The Settlers

XXVI. THE QUEEN IN THE KITCHEN

— 1—

Karl Oskar caught sight of her in the window of Newell’s Hardware Store on Third Street between Jackson and Robert streets; he was walking by and she was displayed in the window. Her name—“The Prairie Queen”—was lettered on the front. She was well polished; her shiny iron surface caught the eye from a distance. The Queen showed herself in all her glory to those on the street and many persons stopped to look at her. A poster, praising the Queen, also hung in the window, and recommended her to buyers: “Undersigned, James Boles, certifies that we use the Prairie Queen in our home and that she is better than any other we have had.” “J. Blien’s Post Boat Company certifies that the Prairie Queen is also suited for boats.” “Undersigned, Nicolas Dowling, certifies that I like the Prairie Queen better than any other make.” “The undersigned, Mr. and Mrs. John O. Andersson, certify that the Prairie Queen is superior to any of her competitors.”

But the price asked for her was high: thirty-three dollars.

Karl Oskar had driven to the pork market in St. Paul with four of his slaughtered hogs. In Stillwater pork brought only four cents a pound, but in St. Paul the price was six cents; thus it paid to drive the longer distance. The buyer had counted out forty dollars in silver to Karl Oskar. He could pay cash for the Prairie Queen and take her home with him on the wagon.

After a moment’s hesitation he stepped inside Newell’s Hardware Store and negotiated his purchase.

Three weeks before Christmas the Queen arrived secretly at the New Duvemåla settlement. She was secreted in a wooden box, nailed shut, which Karl Oskar smuggled into the woodshed when no one was around. He put the box in a corner and, to be on the safe side, covered it with some old sacks; here she was well hidden.

The Prairie Queen was not to be moved from her hiding place and into the house until Christmas Eve. She was to be a Christmas present for Kristina.

Karl Oskar mused that the Prairie Queen was an excellent name for a cookstove. The Prairie Queen, which had gulped down all of his income from the sale of four great hogs, was made of cast iron and came equipped with four utensils: a roaster, a kettle, a coffeepot, and a frying pan. It had the reputation of being more convenient than any other stove in the world.

In order to prepare food at their hearth, a pot was placed in an iron ring which stood on three legs in the center of the fireplace. Only one pot could be used at a time and care must be taken lest the ring holding it turn over. All their cooking and frying had been done this way until now. But it was not ordained that for all time people should prepare food on a hearth. In America a time of constant invention of new machines and utensils and gadgets had begun. Then the Nilssons had read in Hemlandet that stoves of iron were now for sale, stoves that were not built into the hearth and anchored to the chimney but could be moved like any other piece of furniture. Kristina had wondered what such a cookstove would be like. Now she would see one with her own eyes.

Karl Oskar let Johan and Harald in on the secret of the hidden box in the woodshed. On the morning of Christmas Eve, while Kristina was busy with the milking, the two boys helped their father carry in the heavy iron object and place it in the kitchen on the old hearth, from which the ashes had been swept out. They arranged the four cooking utensils, each one in its proper place on the removable rings and lids of the surface. Karl Oskar broke into the chimney; the iron pipe at the back of the stove was pushed into the hole, and the smoke outlet was ready. Finally he went over the whole stove with a woolen rag, dusting and polishing until the cast iron shone and gleamed.

The Prairie Queen now sat in her proper place in the kitchen. She sat in a queen’s seat, elevated on her throne, lighting up the whole kitchen. As soon as one stepped across the threshold one’s eyes fell on it.

When Kristina returned from the stable she stopped dead and stared at the stove. What in the world was that sitting back there? What had they put on her hearth? Her husband and sons stood silent, winking at each other as she exclaimed. She had noticed earlier that they were snickering about, giggling over some secret doings.

“What in all the world. .? What is that in the fireplace?”

An important guest had come to their house this Christmas, explained Karl Oskar. A queen had come to them in their kitchen. She would always sit there on the hearth, and would help the mistress with her cooking chores.

Kristina walked closer to inspect the Prairie Queen. Her hands stroked the shiny iron, took hold of the pot handles, lifted up the kettle and the coffeepot as if to feel how heavy they were.

“A new cookstove of iron!”

“Of cast iron,” said Karl Oskar.

“Have you bought it. .?”

“Yes, it’s bought and paid for. I’m not in the habit of stealing things.”

“Oh my — what a stove! How pretty it is!”

“The stove is a female, by the way. Called the Prairie Queen. The name is stamped on the front of her.”

Kristina sat down on the pile of wood beside the stove, overwhelmed, while Karl Oskar described the cast-iron stove with a pride that couldn’t have been greater had he himself been the inventor.

Into these holes with doors one put the wood. And here, covered with lids and rings, were the cooking holes. The rings could be removed according to the amount of heat required under the pots and kettles. To keep food warm only, no lids were removed. It was a clever contraption, for sure. And that big door on the side was the baking oven, not for real baking, of course, but for smaller cakes. An explanation of how to use the Prairie Queen came with the stove, in English, unfortunately. On the iron stove food would cook much faster since it held the heat.

“And all these cast-iron utensils come with her,” he added. “Aren’t they fine?”

“They are like the glory of heaven!” She lifted the coffeepot again. “The Americans are so clever. But why do they call it the Prairie Queen?”

Perhaps some settler from England had thought up the name for this superior invention, suggested Karl Oskar. The young queen of England was supposed to be the greatest majesty of all those in the world, thus the name “Queen” for this splendid stove.

“The stove is a beautiful decoration for our home!” said Kristina.

She stood before the shiny, cast-iron Prairie Queen, admiringly and respectfully like a dutiful subject before a majesty of flesh and blood on a silver throne. She could not have been more surprised had a living royal person entered her kitchen this Christmas Eve. But this queen was crowned with four gleaming utensils. What woman in a kitchen could watch that crown without being seized with desire to use it.

“Can you light the stove?” she wondered.

“She’s connected, ready to go. You can begin cooking at once.”

Karl Oskar had cut wood of the right size for the Prairie Queen’s firebox. In no time he had a fire going in the new stove. It smoked a little, but he blamed this on the heavy air and fog they had on this Christmas Eve; it caused a poor draft in the chimney.

When the Prairie Queen was ready, Kristina prepared the first meal on the new stove: the Christmas Eve dinner, the greatest festival meal of the year. It was their third Christmas in the new house, and their seventh in North America.

— 2—

The children were allowed to eat as much as they could of the delicious Christmas food and then they went to sleep in the gable room, sated and tired.

Since last Christmas a new life had come into the house; in February Kristina had borne a boy, christened Frank Aldo Hjalmar. They called him Frank, the first of the children to be given an American name. When they came to their third American-born child it was their new homeland’s turn to be remembered at the baptism, thought Karl Oskar. Now their brood had grown to half a dozen, and of her surviving children, Kristina had given life to three in Sweden and three in America; one half of their children were Swedes, one half Americans. In their home the two peoples were equally strong, half of their children represented the old country, half the new. When Frank was born, Karl Oskar had said: Now it’s just right!

After Frank’s birth Kristina had been so weak physically that it was several months before she could fully resume her chores. And during the recent exhausting Christmas preparations she had felt that her strength had not yet fully come back.

Before the children were sent to bed this Christmas Eve, Karl Oskar had read the Christmas gospel aloud to his family, as was his custom. Now that the parents were alone Kristina read a few psalms from the prayerbook about Christ’s birth, beginning as usual with Luther’s words of greeting and rejoicing on the blessed day. The message of the Savior’s arrival here on earth was comforting to her anew each time she heard it.

By and by their talk turned to worldly things, and, naturally, first of all to the new iron stove.

“Thirty-three dollars!” said Kristina. “What an expense!”

“The stove will aid you in your work,” said Karl Oskar. “It’s worth the price.”

In a sudden burst of emotion Kristina put out her hand to him across the table.

“Thank you, Karl Oskar.”

It was she he had thought of when he bought the Prairie Queen. This she had of course understood at once, but it was good to hear him say it. He never failed in his concern for her. It seldom expressed itself in words; he was shy and retiring in such matters. But they knew each other so well that words between them were not required; it was unnecessary to say the self-evident. And from their deeds they knew each other’s thoughts. What people said need not mean anything. What people did meant everything.

How much work and worry he had had fattening those four hogs which had paid for the Prairie Queen! How many steps he’d taken so that she might have an iron stove! Nothing could have been more timely than this help in the kitchen. Yet, she felt that he could have bought something they needed more for those thirty-three dollars. There were farm implements invented here in America, that could have aided him in his work. Hadn’t he several times spoken of a reaper and a threshing machine?

The reaper and the thresher were still too expensive for him, replied Karl Oskar. He would surely get himself both these machines, by and by — he knew how many days’ work they would save him in a year — but lately he had been thinking of a horse. He couldn’t raise a horse since he didn’t own a mare. He had had it in mind to put aside this hog money for a horse; he had felt he almost had it by the halter. But just then he had caught sight of the Prairie Queen in the store window in St. Paul — and he had let go his hold of the horse.

“I thought of you, Kristina. It’s too much for you — you need a little rest.”

She felt his concern, both in voice and look.

Sure, she needed a long rest. Her strength diminished as her chores increased. The older children were growing up and could begin to look after themselves, but those of tender age required care in their stead. She had always had three babies who depended on her: one in her arms, and two hanging onto her skirt. This predicament had been her lot as a mother. And at regular intervals she had had to retire to childbed, from which she arose more tired each time, her body turned into a supply room for a new life, her thin breasts sustaining a hungrily sucking mouth. Karl Oskar had known what he was doing a few years earlier: he had made a solid cradle of oak. That cradle rarely stood empty.

Karl Oskar himself pulled such a heavy load that he could not take on any of hers. But his willingness to help was in itself a help. And the chores with the children she could never have managed except for the great mother-comfort: she had carried them in her body; she had borne them in pain; but when she had them around her — all healthy and without blemishes, chirping like morning birds — in such moments she felt a joy so great that she only wanted to thank God for the lives he had created through her. She ought to be still more grateful since all their children had been born well developed and without deformities.

She said that she must try to get through each day in turn. But after a moment’s silence her thoughts turned to other things.

“I wonder how they have it at home this evening?”

