Transcriber’s Note

The numbered footnotes have been consolidated and moved to the end of the text. Unnumbered footnotes to the Church Register in Chapter XXXVII and to Table I of the Appendix appear locally.

Please consult the [Transcriber’s Note] at the end of this text for the details of any textual issues.

History of Norwegian Immigration

A History of Norwegian Immigration
to
The United States

From the Earliest Beginning down to the Year 1848

By

GEORGE T. FLOM, Ph. D. (Columbia)

Professor of Scandinavian Languages and Literatures and Acting Professor of English Philology, State University of Iowa

PRIVATELY PRINTED
IOWA CITY, IOWA
1909

COPYRIGHT 1909
GEORGE T. FLOM

THE TORCH PRESS
CEDAR RAPIDS
IOWA

To My Mother

THROUGH WHOM I HAVE COME TO UNDERSTAND SOMETHING
OF THE HEROIC WOMANHOOD EXEMPLIFIED IN THE
LIVES OF OUR PIONEER MOTHERS, THIS VOLUME IS
AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED

FOREWORD

This volume is intended to present the progress of immigration from Norway to this country from the beginning down through what may be termed the first period of settlement. It is possible that I may at some future time return to these studies to trace the further growth of the Scandinavian element and its place and influence in American life.

Four years ago I contributed an article to The Iowa Journal of History and Politics upon “The Scandinavian Factor in the American Population,” in which I discussed briefly the causes of emigration from the Northern countries. This article forms the basis of chapters VI-VIII of the present volume, much new evidence from later years having, however, been added. In a subsequent issue of the same Journal I published an article on “The Coming of the Norwegians to Iowa,” which is embodied in part in chapters III-V of this volume. The remaining thirty-six chapters are new. During the last three summers I have continued my investigation of that part of the subject which deals with the immigration movement. This book represents the results of that investigation down to 1848.

For invaluable assistance in the investigation I gratefully acknowledge indebtedness to the numerous pioneers whom, from time to time, I have interviewed and who so kindly have given the aid sought. I wish to thank, also, several persons who generously have accepted the task of personally gathering pioneer data for certain localities. For such help I owe a debt of gratitude to the following persons: J. W. Johnson, Racine, Wisconsin; Reverend A. Jacobson, Decorah, Iowa; Reverend G. A. Larsen, Clinton, Wisconsin; Henry Natesta, Clinton, Wisconsin; Rev. O. J. Kvale, Orfordville, Wisconsin; Rev. J. Nordby, Lee, Illinois; Dr. N. C. Evans, Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin; M. J. Engebretson, Gratiot, Wisconsin; Dan K. Anderson and wife, Woodford, Wisconsin; Ole Jacobson, Elk Horn, Wisconsin; Samuel Sampson, Rio, Wisconsin; T. M. Newton, Grinnell, Iowa; Harvey Arveson, Whitewater, Wisconsin; and Reverend Helge Höverstad, Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin. My thanks are also due to Reverend G. G. Krostu of Koshkonong Parsonage for having placed at my disposal the Koshkonong Church Register from 1844–1850; as also for verifying my copy of it in some cases of names and dates; for the privilege accorded me of using these so precious documents I am most grateful. Reverend K. A. Kasberg of Spring Grove, Minnesota, has given me certain important data on part of the immigration to East Koshkonong in 1842, and similarly N. A. Lie of Deerfield, Wisconsin, for immigration from Voss in 1838–1844, and Mr. Elim Ellingson and wife of Capron, Illinois, on the founders of the Long Prairie Settlement. Many others might be mentioned who have given valuable assistance by letter and otherwise in the course of the investigation, and to whom I owe much. Finally, I wish to thank Dr. N. C. Evans of Mt. Horeb, Wisconsin, for the loan of Cyclopedia of Wisconsin (1906) and Illustreret Kirkehistorie (Chicago, 1898); Mr. O. N. Falk of Stoughton, Wisconsin, for loaning me Billed-Magazin for 1869–1870, and my brother, Martin O. Flom, of Stoughton, for securing for my use several Wisconsin Atlases and a copy of The Biographical Review of Dane County (1893).

Of published works on Norwegian immigration which I have found especially useful are to be mentioned S. Nilsen’s Billed-Magazin on causes of immigration and the earliest immigrants from Telemarken and Numedal; R. B. Anderson’s First Chapter on Norwegian Immigration for the sloopers of 1825, and their descendants; Strand’s History of the Norwegians in Illinois (1905) for the Norwegians in Chicago; H. L. Skavlem’s sketch of Scandinavians in the Early Days of Rock County, Wisconsin, Normandsforbundet for February, 1909, and several articles in Symra, 1905–1908. I must also mention a most valuable series of articles on the Rock Prairie Settlement, Rock County, Wisconsin, which appeared in Amerika in 1906. (See further the [Bibliography] at the end of this volume.)

No one who has never been engaged in a similar undertaking can have any conception of the difficulty of the task and the labor involved in the collecting, weighing and sifting of the vast amount of detail material. I have tried to write a work which shall be correct as to details and historically reliable. That errors have crept in I doubt not. I shall be grateful to the reader who may discover such errors if he will call my attention to them.

Finally, I wish to say that I have attempted nothing complete with reference to the personal sketches of the earliest pioneers; this was manifestly impossible. I have thought also that this was not here called for except in cases of founders of settlements, and even here I have sometimes lacked the full facts. To many it will also undoubtedly seem that the early days of the church and the founding of congregations should have received more attention. I can only say that this volume deals specifically with the causes, course and progress of Norwegian immigration and that this plan precluded a discussion in this volume of religious and educational movements among the pioneers, or of social questions, occupations, public service, and like topics. The work thus aims to keep only what the title promises, and I hope it will be found to be a real contribution to history within the scope marked out for it.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

In this volume I shall aim to give an account of the Norwegian immigration movement from 1825 down to 1848. Thereupon will follow a brief survey of the course of the movement and the growth of the settlements founded here in that period. In the introductory pages I shall discuss briefly individual immigration from Norway from its earliest known beginnings down to 1825.

Immigration from Norway resulted in the founding of settlements in New York, Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa successively; I shall try to give a correct narrative of the beginnings and the growth of these settlements. In this part of the work I shall stress the oldest and largest settlements in Southern Wisconsin and Northern Illinois, for the relation of these to the whole movement and later colonization of the Northwestern States by the Norwegians is one of especial importance. I shall treat somewhat fully of the causes of emigration, of the growth of the movement, and the part in it that each district or province in Norway has played. The leaders from each district and the founders of the settlements here will be named and in many cases, sketches will be given of their lives. Such questions as the course of the movement in Norway, the cost of the voyage, the course of the journey, early wage conditions, the economic conditions of the immigrants, the geographical trend of settlement, will also be considered, and approximately complete lists of the accessions in each settlement for the first few years will be given. The limits of this volume, however, will preclude the treatment of social or cultural questions, or to take more than the briefest notice of the pursuits and occupations of the Norwegian-American and his contribution to American life. I hope to be able to treat elsewhere, later, of some of these problems.

The story of the immigrant settler is one that is well worth the telling; it is one that is justly receiving increased attention in recent years. I believe that the writer of American history will, in the future, pay far greater attention than he has in the past to the immigrant pioneer as a factor in the development of the nation. There are in America today about one million people of Norwegian birth, or Norwegian parentage. That is, there are nearly half as many of that nationality in America as in Norway itself. The transplanting of so large a proportion of a race from the land to which it is rooted by birth and by its history is indeed remarkable.

Various European peoples have contributed to the growth of the American population; they have each given something to the sum total of present American life and in some measure helped to shape American institutions. As a people America is yet in the formative period; racially, at least, one-half of the population is not Anglo-Saxon. It is by the amalgamation of all its ethnic factors that the future American people will be evolved. The contribution that each foreign element will make to that evolution will be determined by the civilization, which each represents as its racial heritage, the culture which, in the course of its history, each has evolved as a people and a nation. As the true student of American history takes note of these things in the future, the significance of the foreign factor in the growth and the upbuilding of the country will receive its just recognition.

We of Norse blood, but American birth, if we are true to the best that is in us, cannot fail to have an interest in the trials and the achievements of the pioneer fathers. We must recognize the true heroism of the men and women who braved the hardships and suffered the privations of frontier life in the thirties, the forties and the fifties. The part that the pioneers of those days played in the development of the Northwest was a great one; in comparison with it that of the present generation is wholly insignificant. It is to the memory of those pioneers, in recognition of their true worth, that this record of their coming is dedicated.

CHAPTER I
Norway: Population, Resources, Pursuits of her People, Social Conditions, Laws and Institutions.

Norway is, as we know, a long and narrow strip of country in the west of the Scandinavian Peninsula, stretching through thirteen degrees of latitude, and in the north, extending almost three hundred miles into the arctic zone. Nearly a third of the entire country[1] is the domain of the midnight sun, where summer is the season of daylight and winter is one long unbroken night. Even in Southern Norway total darkness is unknown in summer, the night being merely a period of twilight. In Christiania the nights are light from April twentieth to the third week in August, in Trondhjem, a week more at either end. In the latter city there is broad daylight at midnight from May twenty-third to July twentieth. Correspondingly there is a period of continuous darkness in the extreme north. Thus at Tromsö the sun is not visible between the twenty-sixth of November and the sixteenth day of January. The long night is therefore short as compared with the long day of summer. Climatically, also, Norway is naturally a land of extremes, extending, as it does, over such a vast area north and south. Yet the populous portion of the country, the southern two-thirds, is not appreciably colder than the State of Iowa and the southern half of Wisconsin and Minnesota. The winter is severest in the great inland valleys. Gudbrandsdalen, Valders and Hallingdal, but especially in Österdalen. In the last-named valley the lowest temperature ever observed has been recorded, namely, 50°, mercury often having been frozen.[2] The winter is also excessively long in these valleys; in Fjeldberg and Jerkin in the Dovre Mountains the temperature is below the freezing point two hundred days in the year. In the south and in the west coast-districts the climate is more uniform and more temperate. Northern Norway, with its gulf stream coast, presents the same general climatic conditions as Western and Southern Norway; the inland region of extreme cold is limited because of the very limited inland area, which also is very sparsely populated.[3]

The population of Norway[4] is very unevenly distributed, the north being rather thinly settled. The area of Norway is 124,495 square miles, or somewhat more than that of Wisconsin and Illinois together. About four per cent of this, however, is covered by lakes, and the average number of inhabitants to the square mile is only seventeen. The corresponding figures of inhabitants to the square mile for Sweden is twenty-eight; for Denmark, however, it is one hundred and forty-eight, and for all Europe, it is ninety-eight. The density of population is greatest in Larvik and Jarlsberg on the south (barring the cities of Christiania and Bergen). In these provinces there are one hundred and sixteen inhabitants to the square mile. In Hedemarken the number falls to twelve. The western fjord districts, those of Trondhjem Fjord, the Sogne Fjord and the Hardanger Fjord are thickly populated.

Norway is a land of fjords and lakes, of mountains and glacier expanses. Less than one-fourth of the country is capable of cultivation, and eighty per cent of this is forest land. This leaves less than five per cent under actual cultivation. We may compare again with Denmark, where seventy-six per cent of the land is cultivated, while in all Europe the ratio is forty per cent.

Norway’s climate is noted for its healthfulness,[5] and its inhabitants attain a higher degree of longevity than those of most other European countries. Nearly seven per cent of its people reach the age of sixty to seventy, while one per cent attain to the age of from ninety to one hundred years. That is, reckoned as a whole, about twelve per cent attain to the age of sixty years or more. This is considerable in excess of that of nearly all other European countries.

The average age in Norway is fifty, while for instance, in Italy it is thirty-five. But the expectancy is far more than this for him who passes infancy; thus if one attains to the age of fifty in Norway, one still may expect to live twenty-three years. Such is the health and the expectancy of life among our immigrants from Norway.

The predominant pursuit in Norway is agriculture, cattle farming and forest cultivation. Herein forty-eight per cent of the population seeks its maintenance. The immigrant pioneer generally selects in America the pursuit or occupation for which he has been trained in his native country. And so we find that the great majority of Norwegian immigrants have sought homes in rural communities and engaged in farming and related pursuits. In fact, more than eighty-eight per cent of our Norwegian immigrants have come from rural communities. Twenty-three per cent of the population of Norway are engaged in industries and mining. To these occupations in this country, Norway has, especially in the later period of immigration, contributed a considerable share. A little over eight per cent of her people are engaged in fishing. And so we find that a proportionately very large amount of the New England fisheries is conducted by fishermen who have come from Norway. Navigation engages six per cent of the population of Norway. In this connection I note that our warships in the Spanish-American war were many of them manned almost exclusively by Norwegian sailors;[6] and there were Norwegians in the American marine service as early as the War of Independence, as again in no small proportion in the Civil War in the sixties.

Perhaps about five per cent of Norway’s population is engaged in intellectual work. Here, too, the contribution of Norway to our population in America has been considerable, especially during the last twenty years.

Nearly all of the Norwegian population is of the Protestant faith, and the great majority of these are members of the state church, which is the Lutheran. Somewhat similar are the affiliations in America.

The constitution of Norway is liberal and the government highly democratic. In these respects the people of Norway are now perhaps as favorably circumstanced as we in America. The Norwegian readily enters into the spirit of American laws and institutions, for their laws are not essentially different from his own. Being accustomed to a high degree of freedom, he has been trained to a high conception of the responsibilities that that freedom entails. He has long been accustomed to representation and sharing in the rights of franchise, and he exercises that right as a privilege and a solemn duty. It may be said, I believe, that no people has a higher sense of right and wrong and a stronger moral incentive to right. Frauds in elections and graft in official life are yet unheard-of among our Norwegian-American citizens.

Norway is, next to Finland, the most temperate of European countries. The sale of liquor is permitted only in incorporated cities and towns, and only by an association that is organized under government supervision. It is the so-called Gothenburg system that is in use. Of the earnings of such organization the government takes five per cent, the county ten per cent and the municipality fifteen per cent, while the net profit of the association must not exceed five per cent on the investment in any one year. The hours of sale are very much restricted. Not only is there no sale of liquor on Sundays, but places of such business must close at one o’clock on Saturday and on days preceding holidays. Norway is essentially a temperate country. Statistics show that out of every thousand deaths, only one is due to drink. The Norwegian people have educated themselves to abstinence, and the temperance movement found wide support earlier in Norway than anywhere else. Det norske Totalafholds Selskab[7] was organized in 1859; ten years ago it had ten hundred and twenty branches and a hundred and thirty thousand members, while other temperance associations also have a considerable membership. Here in America, the Norwegian immigrant has taken a prominent part in legislation looking toward the restriction of the sale of intoxicating liquors,[8] and the Prohibition party finds its strongest support among the Norwegians, as it finds a relatively large number of its candidates for state and county offices from among them.

Crime conditions in Norway are similarly significant. Comparative statistics are difficult of access, but Norway’s proportion of serious offences is very low. In the whole period from 1891–1895 the total number was only two hundred and sixty-one. Norway has its poor as every country has, but it has its excellent system of taking care of the poor. Thus every municipality has a Board of Guardians (fattigkommission), which consists of the parish minister, a police officer, and several men chosen by a local board. Norway keeps her criminals and takes care of her poor; she does not send them to America, as has only too often been the case in some other countries.

Norway has a highly developed school system crowned by the Royal Frederik University at Christiania. It has compulsory education, its boards of inspection and its great Department of Public Instruction. It has its People’s High School, its Workingmen’s Colleges, and a system of secondary schools, whose curricula are still on a conservative basis. Its one University ranks with the foremost in Europe, and with it are connected various laboratories and scientific institutions, and it has a library of three hundred and fifty thousand volumes. Here too are located its Botanical Gardens, the Historical Museum, the Astronomical and Magnetic Observatory, the Meteriological Institute and the Biological Marine Station.[9] The salaries of its teachers in Middelskole Gymnasium, and of instructors and professors in the University, reckoned by the purchasing power of money, is approximately thirty per cent greater than that of our middle western universities. I shall also mention The Royal Norwegian Scientific Society at Trondhjem, founded 1760, a similar society in Christiania, founded 1857, the Bergen Museum, founded 1825, with its literary and scientific collections illustrative of the life and cultural history of Western Norway, The Norwegian National Museum in Christiania, founded 1894, similar, but more general in character, The Industrial Arts. Museum,[10] and the various archives of the Kingdom.

As to the Norwegian language I shall merely speak of its highly analytic character, in which respect it has for a long time been developing in the same direction as English, though of course, absolutely independently. Being closely cognate with English, a large part of the vocabulary of the two is of the same stock. Further, its sound system is fundamentally similar. These three considerations, especially perhaps the first, will make clear to us the reason why the Norwegian so readily learns to use the English language, and if he learns it in youth, even to the point of mastery. This is of the greatest importance, for language is in modern times the real badge of nationality. A correct use of the English language is the first and chief stamp of American nationality, the key without which the foreigner cannot enter into the spirit of American life and institutions.

Norwegian literature I cannot either discuss here. The great movements it represents in recent times are fairly well known; its significance and its broad influence are beginning to be understood. The genius of Norwegian literature is morality and truth. It expresses herein the high ethical sense of the nation, which is pagan-racial, but which is also Christian-Lutheran, a church which in its preëminent spirituality is the typical Teutonic church.

CHAPTER II
Emigration from Norway.

Emigration from Norway has in large part been transatlantic. Norway has lost by American emigration a comparatively larger portion of her population than any other country in Europe, with the exception of Ireland. The great majority of the emigrants have gone to the northwestern states and found there their future homes. In Northern Illinois, in Wisconsin and Minnesota, in Northern and Western Iowa, in North and South Dakota, they form a very large proportion of the population. Emigration to European countries has been directed chiefly to Sweden and Denmark, though not few have settled in England and Germany and some in Holland. Between 1871 and 1875 about fifteen hundred persons emigrated from Norway to Australia; the number that have gone there since that has been much smaller. These have settled chiefly in South Australia, Victoria and New Zealand. In recent years some have settled in the Argentine Republic in South America. Norwegians are found in considerable numbers in Western Canada, but the majority of these have emigrated from the Norwegian communities in the western states, especially Minnesota and North Dakota.

Norwegian emigration to the United States took the sailing of Norden and Den Norske Klippe in 1836. In 1843 it began to assume larger proportions; in that year sixteen hundred immigrants from Norway settled in the United States. During 1866–1870, a period of financial depression in Norway, there left, on an average, about fifteen thousand a year. The rate fell in the seventies, rose again in the eighties, the figure for 1882 being 29,101 persons, while it averaged over eighteen thousand per annum also for the next decade. In 1898 it was not quite five thousand, then again it rose steadily, reaching 24,461 in 1903.

The Norwegian emigration has been mostly from rural districts, day-laborers, artisans, farmers, seamen, but also those representing other pursuits. Not a few with professional or technical education have settled in America; we find them in the medical profession,[11] in the ministry,[12] in journalism, in the faculties of our colleges. All the age-classes are represented among immigrants from Norway, but by far the largest number of both men and women have come during the ages of twenty to thirty-five, and particularly the first half of these series of years.

