Kendric Babcock - The Scandinavian Element in the United States

Three church edifices were erected in 1844-5, and dedicated within a short time of each other. Dietrichson dedicated one at Christiana, Dane County, Wisconsin, December 19, 1844, and another at Pleasant Valley a little further west; Clausen dedicated his church at Muskego on March 13, 1845. 97 97 Dietrichson, Reise blandt de norske Emigranter , 45 ff; Minde fra Jubelfesterne paa Koshkonong . All were simple structures, as would be expected; a plain table was the altar, and the baptismal font was hewn out of an oak log. But they served none the less as effective and inspiring centers of the religious life of the settlements. For the Muskego church, Even Heg gave the land, and Mr. Bakke of Drammen, whose protégé Clausen was, gave $400 towards construction. Dietrichson left his two churches in Koshkonong in 1845, and returned to Norway where he remained about a year. Aided by benevolent friends and by the Norwegian government, he came back to his prairie parishes in 1846 for a final stay of four years. 98 98 Nordlyset , Sept. 9, 1847. But his ways were not altogether ways of pleasantness, nor entirely in the paths of peace. The records of the church, and his own story, show that he had more than one stormy time with his people. 99 99 Dietrichson, Reise blandt de norske Emigranter , 57-67. Some of the church records are printed in The Milwaukee Sentinel , July 21, 1895. He departed for Norway in 1850, and never again was in America. 100 100 The following year he published a second book, Nogle Ord fra Prædikestolen i Amerika .

The preceding account of the beginnings and progress of the earliest Norwegian settlements in Illinois and Wisconsin has been given in some detail, for the reason that the course of these settlements, in a very broad sense, is typical of all the Norwegian colonization in the Northwest, and of the Swedish and Danish as well. In the later chapter on economic conditions, the causes which led these people to settle upon the land rather than in the cities will be discussed at length. Suffice it here to say that the average immigrant brought only a small amount of cash, along with his strong desire for land, and he consequently went where good land was cheap, in order the more speedily to get what he wanted. This meant that he would push out on the newly accessible government land in Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas in turn. So the transformation of the frontier has witnessed the continual repetition of the experiences of the early Norwegian immigrants in Illinois and Wisconsin in the years from 1835 to 1850, as they are described in this and the preceding chapters. At the present time, in the remoter parts of the Dakotas, Montana, Washington, Oregon, and Utah, the same story is being retold in the same terms of patience, hardship, thrift, and final success.

When the Swedish emigration of the nineteenth century began, it is doubtful if many persons in Sweden knew of the existence of the descendants of their compatriots of the seventeenth. The last Swedish pastor of Gloria Dei Church in Philadelphia died in 1831, and there is no evidence that any immigrant after 1800 turned his steps toward Philadelphia or the valley of the Delaware expecting to join the third or fourth generation of Swedes there. 101 101 Winsor, Narrative and Critical History of America , IV, 488. Before 1840, in New York, Philadelphia, and a few other places, a Swede might now and then be found. One of these adventure-seeking young fellows was Erick Ålund, who reached Philadelphia in 1823; another was O. C. Lange who arrived in Boston in 1824, and by 1838 found himself in Chicago, probably the first of that mighty company of Swedes which has made Chicago the third Swedish city in the world. 102 102 Interview with Capt. O. C. Lange in Chicago, March, 1890. He stated that he was the only Swede in Chicago in 1838, but that there were thirty or forty Norwegians “who were doing anything for a living, even begging,” – but Capt. Lange was an ardent Swede and despised Norwegians! Olof Gustaf Hedström, who left Sweden in 1825, and his brother Jonas, were influential early arrivals. 103 103 Norelius, Svenskarnes Historia , 23-26. But the number of such men could not have been large, for ignorance as to America was quite as dense in Sweden as in Norway, the name being all but unheard of in parts of the kingdom. 104 104 Mikkelsen, The Bishop Hill Colony , 26.

Sixteen years elapsed after the “Sloop Folk” landed in New York, and five years after they located in their second American home, in Illinois, before the Swedish immigration really began. The first party, or regular company, of Swedes, consisting of about twelve families, arrived in 1841 under the leadership of Gustav Unonius, a young man who had been a student at the University of Upsala. 105 105 Norelius, Svenskarnes Historia , 2 ff. The early history of the Swedish immigration is treated in a much more complete and scholarly fashion than is the Norwegian, in the works of Unonius, Norelius, and Peterson and Johnson. For this reason, and because of the similarity of the early Swedish and Norwegian movements, the Swedish settlements are not followed up in this study with the same detail as the Norwegian. It was made up of the “better folk”, and included some, like Baron Thott, who were entitled to be called “Herr.” 106 106 Unonius, Minnen , I, 5 ff; History of Waukesha County, Wis. , 748. The immigration does not appear to have been induced by any religious persecution or discontent, but was purely a business venture of a somewhat idealistic sort, into which the immigrants put their all, in the hope that they could get a more satisfactory return than they could from a like investment in Sweden.

From New York the party went by the water route to Milwaukee, following in the wake of parties of Norwegians. There they met Captain Lange, who seems to have persuaded them to select a location near Pine Lake – a name that would certainly attract a Swede – in the neighborhood of the present town of Nashotah, about thirty miles west of Milwaukee. Here they were later joined by a variegated assortment of characters attracted by letters which Unonius wrote to newspapers in Sweden, – noblemen, ex-army officers, merchants, and adventurers, 107 107 “and a large proportion of criminals,” Nelson, Scandinavians in the United States , II, 117. so that the colony took on almost as motley an air as that at Jamestown in the first years after 1607. While they hardly could have succeeded under more favorable circumstances, they were particularly unfitted by their previous manner of living to become farmers or to undergo the deprivations and hardships of pioneering. The winter of 1841-2 was severe, and their poorly-built houses gave inadequate protection against the cold of January and February in Wisconsin; their land was badly tilled, tho they labored earnestly; and their first crop fell short of their necessities. Their hope of leading an Arcadian life in America was rudely shattered. Captain von Schneidau, late of the staff of King Oscar, was a farm laborer, and Baron Thott became a cook for one of the settlers in order to get a bare living. 108 108 History of Waukesha County, Wisconsin , 749. Sickness, misfortune, want of labor, and lack of money led to almost incredible suffering at the first, and some of the settlers, like Unonius and von Schneidau, went to Chicago, where the former became pastor of a Swedish congregation, and the latter prospered as “the most skilful daguerreo-typist, probably, in the whole state.” 109 109 Bremer, Homes of the New World , II, 214-217. Miss Bremer relates how Mrs. von Schneidau “had seen her first-born little one frozen to death in its bed,” and how Mrs. Unonius “that gay, high-spirited girl, of whom I heard when she was married at Upsala to accompany her husband to the New World … had laid four children to rest in foreign soil.”