“They must be on their way to the early morn Christmas service,” answered Karl Oskar. “The Swedish clocks are six hours ahead of us.”

Kristina had wondered greatly about this difference in time. It showed that Sweden and America were two entirely different worlds, each with different time and hours. While it still was evening here, dawn broke at home. The two countries were given their days — their light and their dark — at different times.

During a few evenings before the holidays Karl Oskar had busied himself with his letter to Sweden. Tomorrow he would take enough time off to finish it. What more was there to put into the letter? He had told in detail about the iron stove he had given Kristina as a Christmas present, he had enumerated the cooking utensils that came with the stove, and he had written that the price in Swedish money was about one hundred twenty-five riksdaler. Father and Mother would feel he had paid a senseless sum for it. A mason in Ljuder parish would build a whole fireplace for ten riksdaler. But he had added in his letter that he felt sure it would be many years before an iron stove would be put into a farm kitchen in the home parish.

The last letter from his father had come during the fall; it had been short, yet difficult for Karl Oskar to read. The lines wiggled up and down like a snake; the letters in many places crept into each other, making them impossible to decipher. His father, Nils Jakobsson, wrote that his hands trembled, but he need not have written this: every word in the letter indicated the condition of his hand.

His father had replied to the message about his son Robert’s death in America: “It was Sad for us Old ones to learn of our youngest Son’s demise in youthful years. It was difficult for Robert to be satisfied with anything in this World. You wrote your Brother traveled widely. Wither can Man Flee that Death shall not o’ertake him?”

The letter was barely ten sentences long, and Nils had written only these few words about Robert. It seemed as if the trembling hand had been unable to manage any of sorrow’s outpourings. When Karl Oskar read the letter to Kristina, she told him what she had heard his father say that April morning when they left home and started their journey to America: “I must step out on the stoop and behold my sons’ funeral cortege.” The words touched Karl Oskar deeply. His father had felt his sons were dead while they still lived. Thus when the message of Robert’s death reached him he had submitted to his loss in advance.

The old parents did not know the circumstances of their youngest son’s death. Karl Oskar had only written that Robert had died suddenly and from an unknown sickness.

Surely, no age has a promise of the morrow. When Karl Oskar had gone to inspect the maple-studded knoll near the lake for a cemetery, who would that day have thought his younger brother, a young man of twenty-two, would be the first to be buried under the silver maples?

Since then a new summer had come and gone; the silver maples had twice shed their leaves over the first grave of the new cemetery. And Robert was no longer alone in the Swedish burying plot at Chisago Lake.

You raised your hand against your brother the last time you saw him in life! Such had been their last meeting: one brother had struck the other. Karl Oskar had struck his brother, flesh of his own flesh — what wouldn’t he give to have that deed undone. He had regretted his action at once, and Robert’s assurance of forgiveness was some comfort to him when they found the body a few days later. But his brother’s forgiveness was not sufficient for Karl Oskar; he could not forgive himself for what he had done. Kristina had not again mentioned this burst of temper, except to say on the day of Robert’s funeral that this was a warning, something to learn from, the thing that had taken place when two brothers met for the last time in life: people should always act toward others as if their meeting were the last.

The gold seeker returning from California had been a short-time guest in their house. He had arrived on Monday evening, he had left on Saturday morning. During five nights he had slept under his brother’s roof — then he had taken off again, but had not gone farther than the brook a few miles away in the forest. There his body was found.

If they only had known that Robert was deathly sick when he returned. . But Karl Oskar guessed that Robert himself had not known this. And so the sick one had been forced to end his life like a wounded animal seeking a hiding place in a forest thicket. Such an end would have been spared him had they known about his mortal illness. But the wise man who knew everything aright — his name was Afterward.

Robert’s own reticence was at fault, but concerning his illusory fortune, he had convinced them he had acted in good faith and had believed the useless bills were worth their face value. And it was good, at least, to know that he hadn’t wanted to cheat them but had himself been cheated. Karl Oskar had later thrown the whole bundle of bills into the fire, and as he did so he had felt an intense hatred for the notes: these bills had been printed and circulated to destroy people. Because of these damned bills he had abused his brother! He had wished the wildcat money had feelings; he wanted it to suffer in the flames as it burned to ashes.

What had happened on Arvid’s and Robert’s California journey would now never be clear to them. The gold seekers’ own mouths were closed for eternity. Arvid’s watch, which they had found in Robert’s pocket after his death, had been sent to the boy’s father, the cotter Petter of Kråkesjö. Karl Oskar had enclosed a letter saying Arvid had perished in North America, in an unknown way, in an unknown place, and that no one knew his grave. The father received back the inheritance he gave his son at the emigration; the patrimony returned to its source in Sweden.

On Christmas Eve they always thought of their relatives, both living and dead. Kristina remembered that already a year and a half had passed since Robert was buried on the beautiful hill near the lakeside. But he was far from forgotten; Kristina often mentioned his name, and she did so tonight.

“My brother — I never understood him,” said Karl Oskar. “I wonder if he ever would have found peace in this world had he lived.”

“Robert was already finished with life,” replied Kristina. “He was reconciled to his fate.”

She had several times told her husband about the talk she had had with Robert under the sugar maples on the Friday when Karl Oskar was in Stillwater; it had been her last talk alone with Robert. Now she repeated it again to her husband, and he wondered how she could remember Robert’s words in such detail after so long a time. She explained that his words had had a special meaning after he was dead, and she had thought of them so much because they were uttered at a time when he had only a few days left of life. She had been talking at the time to one who had already completed his life span.

“Do you suppose he knew he didn’t have much time left?”

It was not the first time he had asked this question, and she replied now as before. Robert was sure to have felt that his life would not be long. But his words could sometimes be interpreted one way, then again another way. He had also said that he didn’t suffer from any disease except the old earache he had had since his farm service in Sweden. And when Hemlandet had printed a notice seeking a young man to learn printing, he had asked her if he oughtn’t to reply to the advertisement. Then he had sounded in good health, with no expectation of imminent death.

Karl Oskar nodded: Robert had been a master of secret, always talking in riddles.

“I suspect he had consumption,” said Kristina.

“Probably so.”

“But Robert wasn’t afraid of death. He was unreachable, he said.”

“Unreachable? There again he spoke in riddles!”

“It’s no riddle — I understand what he meant.”

“You do?” Karl Oskar raised his eyebrows and looked at his wife in surprise. “What do you suppose he meant?”

This time Kristina was slow in answering, and when she spoke her voice had changed; it was tense and restrained. In vain she tried to suppress a tremble.

“He was through his. We have ours ahead of us, we do.”

Karl Oskar’s eyes still rested on her inquisitively; he did not understand.

“I just said Robert was reconciled to his lot in life,” she resumed. “We are not.”

What is this all about? he asked himself. A few words by Robert, a year and a half ago, she had taken so seriously that time and again she came back to them and repeated them. What did it mean? He began to suspect that she was keeping something from him.

“What is it we must be reconciled with, Kristina?”

Now she quickly turned her eyes away as if she were found out. She seemed to feel she had said too much and was now regretting it. She replied that she didn’t want to talk about it tonight. It was time to go to bed. It was awfully late, she was quite worn out this Christmas Eve.

How deeply Robert’s statement concerning his fate had affected her she did not divulge to Karl Oskar. It concerned her own life, the lot of the emigrant. And each new day posed this question to her: How would she manage her lot in life?

— 3—

Beginning on Christmas Eve 1856, Kristina had a good and faithful assistant in her kitchen. On the Prairie Queen she was able to prepare food for the large family in half the time it previously had taken her. After a few months with the new stove Kristina could not believe she had been able to manage her household without it for so many years. The new invention saved her so much work it became the most useful object in the house.

Kristina loved her stove as if it had been a living being. She looked after it carefully, dusted it every day, and polished away spots and grease and soot. The Prairie Queen always sat shining clean in its elevated place, an enduring, elegant decoration for their home. And it was the first object a caller’s eyes would light upon when entering the kitchen. She always received her homage: what a beautiful stove!

The only name they used for it was the Queen: Have you fired the Queen? Has the Queen burned down? Did you empty the Queen’s ashes? The potato pot is boiling over on the Queen! Get some wood for the Queen! And they were proud they had a stove they could speak of as royalty, even though it was their servant.

Karl Oskar said that of course an Englishman must have named it; an American would have called it Mrs. President of the Prairie. But he himself was a man who insisted the real truth be known in his house.

“You, Kristina, you are the queen in our kitchen!”

To this she laughed heartily, her hands and face sooty. Pastor Törner had once said something similar when she mended the seat of his pants; he had said that with thread and needle and nothing else she could turn herself into a queen and their house into a palace. But she had never before heard a man use such fair and poetic speech to his own wife.

Karl Oskar insisted. No one but she reigned in their house. While he had his domain outside, she was the absolute ruler inside their timbered walls; he made the decisions in stable and barns, in forest and field. And neither one ever interfered in the other’s rule. In this way their power had always been divided, both in Sweden and America, and it suited him well, and he hoped it suited her too.

The fine stove was queen in name only — Kristina was a queen in reality. She stood faithfully at her stove, she kept her house in order, she managed to make new clothes for all of them and kept their clothing clean. She milked their cows, churned butter, made cheese, spun and spooled yarn, wove and sewed, and during the rush seasons she helped Karl Oskar in the fields with sowing, mowing, and harvesting.

But every day she fought her fatigue. Each day there came a moment when she was tempted to give in to it and suddenly drop what she had in hand, when in the midst of a chore she wanted to lie down on her back and do nothing except this: only rest quietly. How rest tempted her — she longed to taste the wonderful rest! She forced herself to go on; this must be done! It was her work, her duty and no one else’s. No one in the whole world would do it for her. If she didn’t do it, it remained undone. There was no recourse, no grace. It was necessary, and what was necessary a person always managed.

Kristina was not yet an old woman; as yet she had not earned the right to sit down and rest during the day. Only after another twenty or thirty years as the household ruler would she be permitted this. Then she could abdicate her queenly kitchen affairs and surrender to her great wish: rest.

The depressing evening fatigue, with worry in its wake, was nothing new to her; it was part of the lot of every working person. But in the past the fatigue had disappeared after a night’s sleep and rest, and a new day had brought its gift, new appetite for work and new assurance. In this respect it was now different for Kristina; the morning no longer brought back her courage and confidence.