This great emigration of the Norwegian race during the nineteenth century has, of course, very materially retarded the growth of the population in Norway, especially in the period from 1865 to 1890. The increase between 1815 and 1835 was as high as 1.34 per cent annually. From 1835 to 1865 it was 1.18 per cent, but during 1865–1890 it fell to 0.65 per cent. Since 1890 the increase has been considerable again. But during 1866–1903 the total emigration from Norway to the United States alone aggregated five hundred and twenty-four thousand. To this number should be added the children of these if we are to have a proper basis of estimation for the increase of the race in the last half century. This increase thus has been 1.40 per cent annually, that is, the race has doubled itself in fifty years. We may compare with France, where the increase has been 0.23 per cent, Russia,[13] where it has been 1.35, in Servia, where it has been 2.00 per cent, this being the highest in Europe. The increase in Sweden and Denmark is about the same as in Norway—reckoning the racial increase.

It will be of interest here to consider briefly the immigration from the Scandinavian countries as a whole.

During the years 1820–1830 not more than 283 emigrated from the Scandinavian countries to the United States. In the following decade the number only slightly exceeded two thousand. Since 1850 our statistics regarding the foreign born population are more complete. In that year we find there were a little over eighteen thousand persons in the country of Scandinavian birth. In 1880 this number had reached 440,262; while the unprecedented exodus of 1882 and the following years had by 1890 brought the number up to 933,249. Thus the immigrant population from these countries, which in 1850 was less than one per cent, had in 1890 reached ten per cent of the whole foreign element. The following table will show the proportion contributed by the countries designated for each decade since 1850:

Table I

Thus it will be seen that among European countries Scandinavia, considered as one, stands third in the number of persons contributed to the American foreign-born population, exceeding that of Scotland and Wales in 1870 and that of England in 1890. Both the Irish and the German immigration reached considerable numbers at least fifteen years before that from the North, Ireland having contributed nearly forty-three per cent of the total in 1850, and Germany twenty-six. By 1900 the Irish quota had fallen to fifteen per cent, while the German is nearly twenty-six and that from Scandinavia ten per cent. In 1870 our Scandinavian-born immigrant population was twice as large as the French and equalled the total from Holland, Switzerland, Austria, Bohemia, Italy, Hungary, Poland and Russia.[14]

The Norwegians are the pioneers in the emigration movement from the North in the nineteenth century; the Danes were the last to come in considerable numbers. Statistics, however, show that one hundred eighty-nine Danes had emigrated to this country before 1830, while there were only ninety-four from Norway and Sweden. The Norwegian foreign-born population had in 1850 reached 12,678; while that from Sweden was 3,559; and Denmark had furnished a little over eighteen hundred. The Danish immigration was not over five thousand a year until 1880 and has never reached twelve thousand. The Swedish immigration received a new impulse in 1852; it was five thousand in 1868; it reached its climax of 64,607 in 1882. According to Norwegian statistics the emigration from Norway to the United States was six thousand and fifty in 1853, but according to our census reports did not reach five thousand before 1866; the highest figure, 29,101, was reached in 1882 (according to our census).[15]

The total emigration from the Scandinavian countries to America between 1820 and 1903 was 1,617,111. This remarkable figure becomes doubly remarkable when we stop to consider that the population of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden is only two and one-half per cent of the total population of Europe; yet they have contributed nearly ten per cent of our immigrant population. There are in this country nearly one-third as many Scandinavians (counting those of foreign birth and foreign parentage both) as in the Scandinavian countries; for the German element the ratio is one to thirteen.

At this point I may refer the reader to the table in Appendix I of this volume, showing the growth and distribution of the Scandinavian factor, especially in the northwestern states, since 1850. Table I shows Wisconsin as having almost as large a Scandinavian population in 1850 as all the rest of the country. Wisconsin was the destination of the Norwegian immigrant from the time emigration began to assume larger proportions, and it held the lead for twenty-five years. Iowa and Southern Minnesota began entering into competition prominently since 1852 and 1855 respectively. The growth of Swedish immigration in the fifties and sixties gave the lead to Minnesota by 1870, Illinois taking second place in 1890. Returning now to the Norwegian immigration specifically, it may be observed that it was directed to the Northwest down to recent years, almost to the exclusion of the rest of the country. The reader may now be referred to Table II in the Appendix, which shows the growth of the Norwegian population in each state since 1850.

This table tells its own story. In New England the Norwegian factor is unimportant. There has been a high ratio of growth in New York and New Jersey since 1880, but the total number is not large. In the rest of the Atlantic seaboard states, as in the gulf states, the Norwegian population has remained almost stationary at a very low figure. Such is also the case with the inland states of the South, as in the Southwest. The effort to direct Norwegian immigration to Texas, which goes back to the forties, has been productive of only meagre results. Even Kansas is too far south for the Norwegian. In the extreme West, however, considerable numbers of Norwegians have established homes since about 1882, particularly in California, Oregon and Washington, since 1895 also in Montana, and in recent years even in the extreme North, in Alaska.

What were the influences that directed the Norwegian immigrants so largely to the Northwest in the early period and down to 1890?

The great majority came for the sake of bettering their material condition. They came here to found a home and to make a living. Moreover, as I have observed above, immigrants in their new home generally enter the same pursuits and engage in the same occupations in which they were engaged in their native country.

Three-fourths of the population of Norway live in the rural districts and are mostly engaged in some form of farming.[16] Thus seventy-two per cent of the Norwegian immigrants are found in the rural districts and in towns with less than twenty-five thousand population. The fact that the influx of the immigrants from Norway coincided with the opening up of the middle western states resulted in the settlement of those states by Norwegian immigrants. Land could be had for almost nothing in the West. Land-seekers from New England, New York and Pennsylvania were in those days flocking to the West.[17] About ninety per cent of the Norwegian immigrants at that time were land-seekers. As a rule long before he emigrated the Norseman had made up his mind to settle in Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, or Minnesota.

CHAPTER III
The Earliest Immigrants from Norway, 1620 to 1825.

Our data regarding Norwegian emigration to America prior to 1825 are very fragmentary, but it is possible to trace that emigration as far back as 1624.[18] In that year a small colony of Norwegians was established in New Jersey on the site of the present city of Bergen.[19] While it is not known that the names of any of these first colonists have come down to us, we do have the name of one Norwegian, who visited the American coast on a voyage of exploration in the year 1619, that is, the year before the landing of the Mayflower. In the early part of 1619 King Christian IV of Denmark fitted out two ships for the purpose of finding a northwest passage to Asia. The names of the ships were Eenhjörningen and Lampreren, and the commander was a Norwegian, Jens Munk, who was born at Barby, Norway, in 1579. With sixty-six men Jens Munk sailed from Copenhagen, May ninth, 1619. During the autumn of that year and the early part of the following year he explored Hudson Bay and took possession of the surrounding country in the name of King Christian, calling it Nova Dania. The expedition was, however, a failure, and all but three of the party perished from disease and exposure to cold in the winter of 1620. The three survivors, among whom was the commander, Jens Munk, returned to Norway in September, 1620.[20]

In the early days of the New Netherlands colony, Norwegians sometimes came across in Dutch ships and settled among the Dutch. The names of at least two such have been preserved in the Dutch colonial records. They are Hans Hansen and Claes Carstensen (possibly originally Klaus Kristenson). The former emigrated in a Dutch ship in 1633 and joined the Dutch colony in New Amsterdam. His name appears in the colonial records variously as Hans Noorman, Hans Hansen de Noorman, Hans Bergen, Hans Hansen von Bergen, and Hans Hansen von Bergen in Norwegen. Hans Bergen became the ancestor of a large American family by that name.[21] Claes Carstensen’s name appears variously as Claes Noorman, Claes Carstensen Noorman and Claes Van Sant, the latter being the Norwegian name Sande in Jarlsberg, where Claes Carstenson was born, 1607. He came to America about 1640 and settled a few years later on fifty-eight acres of land on the site of the present Williamsburg. The ministerial records of the old Dutch Reformed Church in New York state that Claes Carstensen was married April 15, 1646, to Helletje Hen dricks. The latter was, it seems, a sister of Annecken Hendricks, who was there married on February first, 1650, to Jan Arentzen van der Bilt, the colonial ancestor of Commodore Vanderbilt. Annecken Hendricks is further designated as being from Bergen, Norway, the names “Helletje” and “Annecken” being Dutch diminutive forms of the Norwegian Helen and Anne. Claes Carstensen died November sixth, 1679.

About the year 1700 there were a number of families of Norwegian and Danish descent living in New York. In 1704 a stone church was erected by them on the corner of Broadway and Rector Streets. The property was later sold to Trinity Church, the present churchyard occupying the site of the original church.[22] Prof. R. B. Anderson, speaking of these people, says, that they were probably mostly Norwegians and not Danes, for those of their descendants with whom he has spoken have all claimed Norwegian descent. The pastor who ministered to the spiritual wants of this first Scandinavian Lutheran congregation in America was a Dane by the name of Rasmus Jensen Aarhus. He died on the southwest coast of Hudson Bay, February twentieth, 1720.

In 1740 Norwegian Moravians took part in the founding of a Moravian colony at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and in 1747 of one at Bethabara, North Carolina. At Bethlehem these Norwegian (and Swedish and Danish) Moravians came in contact with their kinsmen, the Swedish Lutherans of Delaware and adjoining parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The Swedes on the Delaware had lost their independence in 1656. New Sweden as a political state existed but sixteen years. Ecclesiastically, however, the Lutherans of New Sweden remained subject to the state church at home for one hundred and fifty years more, and linguistically the colony was Swedish nearly as long. In the church records of this colony there appear not a few Norwegian names, particularly in the later period. We know that Norwegians in considerable numbers came to America and joined the Delaware Swedes in the eighteenth century. Gothenburg, which lies not far distant from the province of Smaalenene, was at the time, and has continued to be, the regular Swedish sailing port for America-bound ships.

One of the most prominent members of the Bethabara Colony was Dr. John M. Calberlane, born 1722 in Trondhjem, Norway. He came to New York in 1753, having sailed from London on the ship Irene, June thirteenth, arriving on September ninth. Dr. Calberlane’s name occupies a foremost place among the old colonial physicians; he was a man of much ability, noble in character and untiring in his devotion to the welfare of his fellow colonists. On July twenty-eighth, 1759, he himself succumbed to a contagious fever that visited the settlement. In a sermon delivered on Easter Sunday, 1760, Bishop Spangenberg gave public recognition of Calberlane’s service in his short life of six years in the colony.[23]

Other Norwegians among these Moravian colonists were: Susanna Stokkeberg, from Söndmöre, Norway, born 1715, who came to America in 1744 with her husband, Abraham Reinke, a Swede, to whom she had been married that year in Stockholm. Reinke is reputed to have been an able preacher of the gospel, the two laboring together in the congregations of Bethlehem, Nazareth, Philadelphia, and Lancaster. She died in 1758, he in 1760, leaving a son, Abraham Reinke. Peter Peterson, who was born in Norway in 1728, and had joined the church in London, came to America as a sailor on the ship Irene in 1749. He died in 1750. Jens Wittenberg, a tanner from Christiania, born 1719, came on the Irene in 1754; he died in the colony, 1788. Martha Mans (probably Monsdatter), from Bergen, born 1716, came on the Irene in 1749. She lived in Bethabara as a teacher and religious adviser until 1773. At the same time, also, came Enert Enerson, a carpenter, while in 1759 came Catherine Kalberlahn, and in 1762 Christian Christensen, a shoemaker, from Christiana. The latter was born in 1718; he had lived some years in Holland before coming to America. The year of his death is 1777. Erik Ingebretsen came over June twenty-second, 1750, via Dover, having been on the ocean six weeks, a remarkably short passage for that time.[24]

The names of several Norwegians are recorded who served in the War of the Revolution. Thus under John Paul Jones served Thomas Johnson, who was born 1758, the son of a pilot in Mandal, Norway. The New England Historical Register, Volume XXVIII, pages 18–21, gives an account of Johnson’s career in the American marine, from which we learn that he was among those who served on board the Bon Homme Richard in her cruise in 1779, having been transferred by Paul Jones from the Ranger. Later he went with Paul Jones to the Serapis and the Alliance and finally to the Ariel. With the last ship he arrived in Philadelphia February eighteenth, 1781. For a fuller account of Johnson’s career the interested reader is referred to the source of which mention has already been made.

Thomas Johnson lived to the good old age of ninety-three, dying July twelfth, 1807, in the United States Naval Hospital in Philadelphia. He had been a pensionist here for a number of years, being known generally by the nickname “Paul Jones.” A biography of Johnson written by John Henry Sherburne was published at Washington in 1825, to which I have, however, not had access. Another Norwegian by the name of Lewis Brown (Lars Bruun) also served under John Paul Jones. I lack further particulars, however, regarding Brown, except that he is spoken of in Sherburne’s book, Life of Thomas Johnson.

A Norwegian sailor, Captain Iverson, settled in Georgia some time about the close of the eighteenth century. United States Senator Iverson from Georgia was a grandson of this Norwegian sailor pioneer in Georgia.[25] About 1805 another sailor, Torgus Torkelson Gromstu, from Gjerpen, near Skien, Norway, settled in New York.

In my article on “The Danish Contingent in the Population of Early Iowa,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics, 1906, I spoke of a society, styling itself Scandinavia, as having been organized in New York City on June twenty-seventh, 1844. I there designated this as the earliest organization of the kind in this country. This I find now to be incorrect. As early as 1769 the Societas Scandinaviensis was founded in Philadelphia. The membership of this society was made up of Swedes, Norwegians and Danes, the first of these presumably being in the majority. The first president of the society was Abraham Markoe (Markö), a Norwegian. One of the memorable events in the history of the society was a farewell reception given in “City Tavern” on December eleventh, 1782, in honor of Baron Axel Ferson, hero of the Battle of Yorktown. The committee of seven appointed to present the invitation and also to wait upon General George Washington at Hasbrouch House, Newburg, with a view of securing his presence consisted of the following: Captain Abraham Markoe, Sakarias Paulsen, Andreasen Taasinge, Rev. Andrew Goeranson, Jacob Van der Weer, John Stille and Andrew Keen. Says the chronicler of the event:

“This event was one of the most glorious in the Society’s history. The reception was held at the City Tavern, Wednesday evening, December eleventh, 1782. The President of the St. Andrew’s Society, Rev. Wm. Smith, D. D., lauded the bravery of the Baron and his men at the Battle of Yorktown, whereupon General Washington in thanking the members of the Society for their forethought in tendering the reception to the noble officer (he subsequently decorated Ferson with the “Order of the Cincinnati” for valor displayed) expressed his pleasure at being present among the people of his forefathers’ blood, as he claimed descent from the family of Wass, who emigrated from Denmark in the year A. D. 970, and settled in the County Durham, England, where they built a small town, calling it Wass-in-ga-tun (town of Wass.)”[26]

In January, 1783, General George Washington was elected honorary member of the Society on account of his Norse ancestry. On the twenty-sixth of August, that year, a banquet was given at the City Tavern under the auspices of the Society, in celebration of the recognition by Sweden, Norway, and Denmark of the independence of the United States of America. John Stille was for many years secretary of the Society; after his death in 1802 all traces of it seem to have vanished. Just when the Societies Scandinaviensis ceased to exist, the Historian cannot say. On February twentieth, 1868, eighteen gentlemen, all of Scandinavian birth and residents of Philadelphia, met together for the purpose of forming a society, and The Scandinavian Society of Philadelphia was founded, an organization which regards itself a continuation of the original society. The chief object of the Society is benevolence.

The name of at least one Norwegian who fell in the early wars against the Indians has come down to us. Frank Peterson, who had enlisted on the fifteenth of June, 1808, was among those who fell at Fort Dearborn in 1812, among the “first martyrs of the West,” in an attack by five hundred Pottawattamie Indians. In this battle two-thirds of the whites were killed and the rest taken prisoners.

At a later date some other names also appear, but those given are the only ones of which we have any record. I shall mention here that of Ole Haugen, who probably was the first Norwegian to settle in the State of Massachusetts. Haugen was from Bergen, Norway, and located in Middlesex County, that state, in 1815. Alexander Paaske, himself an early immigrant from Bergen, living in Lowell, Mass., and who was present at Haugen’s deathbed, is the source of the above fact. Though going beyond the scope of our brief survey of this earliest immigration, it may be of interest here to know that as early as 1817, a girl from Voss, Norway, Anna Vetlahuso, emigrated to America with her husband, a German sailor in Bergen, and settled somewhere in South America. The next recorded names in the order of emigration to the United States are Kleng Peerson and Knud Olson Eide, who in 1821 became the advance guard of a group of fifty-two emigrants that in 1825 founded the first Norwegian settlement in this country. It is of this sailing and the leaders of this group that I now wish to speak; of Peerson I shall give a brief account below.

CHAPTER IV
The Sloopers of 1825. The First Norwegian Settlement in America. Kleng Peerson.

The story of the Sloopers from Stavanger, Norway, who came to America in 1825, has often been told; I shall therefore be very brief in my account of that expedition. Under causes of emigration I shall have occasion below to note briefly some of the circumstances that seem to have led to their departure for America in that year. The director of the expedition and the chief owner of the boat was Lars Larson i Jeilane; the captain was Lars Olsen. The company consisted of fifty-two persons, all but one being natives of Stavanger and vicinity; the one exception was the mate, Nels Erikson, who came from Bergen. Relative to the leading spirit in this first group of emigrants, Lars Larson, I shall say here: He was born near Stavanger, September twenty-fourth, 1787. He became a sailor, was captured in the Napoleonic wars and kept a prisoner in London for seven years. Being released in 1814, he remained in London, however, till 1815, when he and several other prisoners returned to Norway. In London they had been converted to the Quaker faith by Mrs. Margaret Allen, and upon returning to Stavanger, Lars Larson, Elias Tastad, Thomas Helle and Metta Helle became the founders of the first Quaker society in that city, a society which is still in existence.

In 1821 the Stavanger Quakers began to form plans for emigrating to America. It seems that Kleng Peerson and Knud Eide, whom we have mentioned above, were deputed to go to America for the purpose of learning something of the country with a view to planting there a Quaker colony. Kleng Peerson returned to Stavanger in 1824 with a favorable report and many of the members of the Quaker colony began to make preparations for emigrating to the locality selected by Peerson, namely, Orleans County, New York State. A sloop of only forty-five tons capacity which they called Restaurationen, built in Hardanger, was purchased and loaded with a cargo of iron and made ready for the journey. Larson himself had married in December, 1824, Georgiana Person, who was born October 19, 1803, on Fogn, a small island near Stavanger. Besides him there were five other heads of families. On the fourth of July, 1825, they set sail from Stavanger. The following fifty-two persons made up the party: Lars Larson and wife Martha Georgiana; Lars Olson, who was captain of the boat, Cornelius Nelson Hersdal, wife and four children;[27] Daniel Stenson Rossadal, wife and five children;[28] Thomas Madland, wife and three children,[29] Nels Nelson Hersdal and wife Bertha, Knud Anderson Slogvig, Jacob Anderson Slogvig, Gudmund Haugaas, Johannes Stene, wife and two children, Öien Thorson (Thompson) wife and three children,[30] Simon Lima, wife and three children, Henrik Christopherson Hervig, and wife, Ole Johnson, George Johnson, Thorsten Olson Bjaaland, Nels Thorson, Ole Olson Hetletvedt, Sara Larson (sister of Lars Larson), Halvor Iverson, Andrew Stangeland, the mate, Nels Erikson, and the cook, Endre Dahl.

