‘This West of Ours’: The Great Beef Bonanza

“Adair and Goodnight were five years ahead of their time. In 1881, a “Beef Bonanza” was proclaimed by General James S. Brisbin, who stampeded English and American investors with overripe passages from his huge bestseller, The Beef Bonanza, or, How to Get Rich on the Plains…”

Everyone in the East seems to think the days for speculation are over, and they reget a hundred times a year they had not been born fity years sooner. To the discouraged let me say, be of good heart and come West, for what as been occuring in the East during the last two hundred years is now occurring in the West, only with tenfold more rapidity. Young men, when your fathers bought the homes and land which they now own, and on which you were raised, there were no railroads, and emigration was necessarily slow. Their property has been thirty, forty or even fifty years in reaching its present value. Not so the West. Railroads are everywhere, and ten or twenty years at most will do for you what it took your fathers fifty years to accomplish. Millions of people are pressing westward; and settle where you may, you will soon find yourself surrounded by neighbors, not in twos and threes as were your fathers, but by hundreds and thousands of newcomers. The growth of this West of ours has been the miracle of the nineteenth century, and its improvement has as yet only fairly begun.

Gen. James S. Brisbin
The Beef Bonanza, or How to Get Rich on the Plains
1881