XXVII. THE YEAR FIFTY-SEVEN

— 1—

During the open-river seasons in 1855 and 1856 the steamboats carried sixty thousand passengers up the Mississippi to settle in Minnesota Territory. Because of the great immigration, a steamboat costing $20,000 returned twice this sum to its owner within a year.

A story is told of one ship which paddled up the Mississippi with two hundred passengers who had already in New York bought, through a real estate broker, land for their settling in Minnesota. They asked the captain to put them ashore at a town called Rolling Stone, located on the river.

The captain pulled out his charts with all the landing places along the river. There was no place called Rolling Stone. He found a later map of Minnesota Territory on which all towns and places of settlement had been marked. It showed no town called Rolling Stone. He pursued his investigations further, he inquired from old river captains whose boats they met and who had traveled this route for years, he asked early settlers who came down to meet the boat at the piers: no one had heard of a town or place called Rolling Stone.

And the captain turned regretfully to his passengers: he could not put them ashore at a place which did not exist.

However, the two hundred passengers, having bought lots in the fair city of Rolling Stone on the beautiful shores of the Mississippi, showed the captain their maps and descriptions of the new town. The real estate man in New York had supplied them with these papers. The pictures showed tall houses in the town, churches, hotels, shops, and taverns. All the streets in Rolling Stone were well marked. The captain could see the market place. The passengers pointed to the city hall. They had been given the name of the mayor, they knew the number of inhabitants. They showed pictures of the beautiful surroundings. Anyone seeing these pictures must be caught by an irresistible desire to own a home in this wonderful town. And each one of the two hundred passengers had paid three hundred dollars for a lot in Rolling Stone.

The captain replied: Rolling Stone was without doubt a beautifully situated and well laid out city. It was only that the city was missing. If Rolling Stone had ever existed in Minnesota Territory, it must now have rolled to some other territory.

The captain regretted it sorely, but he was forced to put his passengers ashore where they could continue their search for the town in which they had bought lots for their new homes. They could themselves choose a place along the wild shore where they would leave his boat; it couldn’t house them for the rest of their lives. And so they were put ashore. They built themselves brush huts along the bank, they dug themselves down near the river, they were seized with cholera, dysentery, fevers; the greatest number of the lot-owners in the non-existent town died; the survivors gradually scattered and were swallowed up by the great country. But none of them ever found his way to Rolling Stone. Because this town had never existed, except on paper.

This incident took place in Minnesota Territory in the year 1856.

In seven years seven hundred towns were surveyed and laid out in the Territory, and the number of inhabitants increased from six thousand to one hundred and fifty thousand. After the 1851 treaty with the Sioux the whole country west of the Mississippi lay open to settlers. In the capital, St. Paul, there were ten thousand people in 1856. The settlers called this town the Pig’s Eye. Close by, at St. Anthony Falls, the new town of St. Anthony was growing up, later to be renamed Minneapolis.

Not all of the one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants had come to Minnesota to farm. In the tillers’ wake came the speculators who would become rich without tilling the earth. To these, land was a commodity, to be bought one day, and sold for a profit the next. The speculators’ only implement of labor was paper. They printed bank notes and swamped the country with wildcat money; wrote sales contracts and obtained deeds to land; drew maps and built towns on paper. Thus, a large part of the country came into the hands of people who never touched the handle of an ax or a plow.

Under the speculators’ hands, land quickly rose in value. The price of a lot might double overnight. Claims were staked out with feverish haste: “Take what you can, and take the best!” The man who came yesterday obtained a better piece than the one who arrived today. The speculators sold their land and bought more, farther west, which in turn was sold when it was time to raise the price. Those who handled paper became rich on the backs of those who handled the heavy tools of labor. Money men grew rich, while the ax- and plowmen remained poor.

Exploiters and exploited have existed in all countries in all times. This was a country and a time for one who saw the opportunities, for one who was handy with paper.

Minnesota Territory had been established in 1849, and its blossoming during the next seven years was amazing and without precedent. Everything rose in value, all kinds of objects — including the solid ground — were sold and bought, money was abundant, and new stacks of bills were issued as required. There was immeasurable prosperity in the country.

But what was the foundation for this great prosperity?

The foundation can be found in the story of Rolling Stone.

— 2—

After the prosperous years came the year 1857.

It began with a disturbing occurrence in the East: New York banks closed. This crash quickly spread westward; the Chicago banks toppled. By the autumn of 1857 it had reached Minnesota — St. Paul and Stillwater. The banks in these towns closed. People who had been rich in the morning were destitute before the sun set. People with no property except money were penniless. The paper bills no longer had any value. There was no gold and no reliable bills, no acceptable currency. No one could buy without money, and no one could sell. Business came to a standstill.

New bills, warrants, and scrips were issued by the authorities; these would take the place of currency but were accepted with suspicion, and soon were worth only half the printed value. The people in the Territory had lost their confidence in bills.

What could money be used for when it was no longer trusted? What could money men do without money? The speculator’s twilight was at hand; the great revolution in money matters swept them from the Territory; those who had hoped to get rich by buying and selling had nothing more to gain here. The great horde of speculators, brokers, and jobbers left Minnesota. In one year St. Paul’s population dropped by four thousand.

The farmers had for a time been eclipsed by real estate speculators. With the upheaval of ’57 a threatening danger to those settlers who had come to make their homes in the Territory was removed. It was the money men who now were pushed out, while the ax- and plow-men remained in possession of the earth.

And the future state of Minnesota was to be built by those who remained.

— 3—

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.

To struggle on, each day in turn, to feel and use the strength he had — that was a settler’s lot and purpose in life.

XXVIII. THE LETTER FROM SWEDEN

Åkerby at Ljuder parish, August 16

Anno 1857

Beloved Brother Karl Oskar Nilsson:

The Lord’s Peace and Blessing upon you.

I am about to write you a message of Sorrow. Tears of bereavement are falling as I pen these lines. Our Father, Nils Jakobsson, parted this life the 4th inst. and He was brought to the earth in the Parish Churchyard the 11th inst. His life’s span amounted to Sixty-two years and a few months. He suffered a long deathbed but did not Complain. Our new pastor gave him the Sacrament three days before he died, he managed to put himself in order for the pastor and combed his Hair himself.

It was Our Father’s wish to pass on and have Peace. He had some fever attacks and dizziness toward the last and his mind wandered. The last Night he mentioned you and Robert in North America, he heard your wagon drive out of the yard on your journey to America and he rose from his pillow and said Now they are leaving. He said few words in life after that.

We must all one day pale in Death. Our strength will not suffice against Him. But there is much to do when He is a guest in the house. We are settling the estate and I ask you to send me your power of Attorney, then we need not have an auction after our Father. Send also an attest that our Brother Robert is dead and then we won’t need a Power of Attorney from Him.

We are in good health in our family except that I have a boil on a finger of my right hand. I have a kind husband, we have now 2 sons and 1 daughter. I have forgotten how many children you have, Write and tell us. I guess you’ve forgotten the people hereabouts — Dean Brusander is dead, he had a stroke in the Sacristy Whitsuntide morning, he asked about you a few years ago when he Baptized our oldest boy.

Mother greets you as she can’t write to you herself. Our Mother is getting old and worn-out — when our strength is gone all joy is over.

It is not easy to write down my thoughts on paper, I am poor in composition, excuse my poor spelling. Don’t forget us in your new Homeland. God Bless you, Brother, and hope your success continues.

Written down by your devoted Sister

Lydia Karlsson

XXIX. THE LETTER TO SWEDEN

New Duvemåla at Taylors Falls Post ofis

North America, October 3 Anno 1857

Beloved Sister Lydia Karlsson,

Your letter received, I could not help but shed a few tears as I held it in my hand and read that our Father had passed through the Valley of Death. I mourn him here, far from His bier.

I had hoped to see Him once More, I had a good Father but was not always an obedient Son at Home. I feel though that Father forgave me my emigration, I did the best for my Own, our Father couldn’t think anything else.

Now my Father is in that Land where I no longer can reach Him. Peace over his Grave and Remains. Yes, Death mowes his sharp scythe and makes no exception among us. When He comes we must go with him, whether we want to or not. I am however, glad that Father had one of his children with him as a comfort on his Deathbed.

My kind parents looked well after me when I grew up but out here in my new land I have been of little Help or comfort to them.

I enclose a paper which assures you that you my beloved Sister Lydia Karlsson shall have my inheritance after my demised Father Nils Jakobsson. You shall have my share for looking after Our Mother as long as She is in Time. I believe it cannot be a large sum of money.

We have lately had some trouble with money matters in America but it is getting better. Many people have moved in from Sweden this last Summer and they are still coming daily. Even from Ljuder Parish people have come to this Valley. I see that the Dean is Gone, how did he like it that his parishioners followed me to North America? But he couldn’t blame me, I like the land here but have never boasted in order to lure people here from Sweden. I urge no man to emigrate; each one must do so at his own risk.

The number of our children is 6 up to date, if I haven’t written this before. Our youngest is a strapping son, we call him Frank, it is an American name. He runs and plays on the floor, He was one year last February, the little American let go his hold and walked by himself 14 Days before he was a full year. Our Children have grown fast in their new Homeland it’s a Joy for us to see.

I enclose my dear Greeting to our Mother. I know you take good care of her. You are my beloved Sister and we must write each other more often. Before each Day reaches its end I have some thought here in America for my old Home,

Your Devoted Brother

Karl Oskar Nilsson

XXX. KARL OSKAR’S FOLLOWERS

— 1—

They had seeded and planted and harvested and threshed this year as all other years, but the weather had been unfavorable and contrary at all seasons. In the fall came a flood; it began as a sudden shower, but the shower lasted a week, two weeks. The rain did not fall in drops, it streamed down in sheets. Days on end it hung outside the window like a striped curtain. No settler had ever seen such a persistent rain in Minnesota. The autumn sowing was delayed because of the wet weather, and the rye did not begin to sprout until the winter frost had gone into the ground.

On one of these long days, when the rain prevented all outside work, the Lutheran pastor came to call. A memorable rainy night four years earlier Pastor Erland Törner had come to the settlement at Duvemåla for the first time. This rainy day he came on a last visit — he had come to say goodbye.