After a perilous voyage of fourteen weeks they landed in New York, October ninth. An account of that voyage, which also it seems was a rather adventurous one, was given by the New York papers at the time; it was reproduced in Norwegian translation in Billed-Magazin in 1869, whence it has been copied in other works. The arrival of this first party of Norwegian immigrants, and in so small a boat, created nothing less than a sensation at the time, as we may infer from the wide attention the event received in the eastern press. Thus the New York Daily Advertiser for October twelfth, 1825, under the head lines, “A Novel Sight,” gives an account of the boat, the destination of the immigrants, the country they came from, their appearance, etc. For this citation I may refer the reader to page 39 of my article on “The Coming of the Norwegians to Iowa” in The Iowa Journal of History and Politics, 1905, or to R. B. Anderson’s First Chapter of Norwegian Immigration, 1896, 70–71.

In New York the immigrants met Mr. Joseph Fellows, a Quaker, from whom they purchased land in Orleans County, New York. It seems to have been upon the suggestion of Mr. Fellows that they were induced to settle here, although it is possible that the land had already been selected for them by Kleng Peerson, who was in New York at the time. The price to be paid for the land was five dollars an acre, each head of a family and adult person purchasing forty acres. The immigrants not being able to pay for the land, Mr. Fellows agreed to let them redeem it in ten annual installments. For the further history of the colony, with which we are here not so much concerned, the reader is referred to Knud Langeland’s Nordmaendene i Amerika, Chicago, 1889, pp. 10–19, or to Anderson’s First Chapter, pp. 77–90.

We have already mentioned Kleng Peerson, a name familiar to every student of Norwegian pioneer history. Much has been written about this pathfinder in the West, and romance and legend already adorn his memory. It would be interesting to recount what we know of his life in America, but as this has been dealt with at length by Professor R. B. Anderson in his monograph on Norwegian Immigration, which is in large part devoted to the slooper’s history, I may refer the interested reader to this work. Symra (Decorah, Iowa) for 1906 also contains a brief, somewhat eulogistic account in Norwegian of Peerson’s stay in New York and his journey of exploration to Illinois, Missouri, and Texas. The briefest facts I may, however, relate here.

Kleng Peerson was born on the seventeenth of May, 1782, on the estate Hesthammer in Tysvær Parish, Province of Ryfylke. In 1820 we find him in Stavanger, where William Allen, an English Quaker, was then organizing a Quaker society. In 1821 Kleng Peerson and a certain Knud Olson Eide were, as we have seen, commissioned, it appears, by the Quakers to go to America and examine the possibility of organizing a Norwegian colony there. The two explorers secured work in New York City, but Knud Eide fell ill and died not long after, and Peerson went west alone in quest of a suitable location for a colony. Just how far west he may have come on this first journey is not known. After some time he decided upon Orleans County on the shores of the Ontario as the best place to plant his colony, and in 1824 he returned to Norway. We have noted already the results of Peerson’s mission. When Lars Larson’s party prepared to go to America Kleng Peerson also left, but he did not take passage in Restaurationen. It seems that he embarked by way of Gothenburg and was in New York to receive the sloopers upon their arrival.

It would be natural to suppose that Peerson did not go alone from Stavanger when he returned to America via Gothenburg in 1825. After much inquiry I have also succeeded in discovering the name of one man, who, with his family, accompanied Peerson that year. This man was Björn Björnson from Stavanger, a cousin of Kleng Peerson; he brought his wife and several children with him, but left two girl twins, born in May of that year, with a relative who then lived in Tjensvold, near Stavanger. Further facts about this family will be given in the chapter on Chicago.

As Peerson seems to play no role in the founding of the Orleans County settlement, I shall leave him here. There will be occasion to speak briefly of him again later in connection with the second Norwegian settlement. I wish to add a few words here about Lars Larson, however. He and his family located in Rochester, where he became a builder of canal boats, prospered; and kept in close touch with immigrant Norwegians during the two decades of his life there. His home became a kind of Mecca for hosts of intending settlers in the New World. Larson died by accident on a canal boat in November, 1845, but his widow lived till October, 1887. They had eight children, of whom the first one, Margaret Allen, was born on the Atlantic Ocean, September second, 1825. Of her and others of Lars Larson’s descendants I shall speak briefly below. We shall now return to the settlers in Orleans County, New York.

The colony was in many respects unfortunate; it cannot be said to have prospered and has never played any important part as a colony in Norwegian-American history. But it is important as being the first, and also as being the parent of a very large and progressive Norwegian settlement founded in 1834–35 in La Salle County, Illinois, of which more below. And yet the economic conditions of the Quaker immigrants gradually became better and the future looked more promising. They felt now that America offered many advantages to the able and the capable, and they began writing encouraging letters to relatives and friends in the old country, urging them to seek their fortune here. As a result there was, if not a large, at any rate a fairly constant emigration of individuals and families from Stavanger and adjacent region during the following eight or nine years, although few seem to have come before 1829. In this year, e. g., came Gudmund Sandsberg (b. 1787) from Hjelmeland, in Ryfylke, Norway, and his wife Marie and three children, Bertha, Anna, and Torbjör.

Passage was secured in the beginning for the most part with American sailships carrying Swedish iron from Gothenburg. But as this was attended by much uncertainty, often necessitating several weeks of waiting, the intending emigrants began to go to Hamburg, where German emigration by means of regular going American packet ships had already begun. Here, however, another difficulty met them. The already somewhat heavy emigration at this port made it necessary to order passage several weeks ahead in order to insure accommodations, and failing in this, the emigrant was forced to wait there until the next packet boat should sail. And so it came about that many of the early Norwegian immigrants to America came by way of Havre, France, where passage was always certain, emigration from this point being as yet very limited.

Among those who came via Gothenburg was Gjert Hovland, a farmer from Hardanger, who left Norway with his family on the twenty-fourth of June, 1831, sailed from Gothenburg June thirtieth and arrived in New York September eighteenth. He does not seem to have gone directly to Kendall, for we find him soon after the owner of fifty acres of forest land in Morris County, New Jersey.

Gjert Hovland seems to be the first one from the province of Hardanger to emigrate to America. Other emigrants during these years are: Christian Olson, who came in 1829, settling in Kendall; Knut Evenson, wife and daughter Katherine, who emigrated in 1831 in the same ship by which Hovland came; and Ingebret Larson Narvig from Tysvær Parish, Ryfylke, who came in 1831 and two years later located in Michigan. It seems probable that also Johan Nordboe and wife from Ringebo, in Gudbrandsdalen, Norway, came to Orleans County in 1832. Nordboe was the first to emigrate from Gudbrandsdalen, a province from which actual immigration did not begin until sixteen years later.

Norwegian immigrants who came during these years generally located in Orleans County, but rarely remained there permanently. The northwestern states were just then beginning to be opened up to settlers. At this time migration from the eastern states was directed particularly to Illinois. Good government land could be had here for $1.25 an acre. The very heavily wooded land that the Norwegian immigrants in Orleans County had purchased proved very difficult of improvement, and many began to think of moving to a more favorable locality.

In 1833 Kleng Peerson, who seems to have lived in Kendall at this time, made a journey to the West, evidently for the purpose of finding a suitable site for a new settlement. He was accompanied by Ingebret Larson Narvig as far as Erie, Monroe County, Michigan, where the latter remained, Peerson continuing the journey farther west. After several months of wandering across Michigan, and down into Ohio and Indiana, he at last arrived at Chicago, then a village of about twenty huts. The marshes of Chicago did not appeal to Peerson and he went to Milwaukee, but the reports he received of the endless forests of Wisconsin soon drove him back again into Illinois. After several days’ journey on foot again west of Chicago he at last found a spot which seemed to him as if providentially designated as the proper locality for his western colony. The place was immediately south of the present village of Norway in La Salle County. His choice made, Peerson returned to Orleans County, having covered over 2,000 miles on foot since he left.

Peerson’s selection was universally approved and a considerable number of the Kendall settlers decided to move west. Among those of the sloopers who remained in New York I shall here name: Ole Johnson, Henrik C. Hervig and Andrew Stangeland, who, however, some years later bought a tract of land in Noble County, Indiana; Lars Olson located in New York City, and, as we have seen, Lars Larson settled in Rochester; Nels Erikson went back to Norway, while Öien Thompson and Thomas Madland died in Kendall in 1826, and Cornelius Hersdal died there in 1833.

CHAPTER V
The Founding of the Fox River Settlement. Personal Notes on Some of the Founders.

In the spring of 1834 Jacob Anderson Slogvig, Knud Anderson Slogvig, Gudmund Haugaas, Thorsten Olson Bjaaland, Nels Thompson,[31] Andrew (Endre) Dahl, and Kleng Peerson left for La Salle County; they became, therefore, as far as we know, the first Norwegian settlers in Illinois, and indeed in the Northwest, barring Ingebret Narvig, who had located in Michigan the year before. These men selected their land and perfected their purchase as soon as it came into market the following spring. The first two to buy land were Jacob Slogvig and Gudmund Haugaas, whose purchase is recorded under June fifteenth, 1835, the former of eighty acres, the latter one hundred and sixty acres, both in that part of what was then called Mission Township, but later came to be Rutland. On June seventeenth, Kleng Peerson’s purchase of eighty acres is recorded, as also that of his sister, Carrie Nelson, widow of Cornelius Nelson Hersdal, namely, eighty acres of land bought for her by Peerson. For this date are also recorded the purchases of Thorsten Olson Bjaaland, eighty acres, Nels Thompson, one hundred and sixty acres, in what later became Miller Township.

In 1835 Daniel Rossadal and family, Nels Nelson Hersdal, George Johnson, and Carrie Nelson Hersdal with family of seven children moved to La Salle County. Nels Hersdal secured six hundred and forty acres in exchange for one hundred acres he owned in Orleans County, New York. The slooper Thomas Madland, as we have seen, died in 1826; his widow and family of seven also moved to Illinois in 1831. Gjert Hovland came in 1835, and on June seventeenth purchased one hundred and sixty acres of land in Miller Township. Nels Hersdal purchased on September fifth Thorsten Bjaaland’s eighty acres in the same township; the latter, however, bought a hundred and sixty acres again on January sixteenth, 1836, in the same locality. The record of these purchases was copied by R. B. Anderson and printed in his book, First Chapter, etc., cited above and also in Strand’s History of the Norwegians of Illinois, page 75.

Knud Slogvig, who, as we see, came in 1834, did not buy land but somewhat later returned east and in 1835 went back to Norway. There he married a sister of the slooper, Ole Olson Hetletvedt and, as we shall have occasion to note under causes of emigration, became largely instrumental in bringing about the emigration of 1836. Baldwin’s History of La Salle County also states, page 74, that Oliver Canuteson,[32] Oliver Knutson,[32] Christian Olson, and Ole Olson Hetletvedt came to the county in 1834, but the date seems to be uncertain. With regard to Christian Olson the fact seems rather to be that he came in 1836 or possibly not till 1837, while also Hetletvedt seems to be dated about two years too early here. Among those who came in 1836 according to apparently reliable records are: Ole Olson Hetletvedt and Gudmund Sandsberg.

Relative to the founders of the Fox River Settlement, as that of La Salle County came to be called, I wish to add here the following facts of personal history: Gudmund Haugaas, one of the two first to record the purchase of land, had married Julia, the daughter of Thomas Madland, in Orleans County in 1827. She died in Rutland Township, La Salle County, in 1846 and he later married Caroline Hervig, a sister of Henrik Hervig (Harwick). He had ten children by his first wife. In Illinois he joined the Mormon Church and became an elder in that church, practicing medicine at the same time, and, it is said, with much success. He died of the cholera on the homestead near Norway in July, 1849; his widow, Caroline, survived him three years.[33]

Jacob Slogvig married Serena, daughter of Thomas Madland, in March, 1831. He became one of the founders of the Norwegian settlement in Lee County, Iowa, in 1840 (see below), later went to California, where he died in May, 1864. The widow lived until about 1897. Some time before her death she had been living at the home of her son, Andrew J. Anderson, at San Diego, California.

Mrs. Carrie Nelson had seven children, of whom Anne, Nels, Inger, and Martha were born in Norway; Sarah, Peter, and Amelia were born at Kendall, New York. Carrie Nelson died in 1848. The son, Nels Nelson, born 1816, married Catherine Iverson about 1840; he died in Sheridan, Illinois, in August, 1893, as the last male member of the sloop party, being survived by his widow and four of twelve children. The daughter Inger was in 1836 married to John S. Mitchell, of Ottawa, Illinois; Martha married Beach Fallows, a settler of 1835, and Sarah married in 1849 Canute Marsett, an immigrant of 1837, who some years later became a Mormon bishop at Ephraim, Utah. Their oldest son, Peter Cornelius Marsett, born at Salt Lake City June second, 1850, was the first child born of Norwegian parents in Utah.[34] Peter C. Nelson, the youngest son of Carrie Nelson, born 1830, later settled in Larned, Kansas, where he died in 1904. Sara Thompson, oldest daughter of Öien Thompson, and born 1818, married George Olmstead in 1857 in La Salle County; he died in 1849, and in 1855 she married William W. Richey. Mrs. Richey settled in Guthrie Center, Iowa, in 1882, where she lived until recently. Benson C. Olmsted, Charles B. Olmsted and Will F. Richey of Guthrie Center, Iowa, are sons of Mrs. Sara Richey. Nels Thompson died in La Salle County, Illinois, in July, 1863. Daniel Rossadal and his wife, Bertha, both died in La Salle County in 1854. Nels Nelson Hersdal was born in July, 1800, and his wife, Bertha, in May, 1804; they were married a few months before the departure of the sloop. He, “Big Nels”, as he was called, came to Illinois in 1835, returned to New York and did not bring his family to Illinois until 1846, though he moved west before. He lived until 1886, his wife having died in 1882. Peter Nelson and Ira Nelson of La Salle County, are their sons. George Johnson died from cholera in 1849.

Andrew Dahl went to Utah in the fifties, being one of the earliest pioneers of that state. A son of his, A. S. Anderson, was a member of the Utah Constitutional Convention in 1895. Ole Hetletvedt, who located at Niagara Falls, not therefore in Orleans County, had three sons, Porter C., Sören L. and James W. The first of these, born 1831, became captain and later colonel in Company F, 36th Regiment, Illinois Volunteers, in the War of the Rebellion, and was Acting Brigadier General when he was killed in the Battle of Franklin (Tenn.). Sören Olson was killed in the Battle of Murfreesboro. James Olson, who also went to the front, lived to return to his home after the war. Porter Olson lies buried at Newark, Illinois, where a fitting monument adorns his grave. Finally I wish to add that Margaret Allen, the “sloop girl” born on the Atlantic, daughter of Lars Larson, married John Atwater in Rochester, New York, in 1857. They afterwards moved to Chicago, where he died in the early nineties, while Mrs. Atwater is, I believe, still living at Western Springs, Cook County. We shall now return to our settlement in La Salle County.

We have given above a brief account of the founding of the Fox River settlement. Out of that nucleus of about thirty persons, whom we know to have come there in 1834–35 grew up one of the largest and most prosperous of rural communities in the country. The settlement developed rapidly, before many years extending into Kendall, Grundy and DeKalb counties and becoming a distributing point in the westward march of Norwegian immigration during the following years. The settlement in Orleans County, New York, ceased to grow, the objective point of immigrants from Norway had been changed and the Fox River region received large accessions, especially during the year 1836.

Immigration from Norway which heretofore had been more or less sporadic, in which individuals and very small groups are found to take part, now enters upon a new phase, begins in fact to assume the form of organized effort. The year 1836 inaugurated this change, while in 1837 there was something approaching an exodus from certain localities in Western Norway. The desire to emigrate to America had also now spread far beyond the original center, at Stavanger; the source of emigration was transferred to a more northerly region and with it, as we have had occasion to observe above, the course of settlement in this country is not only directed to a more westerly region, Illinois, but also soon extends into the northern border counties of Illinois and into southern and southeastern Wisconsin.

As this increased immigration is historically associated with the names of two of those whom we have already met as pioneers in New York, New Jersey and Illinois, a brief account of their share in the promotion of immigration from Norway will be in place. These two are Gjert Hovland and Knud Slogvig. We have seen that the former of these came to America in 1831, being probably the first immigrant from Hardanger. His name deserves special mention as an early promoter of emigration from southwestern Norway, especially from his own province. He was a man of much enlightenment and liberalmindedness to whom America’s free institutions made a strong appeal. He wrote letters home to friends urging emigration and these were circulated far and wide. In one of these letters from Morris County, New Jersey, 1835, he writes enthusiastically of American laws, and he contrasts its spirit of liberty with the oppressions of the class aristocracy in Norway. He advised all who could do so to come to America, where it was permitted to settle wherever one chose, he says. Hovland was well known in several parishes in the Province of South Bergenhus, and hundreds of copies of his letters were circulated there; they aroused the greatest interest among the people and were no small factor in leading many in that region to emigrate in 1836–37.

Thus it may be noted specifically that in 1836 a lay preacher travelling in Voss had in his possession one of Gjert Hovland’s letters, which letter was read by Nils Röthe, Nils Bolstad and John H. Björgo and others. These three since said that it was the reading of Hovland’s letter which induced them to immigrate.[35] Gjert Hovland, as we have seen, came to Illinois in 1835. His purchase of one hundred and sixty acres of land in the present Miller Township was recorded on June seventeenth of that year, the same date that the purchases of Kleng Peerson, Nels Thompson and Thorsten Bjaaland were recorded. Gjert Hovland lived there till his death in 1870.

The other name, that I referred to, is that of Knud Anderson Slogvig, who undoubtedly was the chief promoter of immigration in 1836. He had come in the sloop in 1825, and, as we have seen, settled in La Salle County in 1834. In 1835 he returned to Skjold, Norway, and there married a sister of Ole O. Hetletvedt, the slooper whom we find as one of the early pioneers of La Salle County. While there, people came to talk with him about America from all parts of southwestern Norway; and a large number in and about Stavanger decided to emigrate. Slogvig’s return may be said to have started the “America-fever” in Norway, though it took some years before it reached the central and the eastern parts of the country. It was his intention to return to America in 1836, and a large party was preparing to emigrate with him.

In the spring of that year the two brigs, Norden and Den Norske Klippe, were fitted out from Stavanger. The former sailed on the first Wednesday after Pentecost, arriving in New York July twelfth, 1836. The latter sailed a few weeks later. They carried altogether two hundred immigrants, most of whom went directly to La Salle County. Of these two brigs I shall speak again in a subsequent chapter.

