Amos Holmes was born in Illinois and came to Kansas when he was four with his father's family, who homesteaded near Prescott, Linn County, Kansas in 1865. There he grew to manhood, married Anna Vail of Hume, Missouri, and three children were born. In March of 1913, he and Anna's brother, Homer Vail, had sales and moved by way of immigrant cars from farms near Prescott, Kansas and Hume, Missouri, to farms they brought south of Plains near Anna's and Homer's brother, Arthur Vail, already settled there. They came by rail in two immigrant cars (ordinary box cars). Each car had to have the livestock, horses, cows, etc., penned to where they could be unloaded at stated intervals for food, water, and rest. By unloading thus at Kansas City, they could make the rest of the journey non-stop. One person was allowed to ride free in each car to care for the livestock, and the rest of the family had to come by passenger train, which they did later after Glessie and Haskell's schools were out. Immigrant cars took a special rate, but the one person riding in it had to ride fully dressed all the way, had to bed down how and where he could among the farm tools and bring household goods for as many nights as they were on the road. Understandably, the very minimum could be brought that way. Usually it consisted of at least one team of horses, a cow or two and what tools, furniture, canned goods, etc., were needed at the other end of the journey to form the nucleus of the new farmstead. The first Sunday after the family arrived was Easter Sunday, typically a windy, dirty day, and the family doubted the wisdom of staying. But they had come from the shut-in hills of eastern Kansas and Missouri with the will and the courage to turn the brown prairies into their vision of the "seeforever" of the green winter wheat fields they were to become, so they stayed.