found, the child was sent via train to their new family for adoption. More commonly, groups of 5-30 children of various ages from infant to teenager would travel with an adult agent as escort along a determined route of towns and communities to be placed in foster home situations. Railroads and charities would provide discount fares, new clothes, bibles, and other sundries to the children for the journeys, and Brace raised money for the program through his writings and speeches. To improve the chances of successful placement, since many host families harbored strong prejudice towards ethnic groups, Brace instructed that care should be taken to select healthy, attractive children with Anglo-American features to match the majority populations of the communities they were being sent to. Children could be placed with couples, families, or single adults, and adoption was not necessary for placement. Rather than adoption, many placements, especially older placements of teens, instead signed a contract of indenture for the children selected, which outlined certain obligations, such as providing clothes, room, board, 4 months of education per year, and other terms in exchange for the child's indentured labor until the age of 21. While current views on adoption and child labor laws see this arrangement negatively as a form of child slavery, at the time, it was considered more beneficial and good for the homeless children to secure a source of food and shelter in the countryside, even when in exchange for forced work, than to leave them living homeless on city streets, and common beliefs of the time viewed the countryside and farming families as more "healthy" and "morally upright" than their city counterparts. Brace's plan largely depended on the goodwill of the foster communities. Sponsoring New York City institutions would provide the children, the basic guidelines in the placement contracts, and supervisory agents. However, due to the small number of agents, vetting the families and providing follow up monitoring of children after placement was mostly reliant on local volunteer committees set up for the care of the children. The informality and lack of oversight of this arrangement lead to the programs' greatest criticisms as some children were misplaced from records or left in abusive situations. As part of his placement programs, an estimated 200,000 American children traveled west by rail in search of new homes during the life of the programs. The trains and relocation efforts began to