I have above given some of the facts of Knud Slogvig’s personal history. Having already spoken of one element in the cause of emigration I believe it will be in place to give a fuller account at this point of the various general and special factors that have been instrumental in bringing about the coming to America of such a large part of the population of Norway in the 19th century.

CHAPTER VI
Causes of Emigration from Norway. General Factors, Economic.

What are the causes that have brought about the exodus from Norway and in general from the Scandinavian countries in the 19th century? The question is not a simple one to answer; for the causes have been many and varied, and it would be impossible in the following pages to discuss all the circumstances and influences that have operated to promote the northern emigration and directed it to America. Perhaps there is something in the highly developed migratory instinct of Indo-European peoples. Especially has this instinct characterized the Germanic branch, whether it be Goth or Vandal, Anglo-Saxon, Viking or Norman,[36] or their descendants, the Teutonic peoples of modern times, by whom chiefly the United States has been peopled and developed.

Of tangible motives, one that has everywhere been a fundamental factor in promoting emigration from European countries in modern times has been the prospect of material betterment. Where no barriers have been put against the emigration of the poor or the ambitious, unless special causes have arisen to create discontent with one’s condition, the extent to which European countries have contributed to our immigrant population may be measured fairly closely by the economic conditions at home. As far as the Northern countries are concerned I would class all these causes under two heads: the first will comprise all those conditions, natural and artificial, that can be summarized under the term economic; the second will include a number of special circumstances or motives which may vary somewhat for the three countries, indeed often for the locality and the individual.

First then we may consider the causes which arise from economic conditions. These are well illustrated by the Scandinavian countries, slightly modified in each case by the operation of the special causes. Norway is a land of mountains, these making up in the fact fifty-nine per cent of its total area, while forty-four per cent of the soil of Sweden is unproductive. The winters are long and severe, the cold weather frequently sets in too early for the crops to ripen; with crop failure comes lack of work for the laboring classes, and, burdened by heavy taxation, as was the Norwegian farmer only too often in the middle of the last century, debt and impoverishment for the holders of the numerous encumbered smaller estates. In Norway, especially, the rewards of labor are meagre and the opportunities for material betterment small.[37] “Hard times” and the inability of the country to support the rapidly increasing population has, then, been a most potent factor.[38] The same will hold true of Sweden, though in a somewhat less degree. Denmark is better able to support a population of one hundred and forty-eight to the square mile than Sweden one of twenty-eight or Norway one of eighteen.[39]

In this connection compare above the statistics of immigration from the three countries, which are much lower for Denmark than for Norway and Sweden. The Danes at home are a contented people, and it is noticeable also that it is they who are most conservative here, who foster the closest relation with the old home, and who consequently become Americanized last. The Norwegians are the most discontented, are readiest for a change, are quickest to try the new; and it is they who most readily break the bonds that bind them to their native country, who most quickly adapt themselves to the conditions here, and who most rapidly become Americanized.

Professor R. B. Anderson, in his book on the early Norwegian immigration[40] puts religious persecution as the primary cause of emigration from Norway. I cannot possibly believe that even in the immigration of the first half of the nineteenth century religious persecution was, except in a few cases, the primary or even a very important cause in the Scandinavian countries. In conversation with and in numerous letters from pioneers and their descendants, especially in Iowa and Wisconsin, I have found that the hope of larger returns for one’s labor is everywhere given as the main motive, sometimes as the only one. Whether it be the pioneers of La Salle County, Illinois, in the thirties, those of Rock or Dane counties, Wisconsin, in the forties, or the Norwegian settlers of Clayton and Winneshiek counties, Iowa, in the late forties and the fifties; the causes are everywhere principally economic. But letters written by pioneers and by those about to emigrate testify amply to the fact that it was the hard times that was the chief cause. And the same applies almost as generally to the Swedes; among the Danes the economic factor has not operated so extensively, though here, also, it was the preponderating cause.

A Norwegian journal, Billed-Magazin, published in Chicago in 1869–70 and edited by Professor Svein Nilsen, offers much that throws light on this question. It contains brief accounts of the early Norwegian immigration and the earliest settlements, a regular column of news from the Scandinavian countries, interviews with pioneers, etc. In one interview, Ole Nattestad, who sailed in 1837 from Vægli, Numedal, and became the founder of the fourth Norwegian settlement in America, that of Jefferson Prairie in Rock County, Wisconsin, and the neighboring Boone County in Illinois, describes his experience as a farmer in Numedal and how the difficulty of making any headway finally drove him to emigrate to America.[41] The statement of another pioneer I quote in its entirety.[42] It is that of John Nelson Luraas, who came from Tin in Telemarken, to Muskego, Wisconsin, in 1839, and in 1843 moved to Dane County, Wisconsin. He says:

I was my father’s oldest son, and consequently heir to the Luraas farm. It was regarded as one of the best in that neighborhood, but there was a $1,400 mortgage on it. I had worked for my father until I was twenty-five years old, and had had no opportunity of getting money. It was plain to me that I would have a hard time of it, if I should take the farm with the debt resting on it, pay a reasonable amount to my brothers and sisters, and assume the care of my aged father. I saw to my horror how one farm after the other fell into the hands of the lendsman and other money-lenders, and this increased my dread of attempting farming. But I got married and had to do something. Then it occurred to me that the best thing might be to emigrate to America. I was encouraged in this purpose by letters written by Norwegian settlers in Illinois who had lived two years in America. Such were the causes that led me to emigrate and I presume the rest of our company were actuated by similar motives.[43]

In a letter written by Andreas Sandsberg at Hellen, Norway, September twelfth, 1831, to Gudmund Sandsberg in Kendall, New York, the former complains of the hard times in Norway. In the spring of 1836 the second party of emigrants from Stavanger County came to America. On the 14th of May of that year Andreas Sandsberg wrote his brother Gudmund in America as follows:

A considerable number of people are now getting ready to go to America from this Amt. Two brigs are to depart from Stavanger in about eight days from now, and will carry these people to America, and if good reports come from them, the number of emigrants will doubtless be still larger next year. A pressing and general lack of money entering into every branch of industry, stops or at least hampers business and makes it difficult for many people to earn the necessaries of life. While this is the case on this side of the Atlantic there is hope for abundance on the other, and this I take it, is the chief cause of this growing disposition to emigrate.[44]

Ole Olson Menes, who came to America in 1845, is cited in Billed-Magazin, 1870, page 130, as follows, illustrating the prominence of the economic cause nine years later:

The emigrants of the preceding year (1844) ... wrote home ... and told of the fertility of the soil, the cheap prices of land and of good wages. In a letter which I received from Iver Hove, he writes that there they raise thirty-five bushels of wheat per acre, and the grass is so thick that one can easily cut enough in one day for winter feed for the cow. Such things fell to our liking, and many looked forward with eager longing to the distant West, which was pictured as the Eden that loving Providence had destined as a home for the workingman of Norway, so oppressed with cares and want.

Of those here cited, Nattestad was from Numedal, Luraas from Telemarken, Menes from Sogn, while Sandsberg came from Ryfylke. But the conditions were the same also in other provinces. In 1844, Hans C. Tollefsrude and wife emigrated from Land. Of the cause of his emigrating and that of early emigration from Land in general, his son Christian H. Tollefsrude of Rolfe, Iowa, writes me:

The causes were, no personal means and no prospect even securing a home in their native district, Torpen, Nordre Land (letter of July 27, 1904).

Rev. Abraham Jacobson of Decorah, Iowa, a pioneer himself, writes:

Reasons for emigrating were mostly economic, very few if any religious.... Wages here were at the very least double that in Norway, and generally much more than that.

Of the emigration from Ringsaker, I may cite Simon Simerson of Belmond, Iowa:

The causes were economic. In the case of my parents, they came here to create the home that they saw no chance of securing in the mother country. (Letter of Oct. 12, 1904.)

Similar evidence might be adduced for other districts and for all the older settlements throughout the Northwest. At a meeting held at the home of Ole O. Flom in Stoughton, Wisconsin, on July twenty-eighth, 1908, when the present writer read a paper on “Early Norwegian Immigration,” testimony to the same effect was given by old pioneers there present. There is no need of further multiplying the evidence.

A highly developed spirit of independence has always been a dominant element in the Scandinavian character,—I have reference here particularly to his desire for personal independence, that is, independence in his condition in life. Nothing is so repugnant to him as indebtedness to others and dependence on others. An able-bodied Scandinavian who was a burden to his fellows was well-nigh unheard of. By the right of primogeniture the paternal estate would go to the oldest son. The families being frequently large, the owning of a home was to a great many practically an impossibility under wage conditions as they were in the North in the first half and more of the preceding century.

Thus the Scandinavian farmer’s son, with his love of personal independence and his strong inherent desire to own a home, finding himself so circumstanced in his native country that there was little hope of his being able to realize this ambition except in the distant uncertain future, listens, with a willing ear to descriptions of America, with its quick returns and its great opportunities. And so he decides to emigrate. And this he is free to do for the government puts no barrier upon his emigrating. This trait has impelled many a Scandinavian to come and settle in America; and it is a trait that is the surest guarantee of the character of his citizenship. Here, too, a social factor merits mention.

While the nobility was abolished in Norway in 1814, the lines between the upper and lower classes, the wealthy and the poor, were tightly drawn and social classes were well defined. And while Norway is today the most democratic country in Europe, and Sweden and Denmark are also thoroughly liberal (in part through the influence of America and American-Scandinavians), a titled aristocracy still exists in these countries. The extreme deference to those in superior station or position that custom and existing conditions enforced upon those in humbler condition was repugnant to them. Not infrequently have pioneers given this as one cause for emigrating in connection with that of economic advantage.

CHAPTER VII
Causes of Emigration Continued. Special Factors. Religion as a Cause. Emigration Agents.

In the class of special causes which have influenced the Scandinavian emigration, political oppression has operated only in the case of the Danes in Southern Jutland.[45]

Military service, which elsewhere has often played such an important part in promoting emigration, has, in the Scandinavian countries, been only a minor factor, the period of service required being very short. Nevertheless it has in not a few cases been a secondary cause for emigrating. Those with whom I have spoken who have given this as their motive have, however, been mostly Norwegians and Swedes; but none of those who belong to the earlier period of emigration give their desire to escape military service as a cause.

Religious persecution has played a part in some cases, especially in Norway and Sweden. The state church is the Lutheran, but every sect has been tolerated since the middle of the century, in Norway since 1845. While few countries have been freer from the evil of active persecution because of religious belief, intolerance and religious narrowness have not been wanting. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, the followers of the lay preacher, Hans Nielsen Hauge, in Norway were everywhere persecuted. Hauge himself was imprisoned in Christiania for eight years. And the Jansenists in Helsingland, Sweden, were in the forties subjected to similar persecution. Thus Eric Jansen was arrested several times for conducting religious meetings between 1842–1846,—though it must in fairness be admitted that his first arrest was undoubtedly provoked by the extreme procedure of the dissenters themselves. After having been put in prison repeatedly, Jansen embarked for America in 1846 and became the founder of the communistic colony of followers at Bishopshille,[46] Henry County, Illinois. No such organized emigration took place among the Haugians, but we have no means of knowing to what extent individual emigration of the followers of Hauge took place during the three decades immediately after his death. The well-known Elling Eielson, a lay preacher and an ardent Haugian, emigrated in 1839 to Fox River, La Salle County, Illinois, and many of those who believed in the methods of Hauge and Eielson came to America in the following years.

It was persecution also that drove many Scandinavian Moravians to America in 1740 and 1747. Moravian societies had been formed in Christiania in 1737, in Copenhagen in 1739, in Stockholm in 1740, and in Bergen in 1740.[47] In 1735 German Moravians from Herrnhut, Saxony, established a colony at Savannah, Georgia.[47] In this colony there seem to have been some Danes and Norwegians. In 1740 a permanent colony was located at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and in 1747 one at Bethabara, North Carolina. Persecuted Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish Moravians took part in the founding of both these colonies.

As we have seen, the first Norwegian settlement in America was established in Kendall, Orleans County, New York, in 1825. It has been claimed that the “sloopers” were driven to emigrate by persecution at home.[48] Another writer has shown that the only one of the Stavanger Quakers who suffered for his belief prior to 1826 was Elias Tastad, and he, it seems, did not emigrate.[49] The leader of the emigrants in Restaurationen, Lars Larson i Jeilane, had spent one year in London in the employ of the noted English Quaker, William Allen. In 1818, Stephen Grellet, a French nobleman, who had become a Quaker in America, and William Allen preached in Stavanger.[49] The Quakers of Stavanger were of the poorest of the people. It is highly probable, as another writer states,[50] that Grellet, while there, suggested to them that they emigrate to America where they could better their condition in material things and at the same time practice their religion without violating the laws of the country. The main motive was therefore probably economic.

It is perfectly clear to me that not very many of the Orleans County colonists were devout Quakers; for we soon find them wandering apart into various other churches. Some returned to Lutheranism; those who went west became mostly Methodists or Mormons; others did not join any church; while the descendants of those who remained are to-day Methodists. The Orleans County Quakers do not seem to have even erected a meeting-house; and in Scandinavian settlements a church, however humble, is, next to a home, the first thought.[51] Nevertheless the Quakers of Stavanger did suffer annoyances, and it must be remembered that the leader of the expedition and the owner of the sloop was a devout Quaker,[52] as were also at least two other leading members of the party. Had it not been for these very men the party would probably not have emigrated, at least not at that time.

There was much persecution of the early converts to the Baptist faith in Denmark between 1850–1860; and not a few of this sect emigrated. In 1848 F. O. Nilson, one of the early leaders of the Baptist Church in Sweden, was imprisoned and later banished from the country. He fled to Denmark, and in 1851 embarked for America. In the fifties Swedish Baptists in considerable numbers came to the United States because of persecution. There are, however, very few Norwegian Baptists, and I know of no cases where persecution drove Baptists to leave Norway.

Proselyting of some non-Lutheran churches in Scandinavia has been the means of bringing many Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes to this country. In the fifties Mormon missionaries were especially active in Denmark and Norway. Their efforts did not seem to be attended by much success in Norway, though not a few converts were made among the Norwegians in the early settlements in Illinois and Iowa, as in the Fox River Settlement.[53] In Denmark, however, Mormon proselyting was more successful than in Norway. All those who accepted Mormonism emigrated to America of course, and most of them to Utah. In the years 1851, 1852, and 1853 there emigrated fourteen, three, and thirty-two Danes, respectively, to this country. But in 1854 the number rose to 691, and in the following three years to 1,736. In 1850 there were in Utah two Danes; in 1870 there were 4,957. The first Norwegian to go to Utah probably was Henrik E. Sebbe, who came to America in 1836, and went to Utah in 1848, where he became a Mormon.[53]

In 1849 a Norwegian-American, O. P. Peterson, first introduced Methodism in Norway.[54] After 1855 a regular Methodist mission was established in Scandinavia under the supervision of a Danish-American, C. B. Willerup.[55] While the Methodist church has not prospered in the Scandinavian countries, especially in Denmark and Norway, there are large numbers of Methodists among the Scandinavian immigrants in this country,[56] and the early congregations were recruited for a large part from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.

The efforts of steamship companies and emigration agents have been a powerful factor in promoting Scandinavian emigration. Through them literature advertising in glowing terms the advantages of the New World was scattered far and wide in Scandinavia. Such literature often dealt with the prosperity of Scandinavians who had previously settled in America. Letters from successful settlers were often printed and distributed broadcast. The early immigrants from the North settled largely in Illinois, Wisconsin, and, a little later, in Iowa. As clearers of the forest and tillers of the soil they contributed their large share to the development of the country. None could better endure the hardships of pioneer life on the western frontier. Knowing this, many western states began to advertise their respective advantages in the Scandinavian countries.

CHAPTER VIII
Causes of Emigration continued. The Influence of Successful Pioneers. “America-letters.” The Spirit of Adventure. Summary.

Far more influential, however, than the factors just noted were the efforts put forth by successful immigrants to induce their relatives and friends to follow them. Numerous letters were written home praising American laws and institutions, and setting forth the opportunities here offered. These letters were read and passed around to friends. Many who had relatives in America would travel long distances to hear what the last “America-letter” had to report. Among the early immigrants who did much in this way to promote emigration from their native districts was one whom we have already spoken of, Gjert Hovland. He wrote many letters home praising American institutions. These letters “were transcribed and the copies distributed far and wide in the Province of Bergen; and a large number were thus led to emigrate.”[57]

The interviews in Billed-Magazin contain statements from several among the early settlers on Koshkonong Prairie and the neighborhood of Stoughton which give evidence of the part that “America-letters” played in their emigration. On page 123 occurs a statement of Gaute Ingbrigtson (Gulliksrud) who came from Tin in Telemarken in 1843 and became one of the earliest pioneers of Dunkirk Township in Dane County. He says: “Two of my uncles and a brother emigrated in 1839. I, however, remained at home with my father who was a farmer in the Parish of Tin. But then letters came with good news from America, and my relatives as well as other acquaintances on this side of the ocean were encouraged to emigrate. From this it came about that I and many others in my native district prepared for leaving in the spring of 1843. The party numbered about one hundred and twenty....”

We have already had occasion to refer to a letter received by Ole Menes of Stoughton in 1845. Ingbrigt Helle came from Kragerö in 1845 and settled in the Town of Dunn. The ship he came on brought one hundred and forty immigrants and he mentions the fact that many had been induced to emigrate by letters from America, and he writes: “Such letters from America urging emigration was, as far as I can see, the thing that brought the majority of emigrants to bid farewell to Norway.” Ole Knudson Dyrland, who emigrated from Siljord, Telemarken, in 1843, and became one of the earliest white settlers in Dunn Township, Dane County, testifying to the same fact, mentions Ole Knudson Trovatten as one who, through letters, exerted considerable influence upon emigration in Telemarken (page 218, Billed-Magazin, 1870). We shall meet Trovatten again below as a pioneer in the Town of Cottage Grove in the same county. The editor of Billed-Magazin writes of Trovatten elsewhere, page 283, after giving a brief sketch of his life: “he settled on Koshkonong and wrote therefrom many letters to his numerous friends in his native country in which he, with much eloquence, made his countrymen acquainted with the glories of America, and there is no doubt that Trovatten in a large measure gave the impulse to the rapid development of emigration in the region of Telemarken.”

Of Trovatten’s influence as a promoter of immigration Gunder T. Mandt, himself an immigrant of 1843 (died 1907, Stoughton, Wisconsin), gives similar testimony. He speaks of the opposition to emigration in Upper Telemarken, which found expression in all sorts of adverse accounts of America, especially among the clergy, and that much uncertainty prevailed among the masses as to the advisability of going to America. During all this, Trovatten, he says, “came to be looked upon as an angel of peace, who had gone beforehand to the New World, whence he sent back home to his countrymen, so burdened by economic sorrows, the olive-branch of promise, with assurances of a happier life in America.... ‘Ole Trovatten has said so,’ became the refrain in all accounts of the land of wonder, and in a few years he was the most talked of man in Upper Telemarken. His letters from America gave a powerful impulse to emigration, and it is probable that hundreds of those who now are plowing the soil of Wisconsin and Minnesota would still be living in their ancestors’ domains in the land of Harald Fairhair, if they had not been induced to bid old Norway farewell through Trovatten’s glittering accounts of conditions on this side of the ocean.” (Billed-Magazin, 1870, p. 38.) Similar evidence of the influence of “America-letters” is also given by Knud Aslakson Juve, a pioneer of 1844, in the Town of Pleasant Spring, in Dane County.

