Vilhelm Moberg - The Settlers

During 1855 and 1856 the weather had been favorable for the crops, and the fields at Duvemåla, in Chisago Township, had brought good harvests. Each fall, as soon as Karl Oskar had done his threshing, he noted down in the old almanac the number of bushels harvested. And in the fall of 1856, recording his sixth harvest in America, he looked back at the earlier figures. He saw that his crop this year was half again as great as last year, and his corn alone had brought him ten times as many bushels as his first year’s crop. Now he was planting the Indian grain on a quarter of his fields; corn might give up to forty bushels per acre and wheat was almost as generous in the deep soil. These new grains were blessed in their growth. And from the figures in his almanac he could follow the improvement on his claim from year to year.

But the following year was to be a year of adversity. Already in spring a severe drought set in which lasted the better part of the summer. The crops withered before they headed. The corn was best able to withstand the persistent drought but the other crops were a failure. Then, about harvesttime, came the locust plague. There had been no grasshoppers in Minnesota since 1849, and the settlers were in hopes they would never return. One day, however, they appeared in immense, ravenous swarms. Like a rain of living black-gray drops they fell over the earth. These repulsive creatures showed an unbelievable hunger, unlike the hunger of other creatures. They consumed everything green in their path, and in their wake left only the black earth behind them.

While these ravages took place, the legislature in St. Paul offered a bounty of five cents a bushel for grasshoppers. Johan and Marta earned two dollars each for catching them. Governor Ramsey proclaimed a day of prayer in the churches against the locust plague, and the authorities also urged the observation of a fast day against the disaster. Few listened to this; the settlers felt they would probably have to starve enough during the winter after the hoppers had eaten their crops.

In Chisago Township the hopper plague was less severe than in other parts of the Territory, but Karl Oskar’s crop was still only a quarter of the previous years. Fortunately, having something left of the old harvest they could manage to get along through the winter.

Then in the late fall of this memorable year came the currency catastrophe.

Karl Oskar had already learned that money was nothing but paper. During 1857, many others were to share his bitter experience; they were stuck with bills the banks could not redeem. During the last years wildcat money from banks in Wisconsin and Nebraska had also been circulating in Minnesota. Few were the settlers who hadn’t one time or another been fooled into exchanging a load of grain or a fatted hog for worthless bills. And thousands of gullible settlers who had trusted the sly wildcats found themselves destitute, their faith in paper money gone. This worthless paper ruler was dethroned. The frosty fall wind of ‘57 blew away the speculators who exchanged land plots as Gypsies exchanged horses.

How hadn’t Karl Oskar’s anger been stirred by these parasites! They were like the rats that fed off the grain and food in the cellar; however well they guarded and hid their food they could still see the teeth-marks or the dung of these pests. “If you won’t eat where I bit, you must eat where I shit,” the rat seemed to say. And it was not easy to separate its droppings from grain and flour bins; with cats, poison, and traps he had tried to rid himself of the vermin. And here were these other thieves the settlers must feed — the speculators, humanity’s rats who grew fat on the crops others had harvested for them. It was more important to root them out than it was to destroy the pests in the granaries and cellars.

The great money upheaval — as long as it lasted — freed the country of them, but, like the rats, they left dung behind. The settlers had a difficult time when business came to a standstill; they couldn’t sell anything, no one had the money to buy. For his grain and pork Karl Oskar would accept nothing but gold or good bills, and neither were available this fall. Thus he was without cash for the purchases he wanted to make. And when he occasionally could sell anything for sound cash, the price offered was pitifully low. Pork was down to two cents a pound; after fattening a hog for half a year until it finally weighed two hundred pounds he received four dollars for his labor. He might as well lie down on his earth and kick himself.

But Karl Oskar grew neither poorer nor richer during 1857. What did it concern him that the banks tumbled? He didn’t have a penny in them. His claim was his possession, and the fields lay where they had always been. For months on end they didn’t have a coin in the house, but they had a roof over their heads, heat from the stove, bread, milk, butter, eggs, pork to eat. What did it concern them that money had disappeared? They had a home and food.

Karl Oskar had come as a squatter to his claim, one of the wooden-shoe people from Sweden. Other settlers in the Territory, with more elegant shoes, had often looked down on and pitied the poor squatter who must make his own shoes from the wood of the forest. But the man in the wooden shoes sat safe and comfortable on his claim after seven years, while thousands of other settlers became destitute in the great depression of 1857.

Each fall since Karl Oskar had got his own team, he had broken at least five new acres of the vast meadow below his house. By now he could look out on thirty acres. Next spring he would seed four times as much land as he had owned in Korpamoen, and this land was three times as fertile as his old farm. In favorable years he now harvested larger crops than any farmer in Ljuder parish.

He liked to sit at the window and look out at his fields; this was the land he had changed. When he came the whole meadow had been covered with weeds and wild grass. Now it produced rye, wheat, oats, corn, potatoes, turnips. The wild grass had fed elk, deer, and rabbits; now the field yielded so much there was enough for them as well as for other people. And it was his hands that had held the plow handles when this fertile earth was wrested from the wilderness. The cultivation was his work and no one else’s, it was the labor of his own hands.

If he should call his clearing his own created work, Kristina would undoubtedly say that he boasted and call him arrogant. A creator, to her, was only one who could make something out of nothing, and only one could do that, the Omnipotent himself: he had created the fertile field at Lake Ki-Chi-Saga on the third day of the creation, when he bade all water gather into one place under the heavens so that dry land appeared. Yet he, Karl Oskar Nilsson, sought his sustenance from the earth and had changed it so that it would give bread to people even after him. Couldn’t he at least consider himself a handyman to the creator?

Kristina was intimate with the Almighty and always trusted him. But Karl Oskar could not be like her in this trusting. Ever since the years of adversity at home in Korpamoen he had been suspicious of God’s help. Whatever a person did, he couldn’t be absolutely sure of God’s aid in his enterprise. He himself had been forced to trust himself and his own strength. Our Lord let the crops grow, but how many grains would he have harvested if he hadn’t cleared the land, plowed and sown? Who would have tilled the field for him if he hadn’t done it himself for himself? Could it be sinful arrogance in him to look out over his fields and feel: this is the creation of my own hands!

And he would continue his work; he would clear wider fields, raise more cattle, cut down more trees in the forest, and build bigger houses. He would from day to day improve his claim until he was no longer able to do so. Soon enough his arms would grow old and tired.