There had long been rumors that he wanted to leave the Swedish congregation in the St. Croix Valley, and now they were confirmed by his own words: he had accepted the call as pastor to the new church in Rockford, a new town down in Illinois, where there was a sizable Swedish colony. He was going to get married and this had influenced his decision to leave. He was engaged to a Swedish girl in Rockford and she wanted to remain in her hometown after her marriage.

Before the pastor arrived, Kristina had felt her nose itch and she had sneezed three times in succession, a sure sign that important callers would arrive. But the minister’s visit today was of little joy to her, as he had come to say farewell to them.

He was no longer the pale, spindly young man who had warmed himself before the fire in their old log house, dressed like a scarecrow in Karl Oskar’s roomy clothes. Since then he had put on weight and his body was firmer; his face was weatherbeaten and his looks rugged. The hard life of traveling about in the wilderness had left its mark on him so that now the young pastor could be taken for a settler. And his life was not unlike that of his fellow countrymen.

During the first two years they had gathered for services in the schoolhouse; only last year had the new church been ready for use. Since then Kristina had failed to attend services only four or five times: if a child lay sick or if she herself lay in childbed. Karl Oskar and she had also attended the Sacrament each time the Holy Supper was given. Pastor Törner’s sermons had been a comfort to her soul; they had quieted her anxiety and helped her overcome her worries about eternal damnation. This minister did not enter the pulpit like a stern judge — he was a mild gospel preacher, on equal footing with the sinners. He did not wish to judge anyone, he only wanted to comfort all. He was the only minister she could think of in their pulpit; he was The Minister.

And now he was to move away from them. She couldn’t pray God to leave him for her sake. She mustn’t be ungrateful, but rather, grateful. She only wished she could give him something in return for all the comfort he had brought her.

Yesterday Karl Oskar had shot a wild goose with black neck and brown wings; she had plucked the white-breasted bird, drawn it, and prepared it for the pot. The goose was as fat as a grouse and had so much flesh there would be sufficient for all of them. She had planned to save the delicate bird for their Sunday dinner but it was as if God had designed that she must roast the goose today and invite Pastor Törner, since it would be her last opportunity.

She set the table in the large room, and invited her guest to sit down on the new sofa they had recently bought. Karl Oskar and she sat on either side of him. The children were not allowed to sit at table today, they would eat afterward in the kitchen.

“My first night in the St. Croix Valley I slept in this home,” said Pastor Törner. “In this home I preached my first sermon in this valley, and here I gave the Lord’s Holy Supper for the first time. Memories make your home dear to me, my friends!”

He spoke his native tongue better than any other Swede she had met in America, thought Kristina. It was balm just to listen to his voice. Most of the immigrants had begun to mix up the two languages dreadfully so that she could hardly understand them. Even Karl Oskar’s language had changed; she noticed the mixture sooner than others because she herself never used English.

The children peeked in through the kitchen door while Karl Oskar and Kristina sat eating with the minister. To the three oldest he had been their teacher and they had great respect for him; they were unusually silent and well behaved as long as this caller was in the house.

In the beginning Pastor Törner had acted as teacher for the Swedish children as well as minister for the congregation, but after great effort the parish had last year managed to get a teacher from Sweden, a Mr. Johnson — he was quite particular that they call him Mister. He had brought good recommendations from previous positions in the new country, but childless parents had not been anxious to share the burden of the salary for the new teacher — which would indeed have been unjust — and thus the parents of the schoolchildren alone paid him. The teacher was remunerated according to the number of children he taught, receiving one dollar a month for each child. A room had been prepared for him in the school building and he was also given free firewood. The parish contributed ten bushels of rye flour a year, and thus he had his bread free.

Besides instruction in the Christian Lutheran religion, Swedish, and English, the settlers’ children were taught writing, arithmetic, history, and geography, and Mr. Johnson had proved to be a competent teacher; he had graduated from high institutions in Sweden. But after he had been here for some time it was discovered that he drank. According to the children he sometimes told funny stories to them during school hours instead of going on with the lesson. Once he had danced in the school, jumped about, and sung for the children, and it had definitely not been psalms he had sung, either. He had apparently been drunk. Some parents had become greatly disturbed and insisted the parish must get rid of Mr. Johnson. Other parents would rather have a drunkard than no teacher at all. At Karl Oskar’s suggestion the parish council had deferred the question. Now he wished to ask Pastor Törner’s opinion.

“Should we keep the schoolmaster?”

Mr. Johnson did drink in excess, said the pastor, but there was no evidence that his lamentable weakness had made him neglect his duties. During this first year he had taught the children well. They would probably not be able to find a teacher of Johnson’s ability to replace him. The salary was not high enough to attract a graduate teacher from Sweden. As long as the teacher’s drinking did not hurt the children, Pastor Törner thought they ought to keep him on.

The Swedish teacher was no longer a young man, and the pastor had spoken seriously to him and made him promise not to take any whiskey until after school hours. Then he would have a whole night to sober up before his next day of teaching. He hoped Mr. Johnson would keep his promise.

For his three children of school age — Johan, Marta, and Harald — Karl Oskar paid the teacher three dollars a month. Next spring when Dan — their first little American — began school, Karl Oskar would have to pay four dollars a month.

He said that Mr. Johnson had a good head, but it was too bad he spent his salary for drinks, which undermined and ruined a person, body and soul. Among the settlers they had an example to warn them: Anders Månsson of Taylors Falls. He had several times this last summer come drunk to church.

Yet Pastor Törner felt that less drinking took place among the Chisago settlers than in other new settlements. And concerning morality, during his time among them only two illegitimate children had been born, both of whom had been begotten in other Swedish settlements.

Pastor Törner praised the delicious goose several times, and Kristina guessed that God himself must have directed the bird in front of Karl Oskar’s gun yesterday to give her this opportunity to treat their pastor to a farewell dinner.

After the meal, coffee was served, and Pastor Törner distributed gifts to each one of the six children. Happiest of all was Harald, who received a Swedish book—First Reader for Beginners—which the pastor had sent for from the old country. The pastor had instructed Harald for a few months and he remembered what a good head the boy had.

“He reads Swedish like a minister!” said the mother proudly. “As soon as he has read a piece once he can repeat it by heart!”

The father added that they had sent for the Little Catechism from Hemlandet and the boy had learned it by heart in a few evenings. And when he found anything printed in English he read it as well as an American.

Pastor Törner looked from Harald to Karl Oskar.

“Of all your children, this one particularly takes after his father.”

“You mean he has my nose!” smiled the settler.

“His nose is assuredly the most apparent likeness!”

Harald was the only one among the children who had inherited the Nilsa-nose, this enormous rutabaga that disfigured Karl Oskar’s face. But there was a belief in the family that its bearer would have luck in life. When the children teased Harald because of his nose, Karl Oskar would comfort him by saying: “Remember that your father’s nose was the best luck he ever had!”

And now the father said to the pastor that he hoped Harald would propagate this rutabaga in his own children, and to their children and children’s children, so that the big nose, a hundred years from now, might decorate a great many American faces as a living memorial to the Nilsa family. In that way, perhaps, he would set his mark on America.

— 2—

The new-timbered Swedish church had been built in the spacious oak grove on the peninsula opposite Nordberg’s Island, a mile and a half from Karl Oskar’s place. From the center of the roof a steeple had been raised whose ever-narrowing timbers rose upward fully thirty feet toward the sky. The builders had gone to a great deal of trouble with this spire, the timbers carefully hewn and planed, but now, seen from the ground, it looked as if it were made of ordinary fence posts. Thirty feet seemed to diminish into a puny distance up there; it was but a snail’s pace on the road to the firmament vaulting so high above their new church. From the ground, thirty feet seemed like a pitiful attempt at a steeple. But none of the builders had raised a church before, none had put up a spire over a Lord’s house. And God must realize that these were awkward builders who had raised his church at the old Indian lake, and therefore God must be forbearing. But in any case this was the first Lutheran church in the St. Croix Valley, and even if the steeple rose only thirty feet into the air it pointed the way to the Lord’s heaven.

Even though services were being conducted in the new church it was far from finished inside. There were only a few pews and most of the participants must stand during the sermons; church bell and organ were missing, for the parish was short of cash. Concerning the color of the exterior paint for the building, a long-drawn-out argument had arisen among the parishioners.

Three different groups each wanted a different color for the new Swedish church. The first group wanted the church washed red to remind them of Christ’s blood and wounds which had redeemed Man from eternal condemnation and effected atonement with God. The second group wanted to see the temple walls green as grass, the color of sweet hope, leading their thoughts to the eternal joy of heaven, helping them to find comfort in the Father. Finally, the third group wanted to paint the church white, the color of purity, innocence, and angels’ wings. This would always remind them of Christ’s saying: Even though your sins be blood-red they shall be washed as white as snow.

For a year and a half the arguments had gone on among the reds, greens, and whites. Many stormy meetings were held, long speeches and heated arguments were heard. Pastor Törner regretted this disunity but he himself took no definite stand. He tried to calm the stirred-up emotions by pointing out that their salvation in no way was dependent on the color of their church. In the end the third group gained a majority, mainly because the parish business manager, Petrus Olausson, was the leader of that group. Consequently the new church had been painted white.

Later, a rumor had it that Olausson, long before the strife began, had happened to buy a large quantity of white paint.

“The settlers fight about any little thing,” exclaimed Kristina. “The Swedes are hopeless that way!”

“We must follow the American order of things,” said Karl Oskar. He approved of that order, however cumbersome and time-consuming it might be to make many heads agree. At least here they ran their own church without interference from high lords. What did the congregation have to say when churches were built in Sweden? The bishop decided almost everything. And Ljuder parish was run by three or four mighty men. Here three or four hundred people took part and made decisions about their parish and their church. It might take more time, but individuals should have the right to put their fingers in their own pies.

As a member of the parish council, Karl Oskar had suggested the erection of a lightning rod as a protection for the new church; since it was built of wood it could easily burn should lightning strike it. Long ago in Sweden, his meadow barn, filled with hay, had been destroyed by lightning fire; he had never forgotten it. In this country lightning seemed to be more frequent and of greater intensity than in Sweden, and he had put up lightning rods on both his main house and barn. It would be very simple to have a similar protective rod for the church. A copper wire would follow the side of the steeple down and into the ground; if lightning should strike, it would run along that wire and disappear into the earth.

