Tom Gjelten - A Nation of Nations: A Great American Immigration Story

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To Magnolia

The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth, have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. In the history of the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir. Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night. Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations.

Walt Whitman

Preface to Leaves of Grass

The family farm sat on the edge of a pristine glacial lake in Norways fjord country, in a sparsely settled district known as rdal, which was therefore the family name. Behind the barn, a dirt trail led up a valley into the mountains. The hillsides were steep and rocky, but the soil was fertile and well watered by glacial runoff. In the summer, cattle and sheep grazed on the verdant slopes. The rdal family named it SgnhildtunetSgnhilds Placeafter one of the early rdal women. The property had been in the family as far back as 1759, passing from father to firstborn son according to the ancient primogeniture law that guaranteed continued family ownership of Norways farmland.

By 1864, Sgnhildtunet should rightfully have passed to Johannes. But he was just twenty-two and restless, and the prospect of following the familiar path of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather left little to his imagination. In Norway, he faced a predictable future, and not an easy one. For all its natural beauty, Sgnhildtunet would never be a farm that yielded abundance. The winter was long and dark and cold. To stay there would be to settle for the narrow nineteenth-century world of the Norwegian peasantry. His forefathers had no choice, but Johannes did.

The talk in rdal in those days was of going to America, a country wide open to Norwegian immigrants. From towns on the west coast, ships were sailing daily to Bergen or Liverpool or other transatlantic embarkation points. For the equivalent of about thirty dollars, companies offered special America packages, covering steamship travel across the ocean plus rail transport into the U.S. interior. Large tracts of tillable land, so scarce in Norway, stood empty in Wisconsin and Minnesota and the Dakota Territory. Dreaming of new lives in a different land, Johannes and his twenty-year-old wife, Brite, said good-bye to their families and headed across the Atlantic.

With Johannes abandoning his claim, the farm in rdal passed to the next oldest son, Ole. There were two other sons in the family, howeverSamuel and a second Oleand when they reached adulthood a few years later, they had no land of their own and nowhere to find work. Norway in the nineteenth century had one of the highest rates of population growth in Europe, but it still had a preindustrial agrarian economy that offered few employment opportunities. More than two thirds of the population lived in rural areas, the majority of them landless. The rdal brothers knew what they needed to do, and in the spring of 1875, they sailed to Liverpool. From there, they booked passage to America on the Allan Steamship Line, a route favored in those years by tens of thousands of Norwegians.

In each decade from 1860 to 1910, the country lost about 5 percent (and sometimes more) of its population to emigration. Only Italy and Ireland lost proportionally more. The vast majority left rural Norway and made their way to the rural United States. The Norwegian American writer Ole Rlvaag called it The Great Settling, and in his novel Giants in the Earth he painted a vivid portrait of the Norwegian immigrants experience as they fanned across the upper Midwest. They traversed the plains in covered wagons, towed by oxen that would later be put to use plowing fields or hauling timber. The wagons were packed with the things they would need to start a frontier lifehousehold utensils, farm implements, clothing, bedding.

Samuel and Ole made their way to western Minnesota, where their brother Johannes had homesteaded a decade earlier. By the time his younger brothers showed up in June of 1875, Johannes had an established farming operation, and he immediately put Samuel and Ole to work. After the harvest season, Samuel and Ole found work in the area as laborers, hiring out to whoever needed help. During the winter, when farmwork was scarce, they attended public schoolgrown men sitting alongside nine- and ten-year-oldsin order to learn English. Once they had saved enough money to buy some livestock and a wagon, Samuel and Ole moved on to look for land of their own. They headed first toward the Red River Valley in the northeast corner of Dakota Territory. It was a slow journey. The cattle they brought with them were constantly hungry and kept stopping to graze along the way. Nearing the Red River, they found the plain almost entirely flooded and had to wade through the water and muck. Mosquitoes tormented them.

Most of the land they crossed had already been settled, so they pressed on to the west, where there was still acreage free for the taking. The southern part of Dakota featured abundant grassland, but the rdal brothers, having grown up among fjords and mountains, were not drawn to wide open spaces, so they stayed to the north. As they plodded on, they encountered fewer and fewer sod shacks, until at last they reached territory no one else had claimed. The land had not been surveyed yet, and Samuel and Ole could take it simply by driving stakes into the ground and declaring it theirs.

The terrain was somewhat reminiscent of rural Norway, but this was virgin land. Everything Samuel and Ole built, they built by hand. Most of the work they did, they did for the first time. Ingenuity and enterprise were key. For their first shelter, they turned their wagon box upside down and mounted it on four posts, laying the canvas over the top. Next, they built rudimentary log cabins. After stripping the logs, they stacked them one atop another, filling the spaces between with clay from the riverbed. The roof was made of bark and sod, laid carefully across pole rafters. In Norway, the farm life had been ritualized, consisting of chores done the same way, generation after generation. In America, the sod Samuel and Ole opened with their plows had never been broken before. The land had never been planted, the fields never fenced. The whole venture was exhilarating. This was the Norwegian immigrant experience that inspired Rlvaag: As Per Hansa lay there dreaming of the future it seemed to him that hidden springs of energy, hitherto unsuspected even by himself, were welling up in his heart. He felt as if his strength were inexhaustible.

Success in America for immigrants required looking ahead and focusing on what had been gained, not what was left behind. The rdal brothers would never see Norway again. They had year-round farming responsibilities and soon were raising families. The old country was impossibly far away. Inevitably, the immigrant experience included periods of loneliness, especially acute there on the Great Plains. But Norwegians were known for their stoicism. Pious Lutherans and not given to frivolity, the brothers worked hard and skillfully and prospered in their new farming lives, cultivating wheat, oats, and potatoes. They dutifully came to see themselves as Americans, but it was not hard. No one marginalized them as newcomers, challenged their presence on the land, or questioned their loyalty, identity, or religion. With other local immigrants, they built schools and churches. As pioneers, they took that part of America as their own, and no one questioned their claim.