At the close of the preceding chapter I spoke of Gjert Hovland’s letters in 1835 as a chief factor in bringing about the emigration of 1836. From settlers in other portions of the country comes testimony of similar nature, and I have spoken with many pioneers from a later period of immigration, whose coming was, in the last instance, determined by favorite accounts of America received from friends and relatives already resident there.

In letters from immigrants to their relatives at home prepaid tickets, or the price of the ticket, were often enclosed. This custom was so common as to become a special factor in emigration. According to Norsk Folkeblad (cited in Billed-Magazin, p. 134), 4,000 Norwegian emigrants, via Christiana in 1868, took with them $40,335 (Speciedaler) in cash money of which $21,768 (Spd.) had been sent by relatives in America to cover the expense of the journey. It has been estimated that about fifty per cent of Scandinavian emigrants, arrive by prepaid passage tickets secured by relatives in this country.[58]

The visits of successful Scandinavians back home was in the early days an important factor; and as a rule only those who had been prosperous would return. In 1835 Knud Anderson Slogvig, who had emigrated in the sloop as we know, returned to Norway and became the chief promoter of the exodus from the Province of Stavanger in 1836, which resulted in the settlement at Fox River, La Salle County, Illinois.

We have already above, page [63], recited this fact and its significance toward promoting further emigration from Stavanger Province and of inaugurating the first exodus from Hardanger also. Thus, while Jacob Slogvig, the brother, was one of a few to secure land in La Salle County and make the beginnings of settlement, Knud became the means of bringing hosts of immigrants from Norway to recruit the colony and start it upon its course of growth. In precisely a similar way did two other brothers become even more significant factors in the foundation and development of the earliest Norwegian settlement in Wisconsin, namely, that of Jefferson Prairie in Rock County. They were Ole and Ansten Nattestad, who had emigrated in 1837. Returning to Norway in 1839 Ansten Nattestad became the father of emigration from Numedal, Norway, bringing with him a large party of immigrants, who located for the most part in southern Rock County, Wisconsin, and adjacent parts of the state of Illinois. But of this movement I shall have occasion to speak more fully below.

An equally interesting instance we have from a somewhat later period. We have above referred to Ole Dyrland’s testimony of the effect of Ole Trovatten’s letters. After remarking that many still were doubtful of the advisability of emigrating he goes on to say:

“But then Knud Svalestuen of Vinje, who had lived for a time in the Muskego Settlement, came home on a trip back to Norway, and by his accounts even the most hesitating were made firm in their faith. Knud came in the fall of 1843, and during the winter he received visits of men sent out from various districts in Telemarken, who came to secure reliable information about the new country. The next spring hosts of intending emigrants left the upper mountain districts of the country.... Three emigrant ships left that year from Porsgrund. On board the ship I left in there were two hundred and eleven emigrants.”

The editor of Billed-Magazin gives other interviews with pioneers showing the effect of Svalestuen’s return (page 293).

Some of the Norwegian pioneers wrote books regarding the settlements and American conditions, and these, laudatory as they were, exerted not a little influence. Special mention should be made of Ole Rynning, whose pamphlet, Sandfaerdig Beretning om Amerika til Veiledning og Hjaelp for Bonde og, Menigmand, skrevet of en Norsk som kom der i Juni Maaned, 1837.[59] This little book of thirty-nine pages had not a little to do with the emigration that followed to La Salle County, Illinois, and elsewhere. In it the author gives an intelligent discussion of thirteen questions regarding America which he set himself to answer. Among them were: What is the nature of the country? What is the reason that so many people go there? Is it not to be feared that the land will soon be overpopulated? In what parts are the Norwegian settlements? Which is the most convenient and the cheapest route to them? What is the price of land? What provision is there for the education of children? What language is spoken and is it difficult to learn? Is there danger of disease in America? What kind of people should emigrate?

Another writer of immigration literature whose writings were widely distributed and had considerable influence was Johan Reinert Reierson. He came to America in 1843, but returned to Norway soon after. In America he had written a book, Veiviseren,[60] which he published in Norway and was read far and wide. This book contains a fund of information regarding the different settlements, as Racine County, Wisconsin, La Salle County, Illinois, and Lee County, Iowa, and others, all of which Reierson had himself visited. Reierson became the founder of the first Norwegian settlement in Texas in 1847–48.

Of the events leading up to this, Billed-Magazin for 1870 gives a circumstantial account, pages 58–60, 66–67, and 75–76. Reierson’s book seems to have been a leading factor in promoting emigration from Valders. Among the earliest to leave this region were Nils Hanson Fjeld and family of South Aurdal, Valders, who emigrated in 1847. He says, page 236 of Billed-Magazin for 1870, that before him only two or three single men had gone to America from that region. The “America-fever” had not yet taken hold of the people, “many would not give credence to mere hearsay, but after a while a couple copies of Reierson’s book about Texas came to the district. ‘Now we have the printed word to go by,’ it was said, and many of the doubters soon were converted to the orthodox faith in the land of promise beyond the great ocean.” And as a result, many began to emigrate. As early as 1848, emigration from Valders on a considerable scale was already in progress.

I shall here also mention Ansten Nattestad, who wrote a similar book, which he took with him on his return to Norway in 1838, and had printed there; this became a factor operating toward emigration, especially in Numedal. Reverend J. W. C. Dietrichson’s Reise blandt de norske Emigranter i de forenede nordamerikanske Fristater, Stavanger, 1846 (124 pages), gave much valuable information about the settlements, but was not calculated to exert much influence toward emigration. The first three that I have mentioned, however, had an influence which we today can hardly fully appreciate.

Finally, curiosity and the spirit of adventure have doubtless prompted some to cross the ocean.

To sum up, the chief influences that have promoted Scandinavian emigration to the United States in the nineteenth century have been in the order of their importance: first, the prospect of material betterment and the love of a freer and more independent life; second, letters of relatives and friends who had emigrated to the United States and visits of these again to their native country; third, the advertising of agents of emigration; fourth, religious persecution at home; fifth, church proselytism; sixth, political oppression; seventh, military service; and eighth, the desire for adventure. Fugitives from justice have been few, and paupers and criminals in the Scandinavian countries are not sent out of the country; they are taken care of by the government.

CHAPTER IX
Growth of the Fox River Settlement. The Immigration of 1836. Further Personal Sketches.

On page [fifty-five] above I spoke of the advance troop of six men who established the Fox River Settlement in 1834. A list of those who followed from New York in 1835 was also given. Other settlers came in subsequent years, more and more now coming directly from Norway to La Salle County. The vicinity of the present towns of Norway and Leland, in eastern and northern La Salle County, became centers of a settlement, which later extended east into Kendall County (Newark and Lisbon) and into Grundy County toward Morris, as also north into DeKalb County (Rollo, Sandwich), and northwest clear into southwestern Lee County (Paw Paw, Sublette, and surrounding region). The slooper, Ole Olson Hetletvedt, had not come west with the first party. He lived first in Kendall and then went to Niagara Falls, being there employed in a paper mill. Here he married a Miss Chamberlain, then moved back to Orleans County. In 1839 he and his wife went west, settling in Kendall County. He bought land on the spot where the town of Newark now stands. He became well known as a lay preacher of the Haugian faith in the Fox River Settlement, also visiting the settlements founded soon after in Wisconsin and in Lee County, Iowa. He died in Kendall County in 1849 or 1850.[61]

Iver Waller, who bought a claim of Miss Pearson in 1835, came directly from Norway to La Salle County that year. Baldwin’s History of La Salle County lists Ove Stenson Rossadal and wife, and John Stenson Rossadal among the arrivals of 1835, and as being brothers of Daniel Rossadal, of whom we have spoken above. Strand’s History of the Norwegians in Illinois correctly names them as sons of Daniel Rossadal. Nils Bilden, who also came during this period (year uncertain), was therefore one of the very first emigrants from Hardanger to the United States. He settled at Rochester, Sangamon County, Illinois.

As to the extent of Norwegian immigration during the years immediately preceding the year, 1836, which inaugurates a new period in the movement, our information is very fragmentary. American statistics give forty-two and thirty-one, respectively, for 1834 and 1835, as the total immigration from Norway and Sweden. In 1833 there were sixteen, while the number for 1832 is three hundred and thirteen.[62] The total number between 1826 and 1831 is given as sixty-eight. It is probable, however, that these figures do not represent the full number of immigrants during these years. Norwegian government statistics on immigration which are available since 1836, give the number of immigrants for that year as two hundred, which is also the figure for the following year. It is to this exodus that we shall now turn.

We have above, under Causes of Emigration, had occasion to speak of Knud Slogvig’s return to Norway in 1835, after a ten years’ residence in America;[63] the results of his return were also there briefly noted. In the two ships, Norden and Den Norske Klippe,[64] which sailed from Stavanger in July of 1836, came two hundred immigrants,[65] who located for the most part in the Fox River Settlement. These stopped en route for a short time in Rochester, no doubt gathering advice and information from Lars Larson, the captain of the sloopers, resident there as we know; thence they continued their journey west to Chicago and to La Salle County. Thus the nucleus which had been formed in 1834–35 in a very short time developed into a considerable settlement at a time when the surrounding country was practically a wilderness. The immigrants of 1836 were, in part, from Stavanger, some, however, were from other districts, east and north, as especially Hardanger and Voss.

Not all who came settled in Mission and the later Miller townships, however. Some went considerably farther north and established, in Adams Township, a northern extension of the original settlement at and around the present village of Leland. The two, however, later grew together into one large settlement, extending also, east into Kendall County. The first white settler in Adams Township was Mordicai Disney, who located there in 1836, slightly prior to the coming of the immigrants from Stavanger.[66]

The first of our immigrants to locate in Adams Township where Halvor Nelson and Ole T. Olson, who in the spring of 1837, settled on sections twenty-one and twenty-two;[67] they had lived in Mission Township since their coming in 1836. Among those who came in 1836 and located in Mission Township were: Amund Anderson Hornefjeld, who in 1840 went to Wisconsin (see below), Erick Johnson Savig[68] and wife, Ingeborg, from Kvinherred Parish, Knud Olson Hetletvedt and wife, Serena (both of whom died of cholera in 1849), Osmund Thomason,[69] wife and daughter, Anne, Henrik Erickson Sebbe and two sons, who went to Salt Lake City in 1848 (see above, p. [78]). Samuel Peerson and Helge Vatname also seem to have come in 1836; they are recorded as living at Norway, Illinois, in 1837, and as aiding in bringing some of the immigrants of 1837 from Chicago to La Salle County.

Some of those who came in 1836 did not go directly to La Salle County. Andrew Anderson (Aasen), wife, Olena, three sons and two daughters, from Tysvær Parish, Skjold, remained two years in Orleans County, New York, coming to La Salle County in 1838; he died of the cholera in 1849. John Hidle from Stavanger County, Norway, also emigrated in 1836, coming direct to La Salle County. In 1838 he settled at Lisbon, Kendall County, being thus the first Norwegian to locate there and as far as I have been able to find out, the first Norwegian to settle in that county (for Ole O. Hetletvedt did not come till 1839). Hidle, who wrote his name Hill in this country, married Susanna Anderson, daughter of Andrew Anderson; she was fourteen years old when her parents came to America, and is still living, at Morris, Illinois, with her daughter Mrs. Austin Osmond. Lars Bö and Michael Bö, who lived and died in La Salle County, came when John Hill did. Lars Larson Brimsöe, born in Stavanger, 1812, worked for some time as a carpenter in New York and Chicago before settling in La Salle County. In 1858 he located in Benton County, Iowa, and in 1872 went to Adams County (died 1873). Björn Anderson Kvelve and wife, Catherine,[70] and two sons, Arnold Andrew and Brunn, from Vikedal, Ryfylke, lived for a year in Rochester, New York, came in 1837 to Mission Township, La Salle County. He removed to Dane County, Wisconsin, in 1839. Of Lars Tallakson, who came to America in 1836 (by way of Gothenburg), we shall speak below. Herman Aarag Osmond, born near Stavanger, 1818, also came to America in 1836. He first lived in Ohio, came in 1837 to Chicago, then to Norway, La Salle County. He settled on a farm near Norway in 1848, but bought in 1869 a farm near Newark, Kendall County; Herman Osmond died in Newark in 1888.

Some of the immigrants of 1836 located in Chicago, which then consisted of only a few houses. Among these was first, Halstein Torison (or Törison), to whom Knud Langeland accords the distinction of being the first Norwegian resident of Chicago. He was from Fjeldberg in Söndhordland, and he came to Chicago with wife and children in October, 1836. The site of his home was that now occupied by the Chicago and Northwestern Depot on Wells Street. He worked first as a gardener for a Mr. Newberry. Reverend Dietrichson speaks of him, in 1844, as prosperous and as occupying a leading position among Chicago Norwegians at that time. In 1848 he moved to Calumet, twenty miles south of Chicago, where he lived until his death in 1882.

Svein Lothe, from Hardanger, also came in 1836, as did Nils Röthe and wife, Torbjör, who were from Voss. The latter remained, however, in Rochester, New York, one year before coming to Chicago. Nils Röthe and wife were the first to emigrate from Voss, Norway. Johan Larson, from Kopervik, an island not far north of Stavanger city, also located in Chicago in 1836. He was a sailor and had, it seems, visited Chicago before; what year he came to America, I do not know. I may also mention Baard Johnson, who, with his wife and five children, settled in Chicago in 1837. Those we have mentioned form the nucleus out of which has grown today the largest Norwegian city colony in this country.

Svein Knutson Lothe, who emigrated with wife and two children from Hardanger in 1836, was from the Parish of Ullensvang. There were eleven persons in all who came from Ullensvang that year, the other seven being: Jon Jonson Aga, wife and two children, Torbjörn Djönne, Olav Öystenson Lofthus and Omund Helgeson Maakestad. Maakestad became the founder of the Hardanger settlement in Lee County, Illinois (see below). I am not able to say where Aga, Djönne or Lofthus located. There were also seven immigrants from Ulvik Parish, Hardanger, that year; they were: Sjur Haaheim and wife, Paul Dale and wife, Sjur Dale and wife and Aslak Holven. These eighteen persons form the advance guard of the immigration from Hardanger.

We have spoken of the two ships that came from Stavanger in 1836. These were followed in the next year by Enigheden (Harmony), Captain Jensen, carrying ninety-three passengers. These were for the most part from Tysvær and from Hjelmeland, and Aardal in Ryfylke, from the city of Stavanger, and from Egersund. They came to New York, thence went to Albany and Rochester, and by way of the lakes to Chicago. Most of them went to La Salle County, although not all settled there permanently. Among the passengers were Hans Valder and wife from Ryfylke, Knud Olson Eide, Ole Thompson Eide, from Fogn, near Stavanger, Thomas A. Thompson, Christopher Danielson and family, Östen Espeland and family, and Knud Danielson and family.

The sailing of Enigheden may be regarded as a continuation of the movement in Stavanger county, which was given such an impetus by Knud Slogvig’s return in 1835. Other immigrants continued to come from this region in subsequent years, but the autumn of 1837 inaugurates a change in the course of the movement to a more northerly region, Hardanger, Voss, and Bergen, for a period, contributing a large share to the now rapidly increasing numbers of emigrants.

CHAPTER X
The Year 1837. The Sailing of Aegir.

The influence of Gjert Hovland in this new trend in the immigration should be noted. South Bergenhus now became the scene of immigration activity. At the same time it is to be observed that Hardanger had contributed its quota of immigrants in the exodus of 1836. The return of Knud Slogvig was noised far beyond the County of Stavanger. Among those who travelled long distances to see and talk with Slogvig and get personal affirmation of what reports had told of America, was Nils P. Langeland, a school teacher from Samnanger, one of the emigrants of 1837. Similarly Knud Langeland relates in Nordmaendene i Amerika, page twenty-three, how he paid a visit to Slogvig in the winter of 1836, and received from him assurance of what he had read[71] about the New World. Knud Langeland gives a most interesting account of how his interest in America became aroused; though a personal experience, it is undoubtedly typical of that of many a young man in Bergen and surrounding region at this time. As a document in immigration history, it is sufficiently significant to warrant quoting in considerable part. He says:

“Purely by accident I found in a friend’s library in Bergen a book by a German entitled Reisen in Amerika.... As this book contained some vivid pictures of the distant regions the traveller had visited, as well as of the impressions he had received of land and people in the new world, it was read with all the allurements of a novel. Here was given full information about the German emigration. With this description of travels in my pocket I went early one summer morning along the bay of Solem and up the steep ascent of Lyderhorn. Up there I read and dreamed of the new wonderful world far away to the west. The mist had sunk low over the fjords between the isles about Bergen, but up there around the tree-tops it was bright sunshine. It was the first time I had seen this glorious sight peculiar to mountain regions. If any prosaic nature ever received poetic inspiration and exaltation it was during this time, while my eyes beheld the sunlit surface of the fog and in the distance caught a glimpse of the sparkling shield of the North Sea, which seemed to rise to the height of the mountain.... And far out toward the west, thousands of miles out there, lies the land about which I am reading, lies the big, still so little known part of the world, with its secrets and its wonders. From that time I sought all books and descriptions of travel concerning America which I could get, and, together with an uncle of mine, I began to collect as much information about the new world, as well through books as through the verbal accounts from Stavanger people, which now began to be current in the district concerning Kleng Peerson’s emigration and return, without our yet actually thinking of emigrating. Through a kind friend’s help I was enabled in 1834 to spend six months in England, on which occasion I gathered a number of pamphlets and books about America and emigration from England. In this way more definite and more reliable information as to conditions in America and the journey thither gradually spread in the vicinity. This seemed to discredit the many ridiculous and impossible stories now constantly set in circulation. Slowly but steadily the thought of emigrating to America took root; more and more joined the little group which now in earnest began talking of selling their homes and going to America. Then it was that the bishop of Bergen wrote a letter to the farmers of Bergen on the text, “Remain in the country; make your living honorably,” whether he forgot it or did not regard it suitable to the occasion, he failed to quote the second commandment of the passage: “Multiply and fill the world.” The latter the farmers had adhered to; most of them had large families, and since the land at home was filled, while they now heard that a large part of the new world was unsettled, they decided to disobey the bishop’s advice and go to the new Canaan, where flowed milk and honey.”

So far Langeland’s account. While the evidence points to many causes as operating conjointly toward bringing about the departure, in the spring of 1837, of so many from Samnanger and from Voss, the influence of Nils P. Langeland, already mentioned above, seems to have been a special factor at this particular time. Nils Langeland was already then an elderly man. He had devoted his life to the cause of popular education, but the intolerant clergy of the time found him too liberal minded and continually put obstacles in his way. Although he was supported by a group of faithful friends, his usefulness was hampered; discouraged at last, he decided to leave his native country and go to America.