Petrus Olausson was immediately against Karl Oskar. To put up a lightning rod on the church would be to show disrespect and suspicion toward God. A person who failed to believe that the Lord would be capable of averting lightning from his temple and would rather trust a copper wire, such a person could not be a faithful Christian. A true Lutheran must trust God, not a copper wire. If they put up a lightning rod they would commit the grave sin of weak faith. They should trust in the Almighty himself to protect the church they had built for him.

Karl Oskar replied: Was a person then not to use the protective remedies invented? That meant one couldn’t use warm clothing against the cold. Nor could a person swim to shore if he happened to fall into the lake. It meant they could not harvest their crops in the fall but must starve during the winter. If this were the Lutheran religion, then he was no true Lutheran.

“Yes, we know,” agreed Olausson with sad finality. “You and your wife harbor sectarians and evil preachers in your house. The soul fiend has put it into your head to use the lightning rod in an attempt to make us give up the true religion. When the devil wants to snare a person, a thin copper wire is quite sufficient.”

Olausson thus having raised a doubt in the mind of other council members concerning Karl Oskar’s religious beliefs, one by one they refused to vote for his motion. Only Jonas Petter stood by him. Because Karl Oskar and Kristina still opened their door to the wife of the Baptist minister in Stillwater, no lightning rod was erected for the new church. The parish left it to the Lord to protect his temple against lightning.

There was still much disorder and confusion in the Swedish Lutheran parish in Chisago Township. There were members without any respect for the church’s holiness, who acted within its walls as though it were a worldly house. Who could rebuke the impudent and shameless since no one had a right to give orders? The pastor himself was hired by the parish as its servant. At last it was agreed that vulgar behavior in the church would be punished with fines. To avoid hurting anyone’s feelings it was called a tax, a nuisance tax. If anyone brought dogs into the church during the service he must pay a dollar for each animal. A gun was allowed if put in the corner, but dogs were not suffered since they disturbed the service by growls and barking. If one entered the temple with dirty boots and made marks on the floor he paid fifty cents for this offense. But most expensive of all was to come drunk to the service: this was taxed at two dollars. It was difficult to decide when someone was to be considered drunk; if one was quiet and orderly he need not pay this so-called nuisance tax, however much whiskey he had consumed. But if anyone raised his voice in talk or laughter, or interrupted the minister at the altar or in the pulpit, it was considered a two-dollar sin.

During the first year the nuisance tax was in effect, it brought the parish forty-five dollars. This money was kept in a special savings box; in time it would be used for the purchase of a church bell. Thus evil was turned into good: the more disorder in the church, the sooner church bells would peal for the Swedish settlers at Chisago Lake.

— 3—

The colony grew with each year’s immigration. The newcomers were mostly relatives and friends of earlier arrivals, lured here by the description of the fertile country. They would arrive during the spring and summer and their log cabins would be built by fall. The immigrants came from various countries, but the majority were Swedes. In Chisago Township there were now five hundred Swedes, and fifteen hundred in the whole valley: a good-sized parish had moved from Sweden to the St. Croix Valley.

The settlements sprang up ever closer to the new church. On the peninsula opposite Nordberg’s Island, that had been named for the first landseeker at this lake, a new town site had been surveyed and named Center City. It was a rather boastful name but the settlers felt the town would in time live up to it. The site was at the center of the settlement and was planned to become the county seat of Chisago County.

A group of houses rose quickly in Center City. A few enterprising Swedes built a sawmill and a flour mill, both run by steam. The settlers need no longer drive long and difficult roads to have their timber sawed or their grain milled. An Irishman opened a lodging house where travelers could sleep and obtain food; a German wagon-maker built a shop with a lathe and other machinery. An American opened a tailor shop, a Norwegian blacksmith arrived with his tools. The Chisago people could now obtain clothing and implements near home.

One day the Nilssons heard that a young Swede had opened a general store in Center City.

The first time Karl Oskar went into the store he thought today he wouldn’t have to use English to make his purchases. The store was so recently built and opened that piles of shavings still lay in the corners. Counter and shelves had not yet been painted, and there was a smell of pitch from newly sawed pine boards. From the ceiling hung a number of implements, harnesses, lanterns, coils of rope, and other objects, but most of the shelves were still bare.

Behind the counter stood a young man with a firm, narrow face and open, light-blue eyes. His blond hair was cut short and neatly combed. No one need ask in what country the new storekeeper had been born: his boots of thick, greased Småland leather alone gave Karl Oskar the information.

He greeted the man in his native tongue and was about to tell him who he was when the young man behind the counter said, “You must be Karl Oskar from Korpamoen?”

If the store ceiling had fallen on his head, Karl Oskar could not have been more surprised. The new storekeeper not only used the Ljuder dialect, he also spoke to Karl Oskar as if his name had been in daily use at home.

“Why — yes! But how in all the world. .”

“I’m Klas Albert Persson from Ljuder. My father was Churchwarden Per Persson of Åkerby.”

“You must be his youngest boy?”

“I am.”

“Well!”

Karl Oskar stared in disbelief at the younger man who was claiming that they were from the same parish in Sweden. And indeed, his ears testified to the fact that the young man spoke the Ljuder dialect.

“You certainly surprised me. I hadn’t expected one from home to be the new store owner.”

“I came to America three years ago,” said Klas Albert. “I’ve worked recently in a store in St. Paul.”

Klas Albert — yes, Karl Oskar remembered the boy, who had been of confirmation age when he himself emigrated; now he looked to be in his early twenties. He remembered him as a boy in Sweden; now he saw him as a grown man in America. In Klas Albert’s change he could measure the time he himself had been out here: enough for a boy to grow into manhood.

Many people were said to have come to America from Ljuder but he had not met any of them. And now the first store in the new town of Center City in Chisago County was run by a son of Churchwarden Per Persson of Åkerby. In some way it seemed the old and the new country had come closer through this meeting.

This countryman he must greet warmly. He offered his hand. “Welcome to us, Klas Albert.”

“Thank you, Karl Oskar.”

Karl Oskar had learned through letters from home that the churchwarden had been killed when his horses bolted, the summer after their emigration. The son now told him that his oldest brother had taken over the homestead. They were seven brothers and sisters, and the six younger ones must find their way in life the best they could. Since there was nothing to do at home, he had come to America to find his future. More and more people at home did likewise.

But the farmer from Korpamoen had never imagined that a son of the rich churchwarden would ever emigrate.

“I recognized you the moment you came in,” said Klas Albert proudly.

“Hm. My nose, I guess?”

And Karl Oskar smiled broadly. The churchwarden’s boys must often have seen his big nose when he drove by on his way to church or to the mill.

Klas Alberts look indicated that this was so. “But you’ve changed a lot since I last saw you.”

“Grown older, of course. We age faster in America than in Sweden.”

“Something in your face is different,” explained the younger immigrant. “Your skin looks like American people’s, they get so sunburned it stays with them the year round.”

“Well. How did you happen to come to Chisago?”

“I heard they had planned a town here, and I thought, as soon as they lay out a town they’ll need a store.”

Klas Albert had wanted to be a storekeeper ever since he was a small boy. But there was no opportunity in Sweden. All the old aldermen sat there and decided who was to be admitted to their group; they wouldn’t let in an outsider with no experience. Anyone wanting to start something new ran into red tape and great lords to stop him at every corner. So he had felt North America was the place to start a business unhindered. It was of course bad luck for him that he had had to start in this depression while all these money troubles still were unsettled. Wasn’t this a strange country, where anyone who wanted could start a bank and print his own bills? It was confusing, and certainly was apt to make people lose confidence in paper money. In Sweden only the government had the legal right to depress the value of money.

But this town had a good location; as more people came business would soon improve. He had heard that a German had arrived who would open a second store in Center City. “But I’m sure I’ll get along,” concluded Klas Albert with youthful confidence.

And Karl Oskar encouraged the new businessman.

“There’re lots of Swedes around here; you’ll get along, Klas Albert.”

He talked so long with the Åkerby churchwarden’s son that he almost forgot he had come to do some shopping. Before he left he invited Klas Albert to his house next Sunday. It would be hard for Kristina to wait to meet him.

When he came home he told her about the new storekeeper in Center City who was no one else but the youngest son of the Åkerby churchwarden. And the following Sunday Klas Albert arrived and was greeted as the most welcome guest they had ever received. Kristina had eagerly been awaiting the visitor and she began at once to question him about the home parish. She asked about people she remembered and wanted to hear of; hour after hour she questioned him about their home village. As it happened Klas Albert had left Sweden three years earlier so his news was not entirely fresh, but his brothers and sisters had written him about what had happened after he left; North America was spoken of in every house, and more and more people thought of emigrating.

Kristina learned a great deal she hadn’t known, and it was especially pleasing to her to see the face of a person who had been in the home places later than she.

Klas Albert was impressed with the fine house they had built to live in, so Karl Oskar took him out on an inspection of their other buildings and the fields; his new home could stand inspection and he wanted to show his guest from Sweden how things were with him in North America.

It was the nicest time of year, early summer; the verdant fields were fresh with the new crops. Karl Oskar didn’t want to boast of his great fields, but Klas Albert guessed he must have over twenty-five acres — which was a good guess. The fat oxen and the cows with their swollen udders wallowed in the meadow, healthy hogs filled the pen, thick-wooled sheep bleated contentedly. Stables, barns, threshing and wagon sheds were examined, and American tools and implements — so work-saving for a settler — were inspected in detail. Then Karl Oskar showed Klas Albert the huge sugar maples. Every year Karl Oskar drilled holes in the trunks to release the sap, which gave them all the sugar and syrup they needed. He asked the guest to taste the product; didn’t those blessed trees give them good sweetening?

The more Klas Albert saw the more his respect grew for the farmer from Korpamoen who was responsible for this thriving farm. Time and again he asked: When had Karl Oskar done all this? How had he had time? The reply was short. He had not wasted a single working day during his years on the claim, and that was the way it had happened.

