The Scandinavian Element in the United States. Babcock Kendric Charles
the present towns of Plymouth, Newark, Avon, and Spring Valley in Rock County, Wisconsin, and Rock Run in Illinois. Through these settlements many new comers filtered and spread out rapidly toward the West and Northwest, reaching in a few years as far as Mineral Point, more than fifty miles from Jefferson Prairie.
Other sections of Norway than those already mentioned began to feel the effects of the emigration bacillus after 1837, and the processes illustrated by the movements from Stavanger, Bergen, and Numedal were repeated – the emigration of two or three, letters sent home, the return of a man here and there, the organization of the party, the long journey, and the selection of the new home. Thelemark, the rugged mountainous district in south central Norway, was in a condition to be strongly moved by stories of freer and larger opportunities. Long before 1837, great tracts of land in Upper Thelemark became the property of two wealthy lumber men, and the tenant-farmers were drawn more and more into work in the lumber mills, to the neglect of farming and grazing. Consequently, when logging was suspended in the hard times, and the wages, already low, were stopped altogether, great distress resulted, and emigration seemed about the only means of escape. “With lack of employment and with impoverishment, debt and discontent appeared as the visible evidences of the bad condition. That was the golden age of the money-lenders and sheriffs. So the America fever raged, and many crossed the ocean in the hope of finding a bit of ground where they could live and enjoy the fruits of their labors without daily anxiety about paydays, rents, and executions.”73
A company of about forty, representing eleven families from Thelemark, failing to get accommodations with the Nattestad party at Drammen, went on to Skien and thence to Gothenburg, where they secured passage in an American vessel loaded with iron, and made the voyage to Boston in two months.74 Three weeks more were consumed in the circuitous journey to Milwaukee by way of New York, Albany, the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes. Like several other parties of that year they originally aimed at Illinois.75 But their boat “leaked like a sieve,” and the stop at Milwaukee was probably precautionary. Instead of proceeding further, they were persuaded to send a committee, under the guidance of an American, into the present county of Waukesha, where they selected a tract about fourteen miles southwest of Milwaukee, on the shore of Lake Muskego.76 Here each adult man took up forty acres at the usual minimum price of $1.25 per acre, and so began the Muskego colony proper, the name, Muskego, however, being later applied to the group of settlements in Waukesha County and to several towns in Racine County.77 Like the colony in Rock County, the Muskego group grew rapidly in spite of malarial troubles, and for ten years it was an objective point for immigrants from Thelemark, and a halting place for those bound for the frontier farther west in Wisconsin or in Iowa.
As the emigration movement from Norway increased, the planning of settlements and the organization of parties took on a more definite and business-like air. The process is well illustrated in the case of the town of Norway in Racine County, Wisconsin, which was one of the most successfully managed settlements in the Northwest. In the fall of 1839, two intelligent men of affairs, Sören Bakke, the son of a rich merchant of Drammen, and John Johnson (Johannes Johannesson), came to America on a prospecting tour, for the purpose of finding a place where they might invest money in land as a foundation for a colony, which they may possibly have intended to serve as a new home for a sect of dissenters known as Haugians.78 After visiting Fox River in Illinois, and various locations in Wisconsin, they found a tract that suited them – good land, clear water, and abundance of game and fish, enough to satisfy the most fastidious. This they purchased, building a cabin on it and awaiting the coming of their friends to whom they sent a favorable report.79 The party arrived in the autumn of 1840, under the leadership of Even Heg, an innkeeper of Leir, who brought still more money, which was also invested in land. Altogether, the money which Bakke brought with him, or received later, amounted to $6000.80 It was all used for purchasing land, which was either sold to well-to-do immigrants, or leased to new comers. This business was supplemented by a store kept in the first cabin. Upon the death of Johnson in 1845, Bakke went home and settled upon an estate owned by his father in Leir, one of the first of the very small number of men who have returned to permanent residence in Norway after some years spent in America.81 Even Heg became the real head of the colony at Norway, Wisconsin, after the departure of Bakke, whose interests he continued to look after, and under his management a steady development followed. This settlement became the Mecca of hundreds of immigrants arriving in Milwaukee in the late forties, and “Heg’s barn was for some months every summer crowded with newcomers en route for some place farther west.”82
Another important and highly prosperous group of settlements, called Koshkonong after the lake and creek of that name, sprang up in 1840 and 1841, in the southwestern corner of Jefferson County, Wisconsin, and the adjacent parts of Dane and Rock Counties. The beginning was made by men who removed thither from the Fox River and Beaver Creek localities after investigating the lands in Wisconsin. In 1840 there were nine entries of land by Norwegians in the present townships of Albion, Christiana, and Deerfield, the usual purchase being eighty acres; the next few years saw the spread of the colony to the townships of Pleasant Valley and Dunkirk, from the influx of immigrants from Illinois and from Norway.83 After the stress and hardship of the first pioneer years, the fortunate choice of location in one of the best agricultural sections of Wisconsin told very promptly, and Koshkonong became “the best known, richest, and most interesting Norwegian settlement in America, the destination of thousands of pilgrims from the fatherland since 1840.”84 Many of the farms are still in possession of the families of the original settlers, whose children are prominent in business, professional and political circles.
The movement of the stream of Norwegian immigrants after 1845 was distinctly in a direction westward from the Wisconsin settlements; the land farther out on the prairies was better, tho it did not have the combination of timber and stream or lake which the early settlers insisted on having, often to their detriment, since land chosen with reference to these requirements was apt to be marshy. The fresh arrivals, after a few weeks or months in the friendly and helpful communities of early immigrants, were better prepared by a partial acclimatization, by knowledge of the steps necessary for acquiring citizenship and land-ownership, and by the formation of definite plans of procedure, for the next stage in the western course of their empire. Occasionally a shrewd farmer of the older companies took advantage of the rise in the value of his farm, sold out, and bought another tract farther out on the frontier, perhaps repeating the process two or three times.85 John Nelson Luraas, for example, was one of those men who first spent some time in Muskego, then bought land in Norway, Racine County; after improving it for three years, he sold it in 1843 and moved into Dane County.86 Here he lived for twenty-five years, and then moved into Webster County, Iowa, taking up new land. After a few years he went back to his Dane County property, where he spent another thirteen years; finally, as an aged, retired, wealthy farmer, he died in the village of Stoughton in 1890.87
Provision for religious instruction and ministration was one of the early concerns of the Norwegian immigrants, as would be expected from a people essentially religious, who moved by whole families. Nor was there much distinction between the more orthodox and the dissenters. After their magnetic center shifted to the west in 1835 and the settlements and population multiplied, a good deal of lay preaching of one sort and another went on, – Lutheran, Methodist, Haugian, Baptist, Episcopalian, and Mormon. Lay services, in fact, were the rule all along the westward moving frontier, and services conducted by regular clergymen the exception. One of the Norwegians wrote: “We conducted our religious meetings in our own democratic way. We appointed our leader and requested some one to read from a book of sermons… We prayed, exhorted, and sang among ourselves,
Translated from
A shipping notice in the
An oft-repeated story tells how the company was persuaded to remain in Wisconsin by some enterprising Milwaukee men who pointed out to the immigrants a fat, healthy-looking man as a specimen of what Wisconsin would do for a man, and a lean, sickly-looking man as a warning of what the scorching heats and fever of Illinois would quickly do to a man who settled there. See
Langeland,
Anderson,
M. W. Odland,
Langeland,
It may be well to note that the name of Dane county has no relation to Scandinavian settlement, but was given in honor of Nathan Dane of Massachusetts, author of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.
Anderson,