This was in the summer of 1836. In the fall of that year, Captain Behrens returned with the bark, Aegir, from America, whither he had carried a cargo of freight in the summer. Langeland’s friends had already sold their homes and were preparing to emigrate. Hearing of this, Behrens decided to convert his bark into a passenger boat, and he offered to take them to America the next spring; the offer was accepted. While preparations were going on, the announcements of the projected sailing, which had been printed in the newspapers, led intending immigrants from other sections, also, to join the party. Among these was Ole Rynning, from Snaasen, in Trondhjem Province, of whom we shall speak more at length below.

On the 4th of July, 1837, Aegir sailed from Bergen with eighty-two passengers. Among these were Mons Aadland, Nils Fröland, Anders Nordvig, Ingebrigt Brudvig, Thomas Bauge and Thorbjörn Veste, all of whom had large families, and the following from Hardanger: Nils L. Jördre, wife and six children, and Peder J. Maurset, wife and child, from Ulvik Parish, and Amund Rosseland, wife and three children, Lars G. Skeie, wife and two children, Sjur E. Rosseland and Svein L. Midthus from Vikör. The last-named were the first to emigrate from Vikör. The party further included Halle Væte, wife and grown daughter, and the following persons: Odd J. Himle, Kolbein O. Saue, Styrk O. Saue, Nils L. Bolstad, Baard Haugen, John H. Björgo, Ole Dyvik, all of whom were married, besides several single men, mostly relatives of the above, namely: Dövig, Bauge, Fröland, Nordvig, Hisdal, Tösseland, et al. Each adult paid sixty dollars (Norwegian specie) for passage, children under twelve paying half price. They arrived in New York eight weeks later. The journey inland was attended by numerous expenses for which the immigrants were not prepared. When they had gotten as far as Detroit, the above-mentioned Nils P. Langeland found himself without the necessary means to continue the journey. His friends who had offered to pay his expenses as far as Chicago, at last became discouraged over the constant demands upon their funds and Langeland was obliged to remain in Detroit. Here, being a capable carpenter, he soon found work; later he removed to Lapeer County, Michigan, bought there 120 acres of land, plying at the same time the trade of a carpenter. Thus it came about that Nils Langeland became the first Norwegian to settle in the State of Michigan, though we have seen that Kleng Peerson had visited the state four years earlier. At least three others of the immigrants of 1837 located temporarily in the State of Michigan that year, namely, Ingebright Nordvig, Östen Espeland, who had come in Enigheden, and Thorsten Bjaaland. These went to Adrian, Lenawee County, but left again soon after. We shall meet Bjaaland again in La Salle County, Illinois, and on Koshkonong Prairie.

CHAPTER XI
Beaver Creek. Ole Rynning.

The immigrants who came in the Aegir seem to have intended to settle in La Salle County, but in Chicago were advised by two Americans not to go there. They were also partly influenced by Norwegian immigrants[72] who were dissatisfied with that locality, and who recommended Iroquois County as a more desirable location to settle. They were told that the Fox River Valley was a very unhealthy place, the settlers were dying of ague and fever, and it was a misfortune that they had ever been induced to locate there. (Knut Langeland also records the fact that the fever raged in the whole of the Fox River Valley from Muskego, in Wisconsin, to the Mississippi River in Illinois, that summer, but that the condition in La Salle was no worse than elsewhere). So the intending settlers deputed three men to explore the country for a site for a new colony.

These, Ole Rynning, Ingebrigt Brudvig and Ole Nattestad,[73] walked south along the line of the present Illinois Central Railroad, selecting the location at Beaver Creek in Iroquois County. Of the further history of this unfortunate and short lived colony, the reader may find an account in Dietrichson’s brief discussion of the settlement, or in Langeland’s or R. B. Anderson’s book. The majority of the settlers died during the spring in the low and unhealthy climate. Ole Rynning himself died and lies buried there. The few survivors left for La Salle County the following spring. Mons Aadland refused, however, to go. He remained in Beaver Creek three years longer; selling his land in 1840 for a herd of cattle and, moving north, he located in Racine County, being therefore one of the earliest pioneers in this part of Wisconsin.

Ole Rynning’s name is most closely associated with the brief history of the Beaver Creek Settlement. We have already seen above how his book, Sandfaerdig Beretning om Amerika, came to have a very far-reaching influence upon Norwegian emigration. This book Rynning wrote that winter in the Beaver Creek Settlement. It was printed in Norway the next year. It soon became widely distributed and continued for over a decade to exert a powerful influence upon Norwegian emigration from Voss, east to Hedemarken, and north to Gudbrandsdalen, in these latter provinces, at the close of the decade, especially.

We have, on page [86] above, observed that Rynning formulated certain questions which he set about answering for the information of intending immigrants. It will be of interest to note here the nature of some of his answers. The first question as to the nature of the country, he answers by giving a very intelligent account of the topography and climate of the country, the soil in the different parts, and of what the produce of the different sections consists. In answer to the third question, he says that the United States is more than twenty times as large as Norway, that the greater part of the country is not yet even under cultivation, and that there is room for a population more than a hundred times as great as that of Norway. There need be no fear, he says, that the country will be full in fifty years.

The fourth question as to where the Norwegian immigrants have located especially, he answers by saying, that in New York, Rochester, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans, there are said to be individual settlers; but he mentions four places where several have settled, namely: (1) Orleans County, New York, but where, he says, there are now only two or three families left; (2) La Salle County, Illinois, where, he says, there are about twenty families; (3) White County, Indiana, on the Tippecanoe River. “Here,” he says, live “only two Norwegians from Drammen, who, together, own about eleven hundred acres of land”; (4) Shelby County, Missouri, where a few Norwegians from Stavanger settled in the spring of 1837; (5) Iroquois County, Illinois. “Here,” he says, “there are eleven or twelve families of those who came last summer.”

The sixth question as to the land in these localities, he answers by praising the beauty and the fertility of the prairie. And as to the price of land, he says, that it has hitherto been $1.25 per acre, but that he has heard that hereafter land is to be divided into three classes and the price of land of the third class is to be half a dollar an acre. He then offers explicit directions as to how to go about securing land. He thereupon gives the prices of livestock at the time, and of produce, etc. A horse, we learn, costs from fifty to a hundred dollars, a yoke of oxen, sixty to eighty. A milk cow with calf, sixteen to twenty, a sheep, two to three, hogs are six to ten dollars a head, pork costs three to five shillings a “mark,” butter six to twelve, a barrel of (wheat) flour, eight to ten dollars; a barrel of cornmeal, two and a half to three dollars; a barrel of potatoes, one dollar; a pound of coffee, twenty shillings; a barrel of salt is five dollars (Norwegian). But in Wisconsin Territory, the prices are two to three times higher, while farther south, everything is cheaper.

Then he speaks of wages, of religious conditions, law and order, how instruction for the young is provided, linguistic conditions, health conditions. He discusses life in the new settlements, its trials and attendant evils. As to the Indians, he says: “They have gone farther west; one need never fear attack by Indians in Illinois.” In answer to the question as to who should emigrate, he warns against unreasonable expectations; advises farmers, mechanics and tradesmen to come, he who neither can nor will work must never expect, he says, that wealth or luxury will stand ready to receive him. No, in America one gets nothing without work, but by work, one can expect to attain to comfortable circumstances. He thereupon discusses the question of the dangers in crossing the oceans, which, he says, are less than usually imagined, and the rumor of enslavement of the immigrant. The latter he brands as false, adding, “yet it is true that many who have not been able to pay their passage, have come upon such terms that they have sold themselves, or their service, for a certain number of years to some man here in the country. Many are thereby said to have come into bad hands, and have not had it better than slaves. No Norwegian, as far as I know, has fared in this way, nor is it to be feared, if one crosses by a Norwegian ship, and with one’s own countrymen.” In conclusion, I shall cite his opinion on the slave trade which is interesting in the insight and judgment it gives evidence of, on the part of an immigrant over twenty years before the war:

The northern states are trying in every congress to abolish slavery in the southern states; but as these always oppose it and appeal to their right to govern their own internal affairs, there will probably soon take place a separation between the northern and the southern states, or else there will be internal conflict.

Ole Rynning was born in Ringsaker, as the son of Reverend Jens Rynning and wife, Severine Catherine Steen, in 1809. In 1825, the father moved to Snaasen. Having finished his education in 1829, he taught school for a time. Then he bought a small farm[74] which he had to give up again, not being able to pay for it. His ultra democratic sympathies were displeasing to his conservative father, and an unhappy love affair, which his father disapproved of as being a mesalliance, seems, at least, to have been, in part the cause of his leaving Norway. We have recited, briefly, his short career in America.[75] Of his nobility of character and the self-sacrificing spirit he showed in helping the grief-stricken and suffering colonists in the unfortunate Beaver Creek Settlement, in the spring and summer of 1838, his surviving associates give ample testimony. His book, Sandfaerdig Beretning, was written on the sick-bed.[76] When he died, there was only one man in the settlement who was well enough to make a casket for him from an old oak which he hewed down. Rynning was buried out on the prairie, but no one knows now where the spot is.

CHAPTER XII
Some of the Immigrants of 1837. The First Pathfinders from Numedal and Telemarken.

Besides the 177 immigrants, who came to America from Stavanger and Bergen in 1837, there was a considerable number who embarked from Gothenburg, Sweden. These came mostly from Numedal and Telemarken in the south central part of Norway.

Among the immigrants of 1837 were, also, the brothers, Ole and Ansten Nattestad, from Vægli, Numedal, both of whom came via Gothenburg, and Hans Barlien, who emigrated with Enigheden. These men played such a part in the immigration history of the period as to deserve something more than a mere mention.

Ansten Nattestad may be regarded as the father of the emigration movement from Numedal, Norway, from which some of the most successful Norwegian settlements in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa, were later recruited. His brother, Ole Nattestad, became the founder of one of these settlements, that of Jefferson Prairie, in Rock County, Wisconsin (also extending into Illinois); while Hans Barlien founded the first Norwegian settlement in Iowa, at Sugar Creek, Lee County. Of the circumstances which led to the emigration of the Nattestad brothers, an interesting account appears in Billed-Magazin, 1869, pages 82–83. This, which is an interview with Ole Nattestad, has been reprinted in other works and I shall not take the space for it here. We may note, however, that they had received their first news of America upon a journey to the neighborhood of Stavanger in the close of 1836. During Christmas of that year, they were the guests of Even Nubbru in Sigdal, a member of the Storthing, and it was his praise of American laws which first aroused Ole Nattestad’s desire to emigrate, as he had already had some unpleasant experiences in that respect.

In April, 1837, they stood ready to leave for America, having converted their possessions into cash, a sum of eight hundred dollars. They went on skis from Rollaug to Tin, over the mountains and through the forests to Stavanger. Halsten Halvorson Brække-Eiet, also from Rollaug, became a third member of the party. In Stavanger, local official hostility to emigration led them into difficulties, and they were forced to seek safety in flight by night. They went to Tananger, where they were more successful, a skipper contracting to take them in his yacht to Gothenburg. In Gothenburg, they secured passage with a ship which carried iron from Sweden to Fall River, Massachusetts. The journey lasted thirty-two days. Thence, they went to New York, where they met a few Norwegians, and thence again to Rochester. Here they spoke with several members of the sloop party of 1825, now living in Rochester, and they were, for a short time, the guests of Lars Olson, as so many others of the immigrants of those years. Hearing that those who had come to America in 1836 had gone west to La Salle County, they decided to go there. In Detroit, Ole Nattestad was one day walking about to view the city, and he says:

Here I accidentally came upon a man, whom I immediately recognized by his clothes as a countryman from the western coast of Norway. I greeted the man, and the meeting was for us both as if two brothers had met after a long separation.

This man was one of the passengers on the Aegir, who had just then arrived in Detroit. The Nattestad party now joined these, all (except N. P. Langeland and family, as we have seen, page [102] above), going west to Chicago. Here they met Björn Anderson Kvelve, whose unfavorable account of the Fox River locality first gave them some doubt as to the wisdom of going there. Of the subsequent events, the reader has already been told. We shall meet again with both Ole and Ansten Nattestad below. Halsten Brække-Eiet later settled in Dodgeville, Wisconsin.

Hans Barlien was from Overgaarden, Trondhjem; he seems to have been the second emigrant to America from that region. Of him there will be occasion to speak more in detail in connection with the first Norwegian settlement in Iowa. I desire, here, however, to mention five others, who came via Gothenburg to America in the same year, namely, Erick Gauteson Midböen, Thore Kittilson Svimbil, and John Nelson Rue, who had large families, and two single men, Gunder Gauteson Midböen and Torsten Ingebrigtson Gulliksrud. These form the advance troupe of emigrants from the Parish of Tin in Upper Telemarken, a region which furnished a large share of recruits for the pioneer colonies of Wisconsin and Iowa in the forties and the fifties. Thore Svimbil became a pioneer in Blue Mounds, Dane County, where we shall find him later. Erik Gauteson Midböen, who had a large family, settled in La Salle County, but, says our authority, “fortune was not kind to him.” He later joined the Latter Day Saints and undertook a journey to Norway as a representative of that church, returned to America and died soon after, about 1850, as near as I can ascertain. Torsten Gulliksrud also settled in Illinois, but died early. John Nelson Rue will appear later in our account as one of the founders of the earliest Norwegian settlement in Winneshiek County, Iowa.

We do not know what the circumstances were that led to the emigration of this little group from Upper Telemarken in 1837. It seems not unlikely that the news of America had come to them through copies of letters from Hovland or others, though they may also have had information more directly through Knud Slogvig’s return. The latter does not to me seem so likely, however, for they appear to have made no attempt to secure passage from Stavanger. The departure of this group from Tin does not seem to have had any immediate influence upon emigration from that region. The real exodus from Tin does not begin till 1839, and then as a part of the general movement, but this may have been aided by letters from those who went thence in 1837. The number that in this way took passage via Gothenburg that year may have been larger than we have knowledge of. While the number, two hundred, which our statistics, cited above, gives as that of the emigration from Norway in 1837 is certainly rather low, it is highly improbable that it was as high as three hundred, as elsewhere given. A conservative and reasonable estimate would seem to place it at about two hundred and forty or fifty.

Among the passengers on the Aegir, we mentioned Nils Fröland. He was one of two, the other being Mons Aadland, to first join Nils P. Langeland in his preparations for emigrating to America. With his wife and children, he located at Beaver Creek, and they were among the fortunate survivors of that colony. In 1839, he moved to Mission Township in La Salle County, and to the present Miller Township the next year. He died there in 1873. His widow (born 1798) was still living in 1895. A grandson, Lars Fruland, resides at Newark, Illinois.

Anders Nordvig, who also came on the Aegir, died in the Beaver Creek Settlement. His widow, a sister of Knud Langeland, moved to La Salle County; she died there at the age of ninety in 1892. A daughter, Malinda, married Iver Lawson (Iver Larson Bö), who came to Chicago from Voss, Norway, in 1844. Victor F. Lawson, owner of The Chicago News, is her son. Another daughter, Sarah (born 1824), married a Mr. Darnell, a pioneer of Benton County, Iowa, in 1854. Mrs. Darnell was the first Norwegian in that county. After Darnell’s death, she returned to Illinois, locating at Sandwich, De Kalb County.

Among the passengers on Aegir, Odd Himle, Baard Haugen, Ole Dyvik and John Björgo went direct to La Salle County. The first of these returned to Norway in 1844, and, while there, married Marie L. Jermo; he returned to America in 1845, and settled on Spring Prairie in Columbia County, Wisconsin, where we shall meet with him again. He died in De Forest, Dane County, Wisconsin, in May, 1893. We shall also meet John Björgo below as one of the pioneers of Koshkonong, Wisconsin. Halle Væte died in Beaver Creek, as did his wife and grown-up daughter. Kolbein Saue and Styrk Saue both went to Beaver Creek and were among the survivors; they came to Koshkonong in 1843 and are to be remembered among the early pioneers there. Styrk Saue was born in Voss, September twenty-fifth, 1814; his wife, Ellen Olson (born Rekve), was born in 1816. They were married in America. Nils Bolstad settled in Koshkonong in 1840. He was one of a group of three to visit Dane County, Wisconsin, on a trip of exploration in the fall of 1839, being, therefore, the first Norwegians in that county.

Among the passengers on Enigheden was Hans Valder and wife. He was born on the farm, Vælde, in Vats Parish in Ryfylke in 1813. Having received an education he taught school in Tysvæer some years before emigrating. Here he heard much about the earliest emigration to America from Stavanger. In Detroit, Valder and Östen Espeland separated from the rest of the party and went to Adrian, Michigan. Thence they went a few miles into the country in Lenawee County to visit a small Norwegian settlement, whither Ingebrigt Larson Narvig had recently moved from Monroe County, where he had settled in 1833.[77] In the spring of 1838 Valder left for La Salle County, Illinois. Here he lived until 1853, when he moved to what is at present Newburg, Fillmore County, Minnesota, and became one of the earliest Norwegian pioneers in Minnesota. Östen Espeland and family remained at the home of Narvig a little longer than Valder, but then they also went to La Salle County.

Another passenger on Enigheden was Christopher Danielson from Aardal, in Lower Ryfylke. He was fifty-seven years old at the time of emigrating, settled in Mission Township, La Salle County, where his wife died a few years later. Danielson died of the cholera in 1849. His son, Christopher Danielson (born in Norway), resides at Sheridan, Illinois. Thomas A. Thompson, born 1812 in Skjold Parish, Ryfylke, settled in Norway, La Salle County, Illinois. In 1867 he removed to Adams County, Iowa, where he died in 1870. Lars Richolson and wife also came in 1837, and settled near Ottawa in La Salle County. Lars Richolson, as, indeed, several of the pioneers of these years, soon became one of the substantial men of the community.[78] Ole Heier, who also came in 1837, from Tin, Telemarken, located in La Salle County. He had been an ardent Haugian, but became a Mormon in Illinois, and later a Baptist. In 1868 he moved to Iowa, where he died in 1873. A son, A. Hayer, lives in Leland, Illinois. Finally there came that year Even Askvig with wife and children from Hjelmeland Parish in Ryfylke. Settling first in Indiana (Beaver Creek) they removed the next year to La Salle County, Illinois. Late in the forties they settled in Texas and at last in 1852 the parents and a part of the family located in southwestern Iowa, where Even Askvig died in 1875 and his wife in 1881.

CHAPTER XIII
Ansten Nattestad’s Return to Norway in 1838. The Year 1839. Immigration Assumes Larger Proportions. The Course of Settlement Changes.

The principal event in Norwegian immigration history for the year, 1838, is Ansten Nattestad’s return to Norway. We have seen, above, page [103], that Ole and Ansten Nattestad left the Beaver Creek settlement in the spring of 1838. Ansten went to Norway, as it seems, for the express purpose of promoting emigration from Rollaug, Numedal, while Ole went out to explore new fields. Going north as far as the Wisconsin line he stopped in what is now Clinton Township in Rock County. This place suited his fancy and he decided to settle here.