Kristina showed the young man the Astrakhan apple tree, grown from a seed that had been sent from her Swedish home. The tree had shot up so fast it was now a head taller than she herself. Every fall she dug around her tree and covered the roots with an extra foot of soil to protect them against the cold. Her tree was in its early youth; as yet it had had no blossoms.

When the inspection had been completed and they sat down to the dinner table, Klas Albert said, “Not one of the big farmers at home in Ljuder is as well off as you, Karl Oskar and Kristina!”

He knew Karl Oskar had been the first farmer in the home parish to sell his farm and emigrate to North America. Now he wanted to say how much he looked up to him and respected him for having taken this initiative. He always admired the first ones, those who dared something new, those who were courageous enough to move. Karl Oskar had indeed been bold in taking off for such a distant country.

Karl Oskar looked at the floor, embarrassed at all this praise. “When I started to talk emigration, the whole parish felt insulted. It was as if I had done something evil. People thought I should be punished for my arrogance.”

“Now you can laugh at those hecklers!” insisted Klas Albert.

“They poked fun at me and said my nose would be still longer when I came to America.”

“Well, is it?”

Karl Oskar laughed. “I guess it’s about the same, within a fraction of an inch!”

“That I must write home about!” said the young store keeper.

They had so much to talk about that their guest remained until late in the evening. When he finally left, Karl Oskar said to Kristina with pride that now Klas Albert would write home and tell them he had met the Korpamoen farmer in Minnesota. He would tell them about the Nilssons’ situation after starting a second time in life. And what he wrote would be spread over the whole parish, and people would talk about them and about their fine home, New Duvemåla, on the beautiful lake. And what now would those people think who once had talked so cruelly about him because he left his old home. They had predicted that his arrogance and pride would be punished with an evil end. His deriders would of course be hoping to hear that he and his family lived in poverty and misery in the new country. Instead, they would hear from the son of the churchwarden himself that Karl Oskar now had twenty-five acres of the most fertile land in America and harvested better crops than any farmer in the whole of Ljuder parish!

“There’ll be a great sickness in Ljuder for some time,” predicted Karl Oskar. “People will be sick with jealousy!”

Kristina had noticed his eagerness to show Klas Albert around. “I think you boasted a little too much,” she said.

“To point out the truth is not to boast!”

Now many more would follow the example of the one they had belittled and derided. His old neighbors had already started to come here; Ljuder parish was being transplanted to this valley. And he felt sure the settlers would in time outshine the home parish. The looked-down-upon emigrants — that pack of Gypsies — would win out over their slanderers. And he began to realize he had shown his countrymen the road to a new and greater homeland.

— 4—

About the same time that Karl Oskar from Korpamoen and Klas Albert, the churchwardens son, met in America, the successor of Dean Brusander sat in his office in Ljuder parsonage every day and handed out emigration papers which his parishioners came to ask for. On the top line of each page in the parish register he wrote after the emigrant’s name: Moved to N. America. But those words he only wrote once on each page; below, on the following lines, he wrote Ditto. It was sufficient. From the first line to the last there were many dittos. And every line of every page of the large parish register was filled with the names of Karl Oskar Nilsson’s followers.

XXXI. A BLESSED WOMAN’S PRAYER

— 1—

Ulrika had given Kristina a mirror which she had hung on the long wall above the sofa in the living room. In that position the mirror could be seen from any place in the room and was convenient to look into. A red rose had been painted on the glass in each one of the four corners, and when Kristina sat on the sofa and turned her head she was confronted by her own image.

As a girl Kristina had often been told that she was beautiful. And perhaps it had been the truth since so many had said it. But where now was the girl who so many times had blushed at the words, “You are beautiful!” Where now were her full cheeks with the soft little dimples of laughter? What had become of her nicely rounded chin? Where was her blossom-tinted color? Where the young girl’s quick and clear glance? What had become of the lips once full as wild strawberries?

The flower of her youth had passed and was gone. The mirror showed her a face already marked by age. It was always there, reflecting back at her; she could not escape the face of a woman getting on in years.

Every day she met this depressing sight. Was this she? She herself? These gaunt, wrinkled cheeks, this pale-gray color, this sharply etched chin, these tired, fading eyes without a glint, this caved-in mouth with teeth missing — this was she herself, what was left of the once beautiful girl Kristina of Duvemåla! And the face seemed to her doubly old and doubly pale as it looked back at her between the four red, cheerful roses in the corners of the mirror; they should instead have served as a frame for a youthful, blossoming girl’s face.

Kristina no longer wished to acknowledge her face. She would be just as pleased if she never saw it again.

“How silly of me to put up the mirror,” she said to Karl Oskar. “I would know anyway that I look worse each day.”

“We all must age,” said Karl Oskar comfortingly. “But the years are harder on us emigrants; we age faster than others.”

The years had set their mark on him too; he no longer moved about with such quick steps and easy gait as before, and at times he complained of the old ache in his left leg which made him limp occasionally. But she had fared worse than he; the neighboring wives had guessed she must be older than her husband, even though she was two years younger. The burden of childbearing fell on the woman; that made the difference.

Frank, the youngest in her flock, had come as a birthday present: he had been born on her thirty-first birthday, two years ago. She had barely been twenty when she had her first child, her daughter Anna, who had died at an early age in Sweden. In the eleven years between her first and her youngest, she had endured seven childbeds and borne eight children. During that time she had also gone through their emigration to a new continent, the building of a new home. All the things that had happened to her were bound to leave their mark on her.

“I want to put away the mirror,” she said, “somewhere in a dark corner.”

“But it’s a nice decoration,” said Karl Oskar. “And when Ulrika comes here she’ll need it to look at herself.”

“She doesn’t age,” said Kristina, with a trace of jealousy of her best friend.

“No, that is remarkable.”

“Her color is like fresh cream even though she has had six children.”

“Six?” he wondered. “I thought it was more. But those bastards she had at home I guess she didn’t count very carefully.”

Kristina tried to tell herself that it was childish to regret that she no longer looked like a young girl. And deep in her heart she knew that her vexation was not primarily directed against her changed face; she regretted her youth which had run away from her during her isolation in a wild and foreign country. Her youth was suddenly gone before she had had time to enjoy it. And she blamed the emigration which had devoured her joyous years. As a young girl — with great expectations for the future — she had not counted on a change of home and homeland.

It seemed to Kristina the great majority of people enjoyed much good and experienced much happiness in life which she had been denied. Most of them had participated in wonderful experiences that she would never have. She had been denied so much and she felt it was the emigration that had robbed her of this. Thus she had never been able to adjust herself to her lot as settler.

But this she had never told Karl Oskar. Nor had she told him that if, at the age of nineteen, she could have seen herself in labor seven times before she was thirty-one, she would probably have said no to his proposal and remained a spinster.

Ulrika had given her a real scare by saying that she could go on and bear children until she was forty-six; half of a woman’s fertile years still lay ahead of her. She could expect to give life to as many more children as she already had.

She had said at the time that she couldn’t survive that many births, of that she was sure. Each time she was more worn-out, more tired. She still felt the results of the last birth in her body.

Frank was now two years old, and as yet there had been no signs of a new life beginning. It was her strongest wish that he might remain the youngest. Kristina feared she could not survive one more childbed.

— 2—

Scarcely had their church been built when they lost their minister. Before Pastor Törner left he promised to find a replacement for the Swedish parish in St. Croix among the Lutheran synod of Chicago. But there was a dearth of Swedish ministers in America; few churchmen wanted to exchange their comfortable lives in Sweden for the dangers and privations of Minnesota. And there were those ministers who felt that these ungrateful people who had left their homeland were lost to God anyway and condemned to eternal damnation.

Meanwhile the emigrants at Chisago Lake must get along with visiting pastors from other parishes in the Northwest, and even though these came at frequent intervals there were many Sundays without a service.

One evening Karl Oskar came home from a parish meeting with sad news about their schoolmaster. Pastor Cederlöf, the Lutheran minister at Red Wing in Goodhue County, who had preached last Sunday and remained for the parish meeting, had told the members something greatly disturbing. In Mr. Johnson, their schoolmaster, he had recognized a false priest, Timoteus Brown, who had long traveled about in the Swedish settlements and — according to momentary suitability — pretended to be a Lutheran, a Baptist, a Methodist, or a Seventh-Day Adventist. Even the name Brown was false; the man’s real name was Magnus Englund, a drunken student from Uppsala, sent by his parents to the New World to cure his drunkenness. Once it had become known that he was a self-made minister he had given up preaching and taken to teaching school. As a teacher he was probably less dangerous. Pastor Cederlöf had not told England that he had been discovered, but he wanted to warn the parish council that their teacher was a wolf in sheep’s clothing; the Swedish paper had long ago published warnings about him.

Consequently, said Karl Oskar, the parish council had today sent for the schoolmaster to examine him, but that bird had already been warned and had flown from his nest at the school building. Someone had seen him board the steamboat in Stillwater.

The Swedish student Englund-Brown-Johnson, who for some time had given good instruction to the settler children, had disappeared and was never again heard of in the St. Croix Valley. So the new parish was for the time being without either minister or teacher.

Several weeks might sometimes elapse without a service in the new church, and Kristina stayed home even on Sundays. Then would come a Sunday with a new minister, always a new and unknown pastor, in the pulpit. It wasn’t as it had been earlier. To her, the services in the new country had been linked with the churchman who had given her the Sacrament in America for the first time and who had turned their old log house into a temple. Without Pastor Törner before the altar or in the pulpit, the church did not seem the same God’s house to her.

And Kristina had not yet heard church bells ring in America. An empty and silent steeple rose from their church in the oak grove at the lake, and no organ played inside. Their temple stood there mute, mum, and silent, as if not daring to voice a sound before the Lord. Each time she looked up at the empty steeple she thought: Like the bells at home, here too the peal from on high would have inspired reverence in the congregation; the Lord’s own voice from above would have opened the hearts of people before they entered his temple.

One Sunday it was announced that a well-known minister from faraway Chicago would conduct services in the new church. But when Kristina left her bed that morning she told Karl Oskar that he would have to go to church alone; she did not feel quite well today.

What was the matter with her? She couldn’t tell definitely, and he wondered. Was she lying to him about her sickness, he asked himself. He hardly remembered a single instance during their marriage when he had caught his wife lying.

