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LAND here is going up in
value, and there is a quarter section adjoining my homestead—very good land,
that we think it would be advantageous to buy ; it was selling at 6 dollars
an acre, and now it is worth 8 dollars and going up steadily. In five or six
years the money invested will have doubled itself; it has good quality hay
on it, and of course buying would increase the value of my homestead, and is
a perfectly safe investment. The surveyed railroad is close by, and the town
site will probably be only one mile away. The wife and I have decided to
sell out some shares, and buy this quarter section, and if we ever want the
money again, we can always realize it, for land is being bought up very
rapidly, and there are now hardly any free grants to be had round our way.
At present I should only use
this land for pasture, and later on when I have the implements it will be
just as easy to work as the other. There are no small implements out here,
they are all fitted to work several hundred acres, so you must not imagine
that this will mean too much work for me; it will only mean more money
coming in by and by.
I should have written sooner,
only I have not had a moment to spare. A cousin of my wife's arrived, and I
took him off seeking land, and I was away a week. I got him located within 8
miles of my place. Since then I have been out to our homestead with a load
of things, and I was going out with another yesterday, but it turned out too
stormy.
I hear that the farmers are
beginning to seed, but it is risky, as we may get bad weather yet.
The oxen have come in, in
pretty good fettle, only the old one is useless; he is dead lame, and will
never get right. I could not sell him outright, so I left him at a sale
stable, and when I returned from hauling out, I found that he had been
traded for a range pony in foal. She is: useless to me this year, but I
shall keep her so as to have the colt, and as I cannot work with only two
oxen, I have bought another pony for 75 dollars. It is a good one and worth
the money. I paid 6o dollars for my Indian pony, and this one is bigger, and
has worked on a plough all last year.
There are several churches in
Saskatoon. We prefer the Presbyterian services. The parson belonging to the
Church of England is a very good man. He only came here in October. He was
at Battleford with the Barr colony, and told us of the hardships he endured.
The colony's crops suffered so much from frost, and food and necessaries ran
very short. |