This was July first.[79] He entered a claim of eighty acres and immediately set to work erecting temporary quarters. For a year he lived alone, rarely coming in contact with a white man, and not seeing anything of his own countrymen during all that time. “Eight Americans,” he says, “had settled in the town before me, but these also lived in about as lonely and desolate a condition as I. I found the soil especially fruitful and the melancholy uniformity of the prairie was relieved here by intervening bits of woods. Flocks of deer and other game were to be seen daily, and the uncanny howling of the prairie wolf constantly disturbed my night rest, until the habit fortified my ears against disturbances of this kind.” The following summer, Ole built a cabin in which he received, as we shall see below, the first group of immigrants into that country in the early fall of that year.

The year 1838 brought a small contingent of emigrants from Voss. They were Steffen K. Gilderhus, Knud Lydvo, Ole Lydvo and Lars Gjerstad.[80] Gilderhus went to Cleveland, Ohio, being, I believe, the first Norwegian to locate there; he remained there only one year, however, going to Chicago in 1839. We shall later find him among the pioneers of Koshkonong, Dane County, Wisconsin. Knud and Ole Lydvo and Lars Gjerstad went to La Salle County, Illinois, and thence to Shelby County, Missouri, where the restless Kleng Peerson had the year before gone in search of a new locality for a settlement in the southwest (see below).

Before passing on to the emigration of 1839, it will be in order to speak briefly of a small group of emigrants from Numedal in the year 1838. The name of the leader was Ole Aasland, a wealthy farmer of Flesberg Parish. He sold out his farm and, taking with him his family and about twenty other persons, whose passage he paid for, he sailed from Tönsberg, via Gothenburg, and thence to New York. He then went to Orleans County, New York.[81] Here it seems he fell into the hands of speculators, who sold him six hundred acres of marsh land in Noble County, Indiana, for a very high price. He removed to that place soon after, it seems, with most of those whom he had brought from Norway. Sickness set in, brought on by the swampiness of the region, and many of his party died. He thereupon (next year) abandoned the land, taking with him the survivors. In the Kendall Settlement, Andrew J. Stangeland bought the land of him for a nominal price.[82] Aasland, who changed his name in this country to Orsland, lived on the so-called Norwegian Road in Kendall, till his death, about 1864. In Kendall, he accumulated considerable property. He left a wife and four children, Canute Orsland, and Harry B. Orsland (born 1828 in Kendall), the former occupying the old homestead as late as 1895, and Hallock Orsland living in Detroit, where a daughter is also living. Let us now turn to Ansten Nattestad’s journey.

According to Nattestad’s own account he went back to Norway in the spring of 1838 via New Orleans and Liverpool. In Drammen he had printed his brother’s journal, En Dagbog, and Rynning’s book was printed in Christiania. He speaks of the great interest that these pamphlets aroused as well as that of his own return. He says:

“The report of my return spread like wild fire throughout the country, and an incredibly large number of people came to me to get news from America. Many even travelled eighteen to twenty Norwegian miles to speak with me. It was impossible to answer all the letters that came with reference to conditions across the ocean. In the spring of 1839 about one hundred persons stood ready to go with me across the ocean. Among these were many farmers with families, all except the children able to work and in their best years.”

There were, moreover, a host of people from Telemarken and Numedal, who could not accompany him, as there was no more room in the ship.

In the meantime these people from Telemarken, not to be deterred long in their plans to go to the New World, immediately set about organizing their party and went to Skien to seek passage there. They were all from Tin and Hjertdal parishes in Upper Telemarken. The leaders of the party were the Luraas family, which was represented by four heads of families, in all about twenty persons of the total number of forty, composed almost exclusively of grown men and women. They embarked at Skien, May seventeenth, somewhat earlier than the party from Numedal and arrived in America before, hence it is to this group that we shall now turn our attention, leaving for the time being Nattestad and his party. The Luraas party was in all composed of eleven families, most of them being from Tin Parish. We have already, under Causes of Emigration, spoken briefly of John Luraas, who perhaps was the chief promoter of this emigration.

The party consisted of John Nelson Luraas, Knut Nelson Luraas, Halvor Östenson Luraas, Torger Östenson Luraas, Halvor T. Lönflok, Halvor Nelson Lohner, Helge Mathieson, Ole Hellikson Kroken, Östen Möllerflaten, Ole Kjonaas, Nils Johnson Kaasa, and the latter’s brother, Gjermund Johnson Kaasa, all of whom had families, besides three unmarried men, namely, Nils, Ole and John Tollefsjord. The Kaasa brothers were from Hiterdal; the rest I believe were all from Tin Parish. In Gothenburg they met another small company of Norwegian emigrants, who had just arrived there from Stavanger, bound for America. This party included Gitle Danielson, the leader of the party, from the island of Rennesö, a little north of Stavanger, and who had a large family, Halvor Jellarviken, with family, and Peder Rosöino, both with families, Erik Svinalie and sister; the party also included John Evenson Molee from Tin in Telemarken, who was at that time in the service of Gitle Danielson. In all there were now about sixty. The journey across the Atlantic took nine weeks and the journey from Boston to Milwaukee took another three weeks. The latter led by way of New York and then by canal boats, pulled by horses, to Buffalo; thence by way of the Great Lakes to Milwaukee, the most common westward route for the early immigrants. This was at the close of August. It was the intention of the emigrants to settle in La Salle County, Illinois; but in Milwaukee they were induced to remain in Wisconsin, and a site for a settlement was selected near Lake Muskego in the southeastern part of Waukesha County, about twenty miles southwest from Milwaukee.

A story is told how it came about that they did not go to Illinois as originally intended. A good-natured fat man is said to have been pointed out to them as the product of Wisconsin. On the other hand Illinois was described as a hot and unhealthy region in substantiation of which a pale, sickly man was presented as the result of life in that state. Whether this was done or not I do not know; but the story may serve as an illustration of frontier humor and immigrant credulity both.

Suffice it to say that the people of Milwaukee succeeded in diverting the immigrants from Telemarken from going any farther, but selected a site for a settlement, as we have said, near Lake Muskego in Waukesha County. Then they returned to Milwaukee to perfect their purchase of land there, the price paid being the usual one of a dollar and twenty-five cents per acre.

Before reciting further the fortunes of this group of immigrants, the first to enter the State of Wisconsin, let us turn for a moment to a consideration of the larger movement. With the year 1839, emigration from Norway begins to assume larger proportions, and certain districts, which hitherto had sent very few, now begin to contribute the larger share of the number of emigrants to America. This year may very properly be said to have inaugurated the second period in Norwegian immigration history. Down to 1839 the immigration movement in Norway had not really gone beyond the provinces of Stavanger and South Bergenhus in southwestern and western Norway. Indeed, nearly all of the emigrants had come from these sections. In fact, before 1836 the movement was almost confined to Stavanger and Ryfylke. In that year it reaches Hardanger, and in 1837, Bergen. It does not reach Voss properly before 1838, although Nils Röthe and wife had emigrated from there in 1836. In 1837, as we have seen, the first emigrant ship, the Aegir, left Bergen with eighty-four passengers. Before 1839 we meet with occasional individual emigration from provinces to the east and northeast. Thus Ole Rynning and Snaasen in Trondhjem Diocese emigrated in the Aegir in 1837. The first emigrants from Telemarken also came in 1837. As we have seen above, 1837 is also the year which records the first immigration from Numedal. Among the emigrants from other parts of Norway prior to 1837 must be mentioned also Johan Nordboe, from Ringebo in Guldbrandsdalen, who came in 1832 and resided for some time in Kendall, New York, later going to Texas, and Hans Barlien from Trondhjem County, who came to La Salle County in 1837. Neither of these two men, however, were instrumental in bringing about any emigration movement in Gudbrandsdalen and Trondhjem. It is not until a much later period that these two districts are represented in considerable numbers among emigrants.

It is the year 1839 in which emigration on a larger scale takes its beginnings. Similarly, the year 1839 marks a change also in the movement of the course of settlement. Down to this time all emigration from Norway stands in direct relation to the movement which began in Stavanger in 1825, and which in the years 1834–36 resulted in the formation of the Fox River Settlement in La Salle County, Illinois. This settlement then became the center of dispersion for what may be called the southern line of settlements. All through the forties and the fifties the southern course of migration westward, which includes southern and central Iowa, stands in direct relation to early Norwegian colonization in New York and Illinois,—that is the first period of Norwegian emigration from the provinces of Stavanger and South Bergenhus (and this province only as far north as Bergen, Voss being excluded) in Southwestern Norway. In 1839 the first settlements are formed in Wisconsin on the shores of Lake Muskego in Waukesha County, and in Rock County; and in 1839–40 that of Koshkonong in Dane and Jefferson Counties. These settlements then became a northern point of dispersion. From here we have a second northern line of settlement westward and northwestward into Northern Iowa, Minnesota, and the more northerly localities of Wisconsin.

CHAPTER XIV
Shelby County, Missouri. Ansten Nattestad’s Return from Norway in 1839. The Founding of the Jefferson Prairie Settlement in Rock County, Wisconsin.

Before returning now to the thread of our narrative, I wish to speak briefly of an early effort, and the only one, before the fifties, to found a settlement from the southern point of dispersion.

In 1837 Kleng Peerson, Jacob and Knud Slogvig, Andrew Askeland, Andrew Simonson, Thorstein Thorson Rue, several of whom had families, and about eight others, left La Salle County, went to Missouri and made a settlement in Shelby County; this, however, proved unsuccessful, principally on account of the lack of a market.

Peerson does not seem to have selected a very desirable locality, and he did not possess the steadfastness of purpose that would seem to be a prime requisite in the pioneer. He was too much of a lover of adventure, and hardly was a plan brought to completion before his head was again full of new dreams and fancies.

He was something of a Peer Gynt but without Peer Gynt’s selfishness or his eye for the main chance; the roving spirit dominated Peerson wholly; not until old age had laid its hand on him did he yield to the monotony of a settled life; but even then in the wilderness of Texas in the fifties. I have personal information of his life there; he took no part in the upbuilding of the community, no active interest in its progress. In a settled community he alone was unsettled; he was never able to gather himself together into concentrated action and prolonged effort in a definite cause or undertaking. A vagabond citizen, he died in poverty. The only activity we associate with his name is the adventurous wanderings of his youth.

After having spent a year in Missouri Peerson returned to Norway, evidently for the purpose of recruiting his colony, but I have no evidence that he succeeded in this. Independent of Peerson’s efforts, the little colony did receive an accession of three in 1838, namely, Knud and Ole Lydvo and Lars Gjerstad, and of one person in the fall of 1839, namely, Nils Lydvo, who had just come from Voss, Norway, with a group of immigrants from that region, most of whom remained in Chicago. The Shelby County settlement did not thrive. It was too far removed from other settlers, too far from a market; the settlers suffered want and became discouraged. The colony was practically broken up in 1840, when most of the settlers removed north into Iowa Territory into what is now Lee County. Here they established the first Norwegian settlement in Iowa. Of this we shall have occasion to speak under the year 1840. Let us now return to Ansten Nattestad and his party of emigrants, whom we left above, page [119], as about to depart for America.

Ansten Nattestad’s party of one hundred then sailed from Drammen by the Emelia, Captain Ankerson, late in the spring of 1839. It was the first time, says he, that the people of Drammen had seen an emigrant ship. Every person paid thirty-three dollars and a half (specie); they were nine weeks on the ocean, going direct to New York. They took the usual route inland and arrived in Milwaukee just at the time when the Luraas party had returned to Milwaukee to purchase land already selected in Waukesha County, as we have seen above. They urged the new arrivals to stop in Milwaukee and go with them to Muskego, but Nattestad objected, and so they continued their journey to Chicago.

Here Ansten learned that his brother had located in Wisconsin the year before. The party’s destination was La Salle County, but this changed the course of some of them. Some who had friends there did go to La Salle County, a few remained in Chicago, especially single men, but the majority went with Ansten to Clinton. All these (excepting some to be noted below) bought land and began the life of pioneers there in the fall of 1839 on what came to be known as Jefferson Prairie. Besides Ole Knudson Nattestad and his brother Ansten, those who founded this settlement were: Halvor Pederson Haugen, Hans Gjermundson Haugen, Thore Helgeson Kirkejord, Torsten Helgeson Kirkejord, Jens Gudbrandson Myhra, Gudbrand, Myhra, Erik Skavlem, the brothers Kittil and Kristoffer Nyhus, and T. Nelson. Halvor Haugen did not come with the Nattestad party, although he was in Drammen intending to sail on the Emelia. Owing to lack of room about thirty persons, including children, had to be left behind. Halvor Haugen has himself told (in Amerika, September, 1907) of the coming of these. After several days of waiting, they secured passage on a boat bound for Gothenburg, Sweden. The journey went via Fredrikshald, where another stay of two or three days took place. At Gothenburg a wait of ten days followed before the brig Bunyan, on which they were to sail, was ready. “It was certainly fortunate,” says our narrator, “that people were not in such haste then, or the repeated delays of several days duration would have been the cause of much unpleasant irritation.” Landing in Boston, the immigrants travelled by rail to Providence, Rhode Island, thence by steamboat to New York. Here they boarded the boat which was to carry them to Albany. As they were told the boat was not to leave before five o’clock in the afternoon most of the men of the party went ashore again to purchase food. When they returned however the boat had sailed having left at ten in the forenoon instead of five in the afternoon as planned. Those left behind managed to reach their destination also, though with many difficulties and unpleasant experiences. From Albany they travelled by canal to Buffalo. “Of this part of the journey,” says Haugen, “there is nothing to be said except that, like all other earthly things, this also at last came to an end.” From Buffalo the journey went by steamboat to Chicago. They did not go thence to La Salle County though undoubtedly intended originally to do so. I do not know what changed their course, but on the next day after arriving in Chicago, they went to Du Page County, Illinois, where a week later they met those who had gone with Nattestad in Captain Ankerson’s ship. The party whose coming has thus briefly been related was composed of Halvor Haugen, wife, three sons, Peder, Halvor and Andreas, and two daughters Bergit and Sigrid; Halvor Stordok, Lars Haugerud, Gunder Fingalpladsen, Engebret Sæter, Lars Dalen, Gjermund Johnson, and Sven Tufte, all of whom also had families, besides some single persons. Halvor Haugen’s family and most of the party remained in Du Page County for a time, and Peder Haugen and his brother Andreas and the two sisters secured employment there. The father, however, went with Erik Skavlem to Jefferson Prairie to help him build a house. At Christmas the rest of the party also went to Jefferson Prairie. During the winter they all lived in Skavlem’s house. This house is described as follows:

“It was sixteen by sixteen and quite low. In order to add to room ‘crowns’ were erected overhead, that is, beams which were laid crosswise near the ceiling. These beams were cut pointed at the ends which were made to rest between the logs in the walls on either side, like riders across the house. On top of these again was laid flats, on which beds were arranged. Down below on the floor there were also three beds.”

A writer in Amerika, March first, 1907, quotes one of the immigrants as speaking of the cramped quarters in the log cabin, in which the whole party lived that fall and winter; room which to one family would seem too small now. “How these settlers,” he says, “could manage in one log cabin a whole winter is a riddle to me.” The following spring Halvor Haugen also built a cabin which was always full as newcomers were constantly arriving. At the same time other cabins were erected by Kittil and Kristoffer Nyhus, Gudbrand and Jens Myhra, and Torsten Kirkejorden. Two years later all of these built new and more commodious houses.

Map of Southern and Central Norway

See Appendix for names of parishes here numbered.

The settlement thus founded exclusively by immigrants from the district of Numedal has always continued to be recruited largely from that region (see, however, below). In the following year a few more families came from Numedal, while from 1841 the accessions were considerable every year for a number of years. Among these is to be mentioned Bergit Nelson Kallerud, from Vægli, who also came in the ship Emilia, in 1839, but who does not seem to have gone directly to Jefferson Prairie. She married Jens Gudbrandson Myhra at Christmas, 1839, while his brother, Gudbrand Myhra, married Ambjör Olson (also from Vægli) in 1840. The following year they, however, moved to the Rock Prairie Settlement (see below), and in 1852 they settled in Mitchell County, Iowa. In connection with the settling of this county we shall have occasion to speak again more fully of them. Jens Myhra was born in Vægli, Numedal, in 1812.

Of the other founders of this settlement I may here add the following facts. Ole Knudson Nattestad was born at Vægli, in Rollaug Parish, December twenty-fourth, 1807. We have above given an account of his settling at Clinton. In Nordlyset for May eighteenth, 1848, there appeared a communication from Nattestad relative to this occasion, in which he rightly claims to have been the first Norwegian to settle in the state. He married there Lena Hiser in 1840; he lived in the settlement, as an influential, respected member of the community, till his death, which occurred at Clinton, May twenty-eighth, 1886. His wife died in September, 1888. They left seven children; Henry Nattestad, the oldest, at present occupies the homestead. The other children are, Charles (Sioux Falls, South Dakota), James (Dakota), Ann (Clinton), Julia (Mrs. Martin Scofftedt Lawrence, Kansas), Caroline (Mrs. Louis O. Larson, Clinton), and Eliza (Clinton). Ansten Nattestad was born August twenty-sixth, 1813, the youngest of three brothers. Ole was the next oldest.

Their father, Knud Nattestad, was a man of some means, but by the right of primogeniture, the oldest inherited the estate and he remained in Norway. Of these things and the early life of the two younger brothers, Ole Nattestad gives an account in an interview printed in Billed-Magazin, 1869, where also is a detailed account of Ansten Nattestad’s coming to America with his group of one hundred immigrants in 1839. He also there, pages 107–108, gives a description of the settlement as it was in 1869, and he has elsewhere in the columns of that magazine made important contributions to the immigration history of the years 1838–1840, which now are among the original sources of material for a history of Norwegian immigration. Relative to the further career of Ansten Nattestad I shall only add here that he became one of the substantial members of this great and growing settlement, in which he continued to live until his death on April eighth, 1889.

Hans G. Haugen was born at Vægli in Rollaug Parish in 1785. He was an old soldier, having been in the Norwegian-Swedish War of 1814, and having served in the Norwegian army for seven years. His wife, whose maiden name was Sigrid Pedersdatter Valle, was born in January, 1803. The family consisted further of two sons, Gunnul and Gjermund, the former born at Vægli, April twenty-eighth, 1827, the latter on September nineteenth, 1836. The father, Hans Haugen, lived only a year after coming to America; he died in October, 1840. In 1849 the widow and two sons moved to Primrose, Dane County, Wisconsin, where we shall meet with them again. Sigrid Haugen died in Beloit in 1885. It may be added here that the family took the name of Jackson in this country. Of the circumstances that led to the adoption of this name the son gives an account which appeared in Anderson’s First Chapter, etc., page two hundred sixty-three.

