The Settlers

Introduction to The Settlers

Moberg gave the Swedish title Nybyggarna to this the third and longest volume of his epic series. The Settlers is a direct translation of the original title. Moberg finished the novel in 1956 at his home at Väddö, north of Stockholm. By that time he had given up on his attempt to settle in America and was again residing in Europe.

The novelist’s initial plans called for The Settlers to be the final volume of a trilogy. He decided to expand his series to a fourth book only when he realized that the immensity of his subject matter “required approximately 1,000 pages in addition to the scope planned [for the Emigrant Novels] from the beginning.”¹

Moberg’s dissatisfaction with the American publisher Simon and Schuster’s editing and marketing of his books increased in the mid-1950s. This disappointment was partly due to the fact that sections of The Settlers and The Last Letter Home were left out or shortened in the American version, published in 1961. Moberg complained to his translator Lannestock that his novels had been “castrated” by the publisher. The novelist added that he would leave America out of all his future literary plans.²

One of Moberg’s most serendipitous moments in Minnesota occurred several years before he began writing The Settlers. He came into contact with a friend who directed him to the Minnesota Historical Society archives, where he found the journals of Andrew Peterson, a Swede who emigrated from the province of Östergötland in 1849 and arrived in Carver County, Minnesota, in 1854.³ Peterson staked out a claim near present-day Waconia, married a Swedish woman from the area, and farmed there until his death in 1898.

Peterson was unique in that he wrote a daily journal in Swedish for forty-four years. He recorded family activities, farm doings, and church life. He also gave brief details about confrontations with Native Americans in 1862 and concerns about the Civil War. Moberg took copious notes on Petersons journals and used information in Petersons nine ledger volumes to form the skeletal outline of Karl Oskar’s life in Minnesota.⁴

It is in The Settlers that Moberg begins to develop this Peterson-like outline. The details of farm life presented in the chapter “Man and Woman in the Territory” illustrate this development. Karl Oskar’s listing of his years’ harvests in “Starkodder the Ox” is also representative of the type of information found in Peterson’s journal in regard to everyday farm life. While the Peterson journals supplied Moberg with little imaginative material, they gave him much purely factual information about crops, harvests, and seasonal activities on a nineteenth-century Minnesota farm.

The chapter “Starkodder the Ox” also illustrates how Moberg combined historical knowledge with his literary imagination. In an 1849 issue of the Minnesota Pioneer, Moberg found a true story of a settler, caught in a snowstorm, who killed two oxen and placed his dying sons in the warm carcasses, only to see the boys freeze to death anyway.⁵ Karl Oskar performs the same action with Starkodder in an effort to save his son Johan.

Despite the rougher aspects of frontier life depicted in The Settlers, Moberg remained sensitive to the needs of family life, especially to the concerns of women. He took great pains to portray Kristina’s spirituality and Ulrika’s increasing Americanization. Through the first ten years of settlement, the immigrants encounter the religious and ethnic diversity of America. In addition comes the realization that they will never see Sweden again. While Ulrika faces these situations head-on (she is almost literally born again), Kristina more introspectively places her faith in predestination and the will of God.

Moberg put an equal amount of care into his descriptions of Arvid’s and Robert’s fates. Where Moberg could be rather unsympathetic to some of his more dominant male characters, he showed a sensitivity toward weaker, less fortunate males that is remindful of his kind portrayal of Kristina and Ulrika. Although Moberg saw the folly of Arvid’s and Robert’s adventures in the West, he sympathized nonetheless with their plight. It seems clear, in fact, that if Karl Oskar was a persona for Moberg’s practical side, Robert represented the author’s imaginative, creative bent.

In earlier versions of The Settlers, Moberg included a note to American readers explaining that he had prioritized the needs of literature above purely geographical facts. Moberg wrote: “In the interests of fiction I have taken certain liberties with geography, time and distance in the passages describing the travels of Robert and Arvid.”⁶ Behind this somewhat mysterious note lies a small episode. Lannestock pointed out to Moberg that since Missouri has no deserts it was not possible to have Arvid die as he does in the novel. Moberg replied that the location of the event did not matter since he was writing a symbolic tale. Neither Lannestock’s nor Simon and Schusters repeated protests convinced Moberg to change the location of the episode involving Arvid. Lannestock wrote of the affair as an uncharacteristic lapse in Moberg’s exacting efforts to achieve verisimilitude. The above-mentioned note was a compromise worked out between Moberg, his agent, and the publisher.⁷

Moberg emphasized his characters’ pioneering experience in such detail that by the end of The Settlers he had moved the plot forward only to the year 1860. It remained for The Last Letter Home, the shortest of the four books, to cover the final thirty years of the novels’ time span, that is, the period up to 1890. Remaining to be dealt with were the problems that arose between white settlers and Native Americans in 1862, the events of the Civil War years, and the details of Karl Oskar’s last decades on the farm.

R. McK.

NOTES

1. Moberg, Nybyggarna (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1984), 536.

2. Lannestock, Vilhelm Moberg i Amerika, 61.

3. Andrew Peterson and Family Papers, 1854–1931, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minn.

4. Moberg discussed Peterson’s journals in “The Life History of a Swedish Farmer,” The Unknown Swedes, 36–55. For other discussions of the journals, see Grace Lee Nute, “The Diaries of a Swedish-American Farmer, Andrew Peterson,” Yearbook (Minneapolis: American Institute of Swedish Arts, Literature and Science, 1945), 105–8; McKnight, Moberg’s Emigrant Novels and the Journals of Andrew Peterson: A Study of Influences and Parallels (New York: Arno Press, 1979).

5. Moberg, “Romanen om utvandrarromanen,” 312.

6. Moberg, “Author’s note,” The Last Letter Home (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), [6].

7. Lannestock, Vilhelm Moberg i Amerika, 100–103.