A Scandinavian Heritage. Joan Magee
at Leyden in the Netherlands when he joined two Dutch students in a voyage to New Amsterdam in search of adventure. About 60 years after the Van Bus-kirks arrived in Nova Scotia as Loyalists, a branch of the family moved to Essex County where they took up land newly made ready for settlement, a property located near the railroads built in the 1850s and 1860s.
The first emigrant to come directly from Scandinavia to settle in the Detroit River border region was Hans Georg Jaspersen, a merchant with international connections, from Slesvig, [now Schleswig] then a duchy which was part of Denmark. He had been born in the ancient town of Slesvig where his grandfather, Jasper Carstensen (1722-1777), was a Danish government official, Justice of the Peace for the area around Treia, to the west of Slesvig. There Jasper Carstensen had founded the family estate of Bransburg about the middle of the eighteenth century. While the eldest son, Carsten, inherited this estate upon his father’s death, the second son, Thom Jaspersen (1753-1800), became Royal Danish Justice of the Forest at Treia. Of his five sons, all but one left Slesvig. The eldest inherited the estate and in turn became Justice of the Forest at Treia. Another son, Johann, became a merchant at Kiel, in the neighbouring duchy of Holstein, also then a part of Denmark. The other sons, Thom, Wilhelm, and Hans Georg, all went abroad, Thom becoming a sea captain, Wilhelm a merchant in Buenos Aires, and Hans Georg eventually settling in the Windsor-Detroit border region.
In 1806, at the age of 18, Hans Georg emigrated to Reading, Pennsylvania. After seven years there, during which time he married Ann Madeira, he became a trader and merchant as had his brothers. By 1819 he had begun to speculate in land in the newly developed Missouri Territory, and in 1821 he was actively dealing in land in Kentucky. By 1822 he had closed his business in Kentucky and moved on to Dayton and Lewisburg in Ohio. In 1832 he arrived in Detroit where he set up businesses on both sides of the Detroit River, joining in a partnership with Peter Frederick Verhoeff, a businessman from the Netherlands.9 Their stores at Windsor, Detroit, and Algonac were intended to outfit settlers on the Upper Lakes. Soon Jaspersen had bought land on Walpole Island in order to trade with the local Indians. Over a period of 20 years, from 1832 to his death in 1856, he was one of the leading businessmen in the Detroit River area. Unlike Peter Frederick Verhoeff, who left Windsor and Detroit to retire in the Dutch community on Staten Island in New York State, Jaspersen settled at St. Clair, Michigan, near his large family.
Jaspersen’s sons, Louis Frederick and Bonanzo, were educated at the Detroit campus of the University of Michigan in 1840-1841. With their father’s assistance they settled in the southern part of Essex County where they became prominent pioneer business leaders in Kingsville and Colchester. Their descendants, the Jasperson family of present-day Essex County, can thus trace their family history back to Treia in Slesvig, now part of Schleswig-Holstein in Western Germany, but then part of Denmark.
While there were a few other individual Scandinavians who settled in the Detroit River region in the years 1820 to 1850, it was only in 1854, with the arrival of the Great Western Railway in Windsor that Scandinavian immigration effectively commenced. Hundreds of immigrants passed through Windsor each day, many of them Norwegians, a few Swedish, all bound for the American midwest. A few, however, remained in Essex County, unable to accompany their families across the international border, refused entry by the American medical authorities in Detroit for reasons of ill health.
This early photograph taken about 1870 at Gudvangen i Sogn, Norway shows the harsh conditions under which Norwegian peasants of the nineteenth century attempted to wrest a living from the soil to support their large families.
2
A Perilous Journey:
Nineteenth Century Norwegian Emigrants in Transit Through Canada
Between 1836 and 1850 the majority of Norwegian emigrants bound for the American midwest travelled to ports in the United States either directly from Norway or by way of Liverpool, Le Havre, or Hamburg. It has been estimated that in those years nearly 18,000 emigrants followed these routes, while only 240 landed at Quebec. This pattern changed dramatically between 1851 and 1853 when 7,510 sailed directly from Norwegian ports to Quebec and then made their way to the American midwest by water and rail, thus passing through Canada en route. From 1854 to 1865 Norwegian emigrants travelled almost exclusively by way of Quebec, some 44,100 out of a total of 46,900 taking this route with Chicago or Milwaukee as their goal before they dispersed for the settlements.1
This change in route was caused by a new international trade development which allowed the shipping companies to lower their fares to America. In the 1850s an emigrant could obtain steerage passage for about $8.00 in the Canadian currency of the day, about the same amount it cost to travel from Hamilton to Windsor on the newly opened Great Western Railway. These lower fares were made possible by a profitable new triangular trade route by which shipowners could send emigrants and ballast to Quebec, take on a cargo of lumber for a British port, and then return to Norway to the original starting point. As the ships were built to carry cargo, the accommodation provided for the passengers was primitive. Shipowners and captains overcrowded the ships, but congestion at the Norwegian ports of departure was still so great that would-be passengers often had to camp near the docks for days or weeks. Travellers had to provide their own food for the journey, while the captain would supply water and firewood. Cooking was usually done on deck in primitive stoves made from barrels. Below deck, the emigrants slept in rows of double-decked bunks, each shared by four or five passengers, arranged along the entire length of the ship. Some improvement in the conditions aboard these ships took place after 1859 when the British government imposed regulations to prevent overcrowding. However, in the 1850s conditions aboard ship were appalling, and disease and death en route to Canada were not unusual. For example, the Emigration Report for the 1857 season indicates that the highest mortality occurred among the Norwegian passengers, with 100 deaths reported among the 6,507 immigrants from Norway (1.53 per cent) who landed at Quebec after a voyage averaging 44 days in length.2 Other ships were lost at sea by storm or by fire. Some simply disappeared and were never heard from.
Once the immigrants reached Quebec safely, and passed the quarantine inspection, they were allowed to proceed on their journey up the St. Lawrence waterway to the Great Lakes where they disembarked at Toronto or Hamilton and proceeded upon their way to Chicago or Milwaukee.
At times, they were subjected to such poor treatment that a special railway conference was called in Buffalo in November 1854 to discuss ways of improving conditions affecting the transportation of emigrants. The conference was particularly concerned with the role played by “runners,” dishonest men who gathered at the railway stations waiting to take advantage of bewildered travellers, in particular those who did not speak English and were often confused about the geography of North America. The unwary among these immigrants were sold worthless tickets or valid tickets at exorbitant prices.
Train travel in the area of the Great Lakes was in its earliest stage. Train service by the Great Western from Hamilton through to the border station at Windsor began in January 1854. The majority of its passengers were immigrants planning to pass through to the United States at Detroit. Windsor itself had a population of about 750.
There are tragic reports of train derailments in these early years, many of which involved the loss of lives, some of them Norwegian. In the London Free Press of 8 June 1854 there is a brief report of an inquest into one of the seventeen accidents on the Great Western Railway that year in which a freight car loaded with immigrants and their baggage was hurled to the foot of an embankment, killing five Norwegians. Concerning the freight car, the report states:
This was shattered into a hundred pieces, the frame of which was lying floor upwards at the bottom of the embankment; it was in this car that five of the deceased were at the time of the accident, together with a large quantity of baggage, which belonged to them, and their fellow countrymen who had gone on in a previous train; parts of the car, and its contents had been hurled to considerable distances, and the boxes of these poor people, which contained all their goods, and the little mementos of the home they had left, were lying scattered in all directions. . . .3
When