During the night Kristina had dreamed that she had borne a child. It had been a very short dream but much had happened in it. She had been sitting in their new church and suddenly felt she was pregnant. She remembered it was her eighth time. The child in her womb felt well developed and she could not understand why she hadn’t felt her pregnancy before. When at the end of the service she was leaving the church, labor had overtaken her and she had borne the child on the steps outside, in view of all the worshipers. The child dropped naked on the top step and wailed loudly. At that moment Samuel Nöjd, the heathen fur trapper, whom she had never seen in church before, approached her with an evil grin. He picked up the child and ran away with it, carrying it by the legs, head down, as he would handle a dead rabbit. Then she herself had cried out, she tried to run after the kidnapper but was unable to do so and fell headlong down the church steps. On the top step she could see a big red mark: her own blood.

At the sight of this she had awakened. Her shift was drenched through with cold sweat, but a joyous relief filled her: only in her dream had she been pregnant. But today she was unable to mount the steps where she had experienced her birth dream.

Kristina had never believed that dreams came true or were a premonition. But the birth on the church steps had shaken her more deeply than any dream she could remember. What could it mean? She knew at least why she had dreamed this particular dream; two months in succession her bleeding had been delayed a whole week beyond the expected day. Twice in a row she had suffered a week of anxiety, waiting for her body to give the sign which meant comfort and peace for another month. And when the sign at last appeared she felt wild with joy for a few days. Fear of a new pregnancy had disturbed her sleep so that in a dream she had experienced what she feared. That must be it. That the repulsive heathen and whoring man Nöjd stole her child added to the horror of the dream.

For years now she had carried within her the fervent wish that God would make her barren for the rest of her life. But she had not dared voice her desire and pray to him to grant it. She had often wondered about this: a woman who refused the blessing of fertility and prayed for the curse of barrenness — didn’t she sin against God’s commandments?

In her fear of a new pregnancy, increased by the dream birth on the church steps, the old temptation returned to her. She thought it over, hesitated, doubted. She decided to ask the advice of Danjel Andreasson, and the next time she saw her uncle alone, she asked, “Would I commit a grave sin if I prayed God to relieve me of further childbirths?”

Danjel was accustomed to his niece talking intimately to him in matters she would not even mention to Karl Oskar, and he was not surprised at her question. He replied that the Almighty could see into the hearts of all his creatures. He knew all her thoughts, wishes, and desires. If she wanted to be relieved of bearing any more children, then this wish must already be known to God. And it was assuredly permitted for each person to pray according to his understanding; if she were praying for something that was good for her, then the Lord would grant her prayer, otherwise not.

Kristina interpreted her uncle’s opinion to mean that a woman’s prayer for barrenness was not a sin against any of God’s commandments. Of course Danjel was only a poor sinner himself and could not with assurance tell her when she sinned and when she didn’t. But if she transgressed with this prayer, then she must already have committed the sin in her heart. Wasn’t she courageous enough to do in word what she already had done in thought?

In every need a person must turn to his creator, every worry, great or small, must be carried to him. God demanded simply that a worried person turn to him, ask his aid.

And now she was a worried and deeply frightened person. Why did she hesitate? Why did she delay? Why hadn’t she been bold enough to offer this prayer long ago? But now she would do so.

Not at the same time as her evening prayer, however, which she read every night in bed before going to sleep. Not so much because Karl Oskar would lie awake in his bed across the room and listen, but mostly because this was a prayer of great importance to her. This urgent prayer must be said secretly, alone, with no one looking on. She wanted to feel entirely alone with the Almighty. And if she sought out a lonely place for the prayer, then he must understand how important it was to her, how fervently she sought its granting.

And this prayer would always remain a secret between the creator and her.

On a light, balmy July evening Kristina stole up the hill to a grove of immense oaks a few gunshots’ distance from the house. She had been careful to see that no one noticed her leave; she sneaked away like someone on a forbidden errand. God saw her, and he would listen, but no one else must see or hear her. She felt she was on her way to a sacred meeting — which she was. Tonight she was meeting God in his own beautifully created oak grove.

Below a mighty oak she fell down on her knees to offer her secret prayer.

Her knees in the lush grass, her forehead against the oak trunk, Kristina prayed to him who had all power in heaven and on earth. She prayed for that which was good for her. A seven-times blessed woman prayed for barrenness for the rest of her life; she prayed the Lord to have mercy on her tired, worn-out body, and not create any more lives in it.

“Dear, dear God! Don’t let me become pregnant again! I am unable to endure it! Think of me, dear God!”

The tall oak crowns swayed above her head. The wind, rustling in their leaves, was the only sound in the grove up here tonight. The silence and the stillness aided in making her feel alone — alone with God. The soft wind she heard in the crowns of the trees she took as a touch of the creator’s own soft hand, as a breath of confidence from the heaven above her; the father in heaven touched his praying child.

After the prayer a great calm came over her. When she rose from her bent knees, she felt sure her prayer had been heard.

XXXII. PARTNERS OF AMERICA

— 1—

On May 11, 1858, a new star shone on the flag of the United States of America. On this day the Congress admitted a new state, the thirty-second, into the union. The state was Minnesota.

But a great distance separated Washington from Minnesota and it was two whole days before the 150,000 inhabitants of the far-away territory learned that they now lived in a state of the Union. On the beautiful May day, when the decision was made, the settlers were busy with the spring planting of their fields, unaware of the transformation of their status: in the morning they went to work as territorial residents, in the evening they returned as citizens of the greatest and mightiest republic in the world.

Up till now the Minnesota settlers had felt that the government in Washington was their guardian: the representatives they had sent to Congress had no voting rights. Washington had appointed their governors, made up their budget, and generally supervised their activities. This had made the people feel that they weren’t trustworthy. And they had waited a long time: Congress had more than once denied the territory state rights. The southern slave states would not admit Minnesota unless Kansas too were admitted. But since the Kansas constitution permitted slavery it was not acceptable to the Northern states. However, after many bitter debates in Congress, both territories had now at last been admitted.

As soon as the decision was made in Washington, the great news was dispatched by telegram to the Minnesota legislature. But the telegraph wires reached only as far as Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, and from there the telegram had to be carried by steamer up the Mississippi. On the morning of May 13, when the new state already was two days old, the steamer arrived in St. Paul. There the papers spread the happy message with the biggest headlines ever seen in the territory: GLORIOUS NEWS! MINNESOTA A STATE! BRING OUT THE BIG GUN! And half the front page of the St. Paul Pioneer depicted a cannon being fired under a flag with thirty-two stars. BRING OUT THE BIG GUN! The letters above the cannon were so large the readers could almost hear the firing.

Fort Snelling at St. Paul fired all its guns, with the consequence that people who hadn’t yet heard the news thought the Indians were on the warpath and began to leave their homes in panic. But as soon as the word spread, each owner of a firing iron added to the noise and celebration. Every settler with a gun fired a shot of joy. For several days one would have thought war had broken out in the new state of Minnesota with battles in every settlement. Old breach-loaders and blunderbusses were fired, Kentucky rifles and Samuel Colt’s new revolvers, percussion rifles, English guns, Scottish shotguns, Irish carbines, German cavalry pistols, French bird guns, and — not least — old Swedish muzzle loaders. In the Minnesota forests, the salutation of all its inhabitants thundered in unison. No gun had a report exactly like another; each rifle and gun and revolver and pistol had its own voice: European people fired their different weapons, uniting into one many-voiced greeting and salutation to the free land of the new world where they had become citizens.

BRING OUT THE BIG GUN! Now they could choose their own government. Now they could elect representatives and have a voice in Congress, could participate in the great decisions! Minnesota’s settlers now had a right to sit in the Capitol, at the table of great deliberations.

The echo of great expectations rose with the salutation in the clear May sky. Those who fired were themselves fired of a great expectation: their territory had grown up, had become a state. Now more immigrants would arrive, to break more fields, build more houses, more churches and schools, build better, more passable roads. Railroads and telegraph lines would now be built, mail-service would improve; the one-time territory would be drawn closer to its older brethren-states in the Union. Money matters would be regulated; new laws concerning printing and issuing of bills would destroy wildcat money forever. Reliable currency would make business grow again, and prosperity would return to the young state ruled only by the settlers themselves.

Joy reverberated in the spring air, this spring which had brought good weather for sowing and growing. The sap in the sugar maples flowed more abundantly than ever before, grass and flowers and all the plants of the earth sprang up in a profusion such as no one had previously observed — this spring when Minnesota became a state.

— 2—

In the settlements at Chisago Lake, the news of statehood was celebrated joyfully. Here no one could afford to waste ammunition but this time everyone was generous with his powder. Karl Oskar shot off three salutes from his old muzzle loader — the only shots he ever fired just for fun in America. His gun was old but it had been made by the most famous gunsmith in Småland and it made more noise than any of the other guns in the district. Karl Oskar said that since he was the first one to settle at this lake he must fire a shot loud enough to be heard all the way to Washington by the President himself!

This same spring Karl Oskar and his family received their papers as American citizens. There were five of them to get such a paper — he, Kristina, and the three children born in Sweden. Each paper cost a dollar. It cost him and his family five dollars to become citizens of the United States. The American-born half of his flock were citizens as soon as they left the mother’s womb; because of this they saved three dollars.

Since they had left Sweden and were stricken from the Ljuder parish records they had not belonged anywhere; they had not had papers that they rightfully belonged in any country; they had in a sense been vagrants in the world. Now they had printed papers to prove they belonged to a new homeland.

When Karl Oskar a few years earlier had assured the court in Stillwater that he wanted to settle in America and become a citizen, he had been asked to forswear all allegiance to foreign rulers and potentates. Without a moment’s hesitation he had forsworn Oskar I of Sweden all obedience and allegiance. He forswore the Swedish king with an easy conscience since he could not remember that he ever had taken an oath to uphold that ruler.

In order to become a citizen of the North American republic you were also supposed to renounce your nobility status and all titles and prerogatives adhering to your status in the old country. Because in this country no one had greater rights and advantages because of his birth; counts and barons and similar lords were forbidden. In whatever mother-womb one had lain meant nothing here; it did not make one a ruler over other people, as in Sweden. But Karl Oskar need not renounce any patent of nobility or inherited rights; from his homeland he had only brought the title of farmer, and this he could keep in America as long as he wished.

