Union to-day. A farmer drove into a prairie town down there--Marshall, I think--with a calf for which he was seeking milk. Asked how he reached such a fix he said: “Well, a stranger came to my place with this calf and wanted milk for it. We had none; so he asked me if I would trade something for the calf. I said ‘No’, but he was so cussed persistent that at last I told him the only thing I could trade for the calf was a section of land. He wouldn’t have it; but was willing to take half a section. Finally I accepted his terms. But I got ahead of him, after all; for when we came to make out the papers I found the sucker couldn’t read! and I’ve landed the whole durn section on him.” One farmer whom I visited was an old naval man. He was literally a sailor on horseback. He was just starting out on his horse to round up his solitary cow. He would buy no more land; and, indeed, declared he would leave the country if only he could get out. “This is no country for a reasonable man,” he complained, “when you have to go eight hundred miles for cordwood.” “That can’t be so,” I retorted, looking eastward towards the Porcupine Hills clothed with timber and abounding with game. “I’ll prove it to you,” was the answer. “I have to go twenty miles for firewood, don’t I? That’s forty miles, there and back, for a load. It takes twenty loads to keep us warm one winter. Twenty times forty miles is eight hundred. Now, am I right?” Lest it be thought that these depleting conditions applied only to the territory of feeble branch railways like ours, look at a few other conditions which afflicted the infancy of the country immediately tributary to the main line of the C.P.R.