The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1905-08-11
RAILROAD NEWS.
Big American Railroad Systems
Are Great Empire Builders.
Do Marvellous Work in PeOpling
the Southwest.
'TYPICALLY AMERICAN.
Railway immigration Bureaus
Perform Great Service.
-
'YPICALLY AMERICAN.
Gossip and Matters OF Interest
in Railroad Circles.

Chicago, Aug. 11.-No organization
more typically American exists than
the immigration bureau of one of our
great railroad systems. 1t imposes no
conditions on prospective inhabitants
for the areas it has set about filing
with people except that they must be
industrious, so that ultimately they
shall provide freight for the road to
transport. Its arguments are chiefly
addressed to that great mass of the
American public whose imagination is
attracted by the prospect of a substan-
tial farm, an ample family and three
comfortable meals aiday. Immigration
bureaus have no religious preferences.
no politics, no race prejudices; they
are simply and frankly looking for
business for their roads in way that
incidentally has done great things for
the sections of the country where they
operate.
The railway systems now composing
the old Granger roads are the most
picturesque and successful employers
of the immigration scheme. Their
publications are works of no mean lit
erary and pictorial merit; their agents
are as polite and full of knowledge as
bond-runners and they get results.
practice the simple life, who have old
fashioned ideas of thrift and sobriety,
and believe in sturdy families reared
in wholesome surroundings, it is no
wonder that the Dakotas, Kansas, Mis-
souri,, tn Texas Panhandle, Oklahoma,
even the Great American Desert,
should be filling up fast with prosper
Gus citizens of the best kind:
The astonishing rapidity with which
the west of today gathers in settlers
and prosperity, is, in good measure,
due to the hustIing, wholesale, and
eminently American policy of the rail-
road immigration bureaus. This is
called to mind by countless instances
forever cropping up in literature and
observation. For example, twenty
eight small towns in the young COM
munity of Oklahoma in 1903 reported
fifty-seven banks with deposits of $3,-
$4,000. The yearly freight receipts
of one road from a single town in
creased in 1900-1901 from $4,000 to
$4,000 another town in 1900 return
ed $2S.87S, in 1902 $3O9,16S; and so
the story proceeds One railway COM
pany issues booklet about Oklahoma
which makes your mouth water with
the possibilities of wealth disclosed by
its insinuating descriptions and gener-
Gus pictures. Looking from the street
scenes of the most pretentious towns,
brick blocks out into the wide, open
prairie with the skyline showing
miles beyond, to the tracts of cotton
and wheat with the sunburned inhab-
itants in the foreground. working in
dustriously, you begin to wake up to
a sense of the vastness of the nations
gardening. This road publishes
similar compendium of roseate hues
for every state and territory it enters.
and distributes its work broadcast.
The position of the American rail-
road as an empire builder has long
been acknowledged by Europeans. Not
only the great transcontinental lines.
but all the highways of steel and ma
sonry-some more, some less impor-
tant-have had a share in the work.
1t is to the initiative of American
business pioneers, whose imagination
dared to look forward to future accom-
plishments which to the older nations
have sometimes seemed chimerical,
that most of the credit for our coun-
try's wonderful growth belongs.