Pembina fur traders, then Black Hills prospectors, began the tilt of settlement to the northern plains. In 1871 the Northern Pacific Railway chugged into the Red River Valley with a huge land grant. It reached Bismarck in 1874. The trains brought in thousands of family farmers as well as "bonanza" owners farming thousands of acres. Farmers from southeastern Dakota pushed west. The Dakota Southern Railway linked Sioux Falls and Yankton in 1873. Then new wheat farmers, many of them Swedish or Mennonite Germans from Russia, shipped their crops to mills on the Big Sioux River.