Karl Oskar spent several evenings reading their citizenship papers; with the aid of his son Johan, who had learned English at school, he searched out the meaning of the words and interpreted them for Kristina. Their names were now incorporated in the official papers of their new country; they would forever remain recorded in official American records as citizens of the United States. They were now equal to the families who had lived here for a hundred years or more. And it was printed on paper that they had changed from Swedes to Americans.

“Are we no longer Swedish people?” wondered Kristina.

“We’re stricken out at home. We’re American citizens. We’re partners of America. We have renounced Sweden for eternity.”

“In case of war between the two countries — will you go out and fight against Sweden?”

He laughed. “I guess I must if I’m asked.”

“Never have I heard such craziness!”

“But the Americans have once and for all gotten rid of the English king and will never again fight the old country. They have better sense.”

Kristina eyed the citizenship papers without understanding a syllable. In her, America had acquired a citizen who never used the language of her new country. She kept to her resolution not to try to learn English. Yet Karl Oskar insisted that through these papers she had been turned into an American.

Kristina felt it couldn’t be that easy to change a person. This paper couldn’t change her, even though it was large and thick and decorated with stamps and ornaments around her name, which was printed in large letters. In this paper it stated that she was an American citizen: “Wife of Charles O. Nelson.” But what did this new name mean to her? It changed her neither inside nor outside. She was sure to remain the same as she had been since her birth: Kristina Johansdotter of Duvemåla, Algutsboda parish, Sweden. And however much her name was changed on American papers, she would continue to think as often and as longingly as before of her old homeland.

She had noticed that Karl Oskar had changed these last years. Not in clothing or external things but in his speech and his way of thinking. He accepted the customs here, he felt that Americans were clever and industrious, he approved of most of their ways and tried to ape them.

He himself testified to this change as he now asked his wife: Should he begin to use the name on the American citizenship paper, should he call himself Charles O. Nelson? What did she think?

“I don’t like it!” said Kristina. “You may renounce the Swedish king, but if you change your Swedish name I’ll laugh at you! For then it means you’re getting to be uppity!”

This was a clear reply and he said nothing more. Kristina was really right, he thought. And he continued to write his name in the old way; he was still Karl Oskar Nilsson.

— 3—

The powder smoke of the May festival days blew away, and plans for the new state’s government took its place. Liberty always brings with it great concerns and much trouble, and liberty is most troublesome to those who are unused to it. It now fell upon the shoulders of Minnesota’s inhabitants to agree on how to govern their state; they must prepare and agree to a state constitution.

In the old territorial days, Democrats and Whigs had fought for power. But in 1855 a new party had come into existence, founded in Michigan the year before. Its members called themselves Republicans. They promised great advantages to the settlers and wanted to give land free to newcomers. They became the party of the settlers. Alexander Ramsey, the territorial governor, previously the Whig leader, joined the new party and became its leader. The Democratic leader was Henry H. Sibley, earlier the government’s Sioux Indian agent. The Democrats were soon outnumbered by the fast-growing Republican party.

Republicans and Democrats met in St. Paul to work out a constitution for the state of Minnesota. But the differences between the two parties grew ever wider, and soon made it impossible for the delegates to work at the same table. It turned out to be very difficult to work out one constitution for the new state; on the other hand it was very easy to arrive at two. The two parties sat in different rooms and each made up a constitution. The two documents differed in about two hundred points.

In the Old World people shot each other when they disagreed about forms of governments, but Republicans and Democrats in Minnesota agreed on one thing: this must not happen among them! They must come to peaceful agreement. And after long and tiresome negotiations the two constitutions were finally fused into one, acceptable to both sides.

Now the young state must elect its first governor. But its inhabitants had come from countries in the Old World, where they never had been permitted to select their rulers, and their highest lord — the king — had always been appointed by God, who never asked their advice. The selection of a governor would be the first test of the people’s ability to govern themselves.

Both parties nominated candidates: Alexander Ramsey on the Republican ticket and Henry H. Sibley on the Democratic. A bitter campaign ensued.

In the Swedish settlement at Chisago Lake many immigrants who never before had participated in choosing representatives for governmental posts, must now for the first time in their lives learn to handle a ballot. To the Swedes, this participating in their own concerns, seemed a strange and novel business. Most of the Swedes at Chisago Lake wanted Ramsey. His party promised aid and easing of taxes, while the Democrats advocated raising taxes for farmers. And Ramsey’s personality and background inspired confidence. Born to poor people he had been orphaned at ten, from which time he had supported himself, often through manual labor. He had worked as a carpenter and forester and like themselves learned to get ahead in the new country. He was the right kind of governor for men who wielded the ax and the plow. In Sweden one must be born in a castle to reach such a high position, in America a log cabin sufficed. Colonel Sibley was a businessman, one of the higher-ups in the American Fur Company, the richest and most powerful business venture in the territory. Sibley, the Democratic candidate, had grown wealthy from dealing in furs; he would be a governor for money-men. About him his opponents said: Sibley is honest in this way, that he never makes any promises except those he won’t fulfill.

In Red Wing, a Swedish paper had been started, Minnesota-Posten. While Hemlandet was intended as an organ for all Swedes in America, the Minnesota-Posten directed itself especially to the immigrants in Minnesota. The new paper was more American than its predecessor and championed the new homeland above the old. In its first issue it explained that the Swedes in America would never really have a chance until they were entirely integrated with the Americans. “Minnesota-Posten aims to devote itself to the new generation and wishes particularly to be a friend of young people and a guide for their transition from Swedes to Americans. .”

The Red Wing paper came out for the Republicans and urged the Swedes to take advantage of voting rights to support the good and the right by casting the first ballot in their lives for the Republican candidate for governor.

Long before Karl Oskar had become a reader of the Minnesota-Posten, he had decided to vote for Ramsey. In this he listened to the best advice available: he followed his own common sense. The Democrats had been in and misused their power until they had almost ruined the country; the money situation indicated it was time for a change. Only those who earned easy money stayed with the Democrats and were for Sibley.

Karl Oskar was shocked at the shameless behavior of the party members against each other during the campaign. In each issue the Minnesota-Posten called the Democrats “this dishonorable pack.” To express such an opinion right out would be libelous in Sweden. But apparently what was considered a crime in Sweden was a civic duty in America.

The Democrats said the Republicans were playing false by promising the settlers free land. The Republicans accused the Democrats of having bought five thousand gallons of cheap whiskey to be used for vote buying; they were sending agents around with whiskey kegs and offered up to ten gallons for a vote. A rumor was spread about Colonel Sibley that while he was an agent for the Sioux he had led such an immoral life that he had had thirty-five children by squaws. A man who in this way increased a warring tribe — was he suitable as governor? A few days before the election, a Republican paper raised the number of Sibley’s illegitimate children to forty-two, while the Democratic papers published attests from well-known people, assuring the public that the Colonel had not a single brat among the Sioux.

The Democrats won the election, and Colonel Henry H. Sibley became Minnesota’s first governor. In some quarters it was felt that the rumor about his many children among the Indians had won him the victory. Those who held it to be false were greatly angered at the dastardly attempt to dirty an innocent man — that was why they had voted for Sibley. Those who considered the rumor true regarded his forty-two-fold paternity as proof of superior manhood, not at all derogatory to a governor of the young and fast-growing state — that was why they had voted for him.

Most of the Swedish immigrants voted Republican: in Chisago County 409 votes were cast for Ramsey, with only 192 for Sibley. And the honest Minnesota-Posten greeted the new governor with the following words — in Swedish: “This old fox will now be our governor for the next two years!”

The Republicans blamed their loss on the whiskey; a great number of the Democratic voters had been drunk. The Democrats accused the Republicans of ballot stuffing. One man could only have one vote, but in several Republican townships it appeared that more ballots had been cast than there were inhabitants; indeed, in two districts the number of ballots was twice the number of voters. The election turn-out, consequently, exceeded all expectations.

The difference between the number of votes and voters was difficult to explain, but apparently some non-existent persons had participated. The majority of these votes were discarded, but the incident could not be held against the voters: it was self-evident that the new citizens had overdone it a little when they used their new rights for the first time: it was probably purely an expression of joy which had made them produce more votes than voters. These people had for so long been suppressed and without rights in their respective homelands that it was quite excusable if they exaggerated a little when they celebrated their coming-of-age. Their action showed they were people with life in them; they would be able to take care of themselves.

In view of the fact that these immigrants and other settlers out here lacked all experience in self-government, they merited this praise at least, that they had proved they could vote for a governor.

— 4—

About this time, when men got together in Minnesota, there was talk about a lawyer down in Illinois whose name was Abraham Lincoln and who was at the helm of the new Republican party. But the man was seldom referred to by his name. He was called Old Abe, or Honest Abe. It was known of him that he was a settler’s son and had been born on the floor of a log cabin in Kentucky. Honest Abe came from the deep forest, his ax under his arm; he had been sent by God to be the settlers’ leader in the Northwest. His body was said to be as large as that of the biblical Goliath, and the strength of his arms was fantastic: he could drive his ax deeper into the wood than any timberman before him. In wrestling no one had ever been able to press Abe’s shoulders to the floor; both as wrestler and fighter he was unbeaten in all the states and territories of the Union. And the creator had endowed him with spiritual gifts of the same immense proportions. He studied while he performed his daily labor; as a store clerk in New Salem he read a book with one eye while he weighed up coffee and tea for his customers with the other. Ever since he was thirty he had been called Old Abe — this because of his great wisdom. In him friends and foes could trust: he would always satisfy the former and disappoint the latter.

The settlers in Minnesota were sure that Old Abe was capable of thinking for all of them. At last a great leader had been born to the men of ax and plow.

The stories about him changed and grew ever more amazing with the years. One day he had short-weighed tea for a customer by three ounces, and he rode twenty miles to the customer’s house with the missing amount. Another time Honest Abe walked five miles to give ten cents back to a customer he had overcharged. Soon it was ten miles Abe had walked and five cents; as the story spread the distance grew greater and the sum smaller.

When Honest Abe himself opened a shop he soon lost out; he was unable to lie or cheat and consequently showed no head for business. Now this remarkable man had become a lawyer in Springfield