Bradshaw
It took Southern Pacific a little while to catch on to the idea of recruiting settlers to live alongside its tracks across the Louisiana prairies, but the company did it with a vengeance once it started. One of its agents, Sylvester L. Cary, was almost certainly the most aggressive promoter of prairie settlement and is credited with bringing more than ten thousand men, women, and children to southwest Louisiana in the late 1800s.
He compiled a promotional booklet, “Southwest Louisiana on the Line of the Southern Pacific Company” (Poole Brothers Publishers, Chicago, 1893), to boost his claim that there was no better place to live and farm, and included reports from “the most knowledgeable experts “ alongside his own essays, Most of them described the many things that could be easily and profitably grown here, but some included testimonies acclaiming this as a place “where you can have most of life’s blessings with the least expenditure of labor … and where most of the necessities and comforts of life can be produced on the spot.”