Thore Helgeson Kirkejord[83] was born September twelfth, 1812; married in 1837. They had one daughter, Christie, born 1849, and who is married to Gunder Larson.[84] Thore Helgeson died in Clinton in 1871. Christopher C. Nyhus (Newhouse) was born at Vægli in July, 1812. When he came to Clinton Township he first entered claim to forty acres of land, which was later increased to a hundred sixty. He married a daughter of Halvor Halvorson in the fall of 1843. They had five children, Christopher, who died in infancy, Oliver, Christopher 2d, Torrena (Mrs. Gustav Nelson, Clinton), and Christiana. T. Nelson settled on section twenty in 1839; he married Rachel Gilbertson that year. They had five children. The son, T. T. Nelson, married Mary Tangen of Manchester, Illinois, in 1872. They have two daughters, Anna R. (b. 1875), Gertine (b. 1878).

CHAPTER XV
The Earliest White Settlers on Rock and Jefferson Prairies. The Founding of the Rock Prairie Settlement. The Earliest Settlers on Rock Prairie

We have seen that when Ole Nattestad settled at Clinton on July first, 1838, the country was a wilderness, he being the only white man there. He speaks, however, of eight Americans living some distance from him, in similar condition. It was less than three years prior that the first white settlers had located in the county. On the eighteenth day of November, 1835, John Inman, of Lucerne County, Pennsylvania, Thomas Holmes, William Holmes, and Joshua Holmes, of Ohio, Milo Jones and George Follmer, settled on the site of the present city of Janesville, opposite the “big rock.”[85] This was the first settlement in Rock County. Inman and William Jones had visited the locality and selected this spot in July of that year. On this occasion they had camped on the bluff on the Racine road. Our authority relates: “From this point they saw Rock Prairie stretching away in the distance to the east and south, till the verdant plain mingled with the blue of the horizon. They saw before them an ocean of waving grass and blooming flowers, and realized the idea of having found the real Canaan—the real paradise of the world.” They returned to Milwaukee, having in their ten days’ exploration of the Rock River Valley, found but one family, namely, a Mr. McMillan, who resided where Waukesha now stands.[85] Somewhat later in the year came Samuel St. John and his wife, the last being the first white woman in the county. The next year there were several new arrivals. On December seventh, 1836, townships one, two, three, and four north of ranges eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, of the fourth principal meridian, afterwards the eastern sixteen of the present twenty townships of Rock County,[86] were taken from Milwaukee County and constituted a separate county, called Rock. The county took its name from the “big rock” on the north side of the river, now within the city limits of Janesville, and an ancient landmark among the Indians and the early traders.

All these earliest settlements (1836–1837) were made near and along the Rock River. In 1838 there were four hundred and eighty settled in this region chiefly, the centers of population being already then Janesville and Beloit. Next follow Johnstown, Lima, and Milton, in the northwestern part of the county, and Union. The region west of Beloit, Newark, Avon, Spring Valley, was still wholly unsettled in the summer of 1839. The Town of Bradford, the next north of Clinton, was first settled by Erastus Dean, in 1836; there were very few before 1838. The Town of Clinton, as originally organized (1842), comprised the territory of the present town, the south half of Bradford, and portions of Turtle and La Prairie.

The first actual settlement in the present township was made in May, 1837, on the west side of Jefferson Prairie, by Stephen E. Downer and Daniel Tasker, and their wives, on the southeast side of the prairie. In July, Oscar H. Pratt and Franklin Mitchell, from Joliet, Illinois, made claims. These were the earliest. On the west side of the prairie settlement was made in October, 1837, by H. L. Warner, Henry Tuttle, Albert Tuttle, and Griswold Weaver. We recall that Ole Nattestad said that when he came to Clinton on July first, 1838, there were eight Americans living isolated at considerable distance from him. Nattestad located on section twenty. Here Christopher Nyhus also settled, while Thore Helgeson settled on section twenty-nine. Who the eight settlers were that Nattestad met, remains somewhat uncertain, but it does not seem unlikely that it was the four last mentioned, and some of the first explorers, who are named as Charles Tuttle, Dennis Mills, Milton S. Warner, and William S. Murrey.

The Town of Turtle, directly west of Clinton, was not organized until 1846. The first settlers were S. G. Colley, who located on section thirty-two, in the spring of 1838, and Daniel D. Egery, who came there about the same time, locating on section thirty-six (to Beloit, however, in 1837). Such were the beginnings of settlement east of Beloit prior to Nattestad’s coming, and it was still virtually a wilderness when Ansten Nattestad’s party came at the close of September, 1839. West of Beloit, in the Town of Newark, the Norwegians were the first, while in Avon and Spring Valley they were among the earliest groups of settlers. It is the settlement of this region, and especially the Town of Newark, to which we shall now turn.

We observed above that some of Ansten Nattestad’s party who came to Jefferson Prairie in September, 1839, did not remain there. These went fourteen miles farther west and established a settlement in the Township of Newark, which had not been settled by white men before, while a few of the members of this latter party went south from there eighteen miles, crossing the Illinois line, and located in the Township of Rock Run, in Stephenson County, Illinois.

The founder of the Rock Prairie Settlement was Gullik Olson Gravdal, of Vægli, Numedal; he emigrated from Norway with Ansten Nattestad in 1839. He came directly to Jefferson Prairie, but did not remain there. With Gisle Halland and Goe Bjöno he went west a distance to look over the country, with a view to settling elsewhere. Having arrived at Beloit, they managed here to secure a map and from it got some idea of where government land was to be had. Then they continued their journey along the Madison road seven miles farther west. Finally, he came to a place which suited him, for he found, as he says, “good spring water, as also prairie and woodland in the right proportion.” Together with Lars Röste, a single man from the Parish of Land, he then bought forty acres of land.[87] Gisle Halland bought land one mile farther east, while Goe Bjöno took a claim on a piece of land for Mrs. Gunhild Ödegaarden, three miles south of the site selected by Gravdal.

Gunhild Ödegaarden (who emigrated from Nore, annex parish in Numedal) was a widow of considerable means, who had paid the passage of several other persons. Her family, among whom were grown sons and daughters, emigrated with her to America in the Nattestad party and came directly to Jefferson Prairie. Immediately after Bjöno’s purchase of land for her in Newark Township she, with family, moved out there and had a log cabin erected, this being the first dwelling built in that township. This statement is based upon the authority of Gravdal himself, as printed in an interview on page 162 of Billed-Magazin for 1869. The History of Rock County agrees in this statement that Mrs. Ödegaarden’s log cabin, built in the fall of 1839, was the first house erected in the Town of Newark. Gunhild Ödegaarden’s name appears regularly as Mrs. Gunale (or Gunile). She is there mentioned several times, her family being extensively intermarried with the old pioneer families in the settlement.[88] Gravdal completed the erection of a cabin late in the fall, and his family having been left on Jefferson Prairie, he brought them to Rock Prairie in the latter part of November (Billed-Magazin, 1869, page 162).[89]

That same fall Gisle Halland married Margit Knudsdatter Nösterud from Rallaug Parish, Numedal, being obliged to go as far south as Rockford, Illinois, to get the ceremony performed. Their oldest child, Kristine, born in the fall of 1840, was the first white child born in that township. Gravdal, speaking of those days, says: “When I located in this region, the whole country to the west was a desert. I do not know whether there lived white people anywhere between my home and the Mississippi. The same was also the case toward the north; however, about seven miles west (east?) from my home two Yankees had settled in the wilderness. The Indians were still lords of these regions. They often visited us in our houses, but they were always friendly and courteous. We were never molested by the wild son of the desert. There was at this time an abundance of game; we saw stags in large herds, and prairie chickens literally swarmed.” There seem to have been no fresh accessions of settlers until the spring of 1841. Then Lars H. Skavlem arrived and located on section eleven. Gullik Knudson Laugen also came at the same time, and not long after several Americans moved in. Both Skavlem and Knudson had come to America in 1839, having been members of Nattestad’s party. Skavlem had, in the interval, lived on Jefferson Prairie. Gullik Knudson had remained in Chicago, as had also Gunnul Stordok, securing work there,[90] as did also two girls from Numedal, to whom they were engaged in Norway. These two couples were married the following winter, and, having saved some money from their small earnings, they decided to buy a home somewhere in the Norwegian settlement in Rock County. Knudson relates: “I walked about several days to find a location for a home, and at last came to a place on the verge of a prairie, where a rushing spring of water poured out of the ground. Here I decided to build and live, and I called the place Springen (the spring). The land about was like a desert; barring the four Norwegians who had come before me, there were no settlers. Toward the west one had to travel twenty-two miles to find white people. It was fortunate that there was an abundance of game, for what we secured by hunting was the sustenance on which we chiefly relied during the winter.” He tells how, with the first fall of snow, he and another[91] walked on skis to Beloit to buy flour, and how the tracks left in the snow by the skis had aroused considerable wonder and speculation among the Americans about there, who afterwards discovered the tracks, and that it became the subject of extensive discussion as to what unknown monster could have left such tracks. Beloit, he says, consisted then of a mill, a hotel, two stores, and a few laborers’ cottages.

From the fact of his location near the big spring, “Springen,” as Knudson called it, he came to be called Gullik Springen; his sir name, Laugen, he no longer used, but wrote himself Gullik Knudson. Here by this spring, Knudson built a hut of shrubs, thatched with straw, in which they lived for three months while the log cabin was being built.[92] The flat cover of a chest, brought from Norway, served for a table, and the cooking was done on the ground. In December the log cabin was ready. Gunnul Stordok and wife, who did not come to Newark until September, lived with Knudson during the first winter, after which they removed to Illinois.[93]

In the summer of 1841 a considerable number of Knudson’s acquaintances from Norway came; these found a temporary home with Knudson, sharing in his genuine pioneer hospitality. Among them were Halvor Skavlem and his wife, Berit, the daughter, Kari, and two sons, Ole and Paul Skavlem, the latter with wife and child, Bessie. Halvor Skavlem died one week after their arrival. The son Paul bought land; Ole first, however, went to Mineral Point, in Dodge County, returning, however, later; he settled near Orfordville. Another of this group was Halvor Nilson Aas, who, with his family, settled near Gravdahl, in Newark Township. Knut Kristensen also came in 1841 and located on section eleven, erecting a log cabin there. Finally, Ole Halvorson Valle, who later moved to Iowa, was among this number.

Several of those who had come to Jefferson Prairie in 1839 removed to Rock Prairie in the summer of 1841. Thus, Hellik Glaim, Lars Skavlem, and the latter’s three brothers, Gullik, Gjermund, and Herbrand; these all moved there upon their father Halvor’s arrival from Norway that summer. Hellik N. Brække and Nils Olson Vægli came directly from Norway in 1841. The last mentioned was from Vægli Annex to Rollaug Parish in Numedal. He was born at Vægli Parsonage and was therefore often called Nils Prestegaard. He lived at Gravdal’s the first winter; the following summer he, with two others, Paul Skavlem and Hellik Brække, bought a quarter section of land together in section thirty-two in Plymouth Township. Nils Vægli was married in 1844 to Kari Skavlem, daughter of Halvor Skavlem; they went to Koshkonong, in Dane County, to be married by Reverend J. W. C. Dietrichson, who had just come there from Norway. They were one of the first couples to be married by him. Hellik Brække sold out his share in the land, and in 1852 moved to Mitchell County, Iowa. Lars Skavlem bought land and settled near Halvor Aas, whose daughter (Groe Nelson) he married in 1844; hence, he was also called Lars Aas. He later bought his father-in-law’s farm, the place being called “the Skavlen farm” (Skavlenfarmen). Gullik Skavlem bought land three miles east of Gisle Halland in Beloit Township, about three miles from Beloit; he, however, moved to Mitchell County, Iowa, in the fifties.[94] Hellik Glaim had stopped in Chicago till 1840, when he came to Rock Prairie. Ten years later he sold out and moved to Fillmore County, Minnesota.[95]

The above is a brief record of the beginnings of the Rock Prairie Settlement. Of some of the founders of this settlement, which, in a few years, became one of the most prosperous in the state, I may here add:

Gullik Gravdal, the nestor of the settlement, was born in Vægli, Numedal, in 1802; he died in 1873, leaving widow, a daughter, Sarah, and two sons, Ole and Tolle. Ole Gravdal was born in Norway in 1830; he married Jöri Ödegaarden in 1855, after which he lived for thirteen years in Beloit, then removed to Newark Township. He is at present living in Beloit, Wisconsin. Ole Gravdal dropped the latter name and used the patronymic Gulack. Tolle Gulack Gravdal was born in 1833. He married Bessie Skavlem, daughter of Paul H. Skavlem, in 1857. They lived on the farm in Newark until 1894 (Tolle having lived there fifty-five years), in which year they moved to Beloit. He died in September, 1903, leaving a widow and two children, a son, Gilbert Gravdal, in Newark Township, and a daughter, Mrs. C. E. Inman, in Beloit. A son, Henry, died in 1902, and a daughter, Nellie (Mrs. W. O. Hanson), died in the summer of 1903. Amerika for September twenty-fifth, 1903, prints an obituary notice of Tolle Gravdal, according to which his death was sudden, being stricken as he was at work. The notice says, “he was one of those who had tried the privations and the trials of pioneer life, and he was always ready to extend a helping hand to all who needed it. He enjoyed universal respect and love for his sincerity and his integrity and his lovable nature.” Sarah Gravdal, daughter of Gullik Gravdal, married Halvor Halvorson (son of Cleophas Halvorson), of Newark Township, in 1869.

Hellik Nilson Brække married a sister of Reverend C. F. Clausen’s wife; in 1852 he joined the latter’s colony of settlers in Mitchell County, Iowa. Lars Skavlem was born in 1819. He married Groe Nilson Aas in 1844; their children are Halvor, Bessie, Helen and Carolina. The son, Halvor L. Skavlem, born 1848, is a farmer in Newark Township; he married Cornelia Olmstead, in Plymouth, a granddaughter of Mrs. Gunild Ödegaarden.[96] Gunnul Stordok moved to Rock Run (see below). It seems that he had retained some of his land in Newark, for when Gunder Knudson Springen (brother of Gullik Springen) came there in 1843, he bought land then owned by Gunnul Stordok.

We shall now leave, for the present, the Rock Prairie Settlement, and observe what was taking place elsewhere during the period that has been briefly sketched here.

CHAPTER XVI
The Rock Run Settlement. Other Immigrants of 1839. The Immigration of 1840.

It has been stated that a settlement was also established in Illinois about twenty miles southwest of Rock Prairie, the same year as the latter was settled, i. e., in 1839. This came to be known as the Rock Run Settlement, from the name of the town. It lies partly in Stephenson, partly in Winnebago County. The locality is prairie, relieved here and there by bits of timber land. The foundation of this settlement is also to be accredited to an immigrant from Numedal, who came on the Amelia, in 1839. His name was Clemet Torstenson Stabæk, and he came from Rollaug Parish. With him three others located there in the fall of 1839, namely, Syvert Tollefson and Ole Anderson, from Numedal, and a Mr. Knudson, from Drammen. Stabæk was a man of considerable means. He selected land in Winnebago County, near the present village of Davis. His son, Torsten K. O. Stabæk (born in Norway[97]) married Torgen Patterson, and they lived on the farm until 1884, when they moved to Davis.[98] Kristopher Rostad and wife, Kristi, seem also to have moved to Rock Run before the close of 1839. In the following summer came Gunnul Stordok, to whom we have referred under the settling of Newark in Rock County. Stordok lived in Rock Run until 1870; he then moved back to Newark, where the rest of his relatives who had come to America had settled.[99] Gunnul Stordok was born in Rollaug, Numedal, in the year 1800; he married Mary Larson (of Rollaug) before emigrating.

Among the earliest arrivals in the settlement subsequently was Halvor Aasen, born in Numedal in 1823, and who came to America in 1841. For two years after coming to this country he worked in the lead mines at Mineral Point, Wisconsin, and at Galena, Illinois. In 1843 he married Christie Olson, and bought a farm in Laona Township, Winnebago County, whither he and his wife moved in 1844. Here they lived until their death. She died in 1902, and he in March, 1905.[100]

The Rock Run Settlement was prosperous but did not grow to such proportions as its sister settlements to the north. In later years many of its earlier pioneers moved back to Rock County, as Stordok did, and as Lars Rostad and family also did in the sixties. Among those who located at Rock Run in the forties were Hovel Paulson (born 1817) from North Land Parish, Norway, who located near Davis in 1846;[101] Christian Lunde, also from Land, Norway, came to Rock Run in 1848 and later moved to Goodhue County, Minnesota; Narve Stabæk, Torsten Knudson and Nels Nelson, all three from Numedal; Gunder O. Halvorson, from Kragerö; Svale Nilson, from Bukn Parish, Stavanger; Gunder Halvorson, from Telemarken, and Lars O. Anderson. There appears a very brief account of the Rock Run Settlement by Lars O. Anderson in Nordlyset, under date of June second, 1848. According to this there were at that time twenty families, twelve unmarried men over twenty years of age, six unmarried women of over twenty years, while there were thirty-two persons below the age of twenty. The whole settlement, he says, numbers ninety persons and comprises 4,062 acres of land.

We have followed somewhat fully the immigration movement in Numedal and Telemarken in 1839, and we have also noted the fact that that year records its contingent of emigrants also from Stavanger Province. It remains here to note briefly the growth of the movement in Voss and its spread elsewhere. Nils Lydvo came from Voss in 1839, and went directly to his brothers, Knud and Ole Lydvo, in Shelby County, Missouri. At the same time came Anders Finno, Lars Davidson Rekve, Nils Severson Gilderhus, and Anfin Leidal; their destination was La Salle County.[102] The party further contained Ole K. Gilderhus, Lars Ygre, Anders Flage, Lars Dugstad, Knud Gjöstein, Anders Nilson Brække and wife, Knud Brække and wife, Magne B. Bystölen, Anna Gilderhus, and Anna Bakketun.

This party seems to have arrived in New York early in July, 1839, and to have intended to go to Illinois. We shall meet with most of them later as pioneers in Wisconsin settlements, but for a time many of them remained in Chicago, so that in the fall of 1839 and the following winter there was a considerable colony of Norwegian immigrants located in Chicago. Nils A. Lie, of Deerfield, Wisconsin, writing of this fact, says there were more Vossings in Chicago about 1840 than all other Norwegians combined.[103] Among those who remained temporarily in Chicago were Ole K. Gilderhus, Lars Ygre and Lars Rekve. The last of these worked for a year on a steamer plying between Chicago and St. Joseph, Michigan.[104] I shall give a brief sketch of him below, under Koshkonong. Anders Finno went to Koshkonong, Dane County, in 1840, but later settled in Blue Mounds, in the same county. In 1850 he went to California with a group of gold seekers and has not since been heard from by his compatriots.

Anders Nilson Brække[105] was born at Brække, Voss, Norway, February twelfth, 1818; he had married Inger Nelson in Norway. Brække located permanently in Chicago, working at first for Mathew Laflin and John Wright. He laid the foundation of his future fortune in 1845, when he purchased some property on Superior Street, on part of which he built the residence, where he lived until his death in 1887. He held many offices of public trust in the discharge of which he was able and unimpeachable in his honesty. Brække’s first wife died early leaving three children.[106] In 1849 he married Mrs. Julia K. Williams; three children by this marriage are living.[107]