something else of interest from the Laura Ingalls Wilder Pioneer Girl book.....emigrant trains!

Grandma Pauline Axsom had written family histories for me. My great grandparents Johnnie & Daisy Axsom had moved to South Dakota on an emigrant train.

p. 194, footnote 104.: all their worldly good[s], seed grain and provisions for a year in emigrant cars. The railroad companies offered special shipping rates to those wishing to emigrate to Dakota Territory. For example, in February 1880, the Southern Minnesota Railroad offered "a rate on a car of emigrant movables" between towns in the territory of "only $22.50". {Home and Other News BCP Feb. 26 1880)., For less than a carload, the rate was twenty-five cents per one hundred pounds. In April 1880 the editor of the Press estimated that since the middle of March "no less than 40 car loads" of"immigrant goods" had rolled into Brookings over the new rails, along with about 120 head of cattle. In De Smet emigrants camped around the town and on vacant lots.

I don't think they were in this wave of emigrants, I think they went later after they had kids and their youngest Marvin was born there. but they did travel on an emigrant train with everything they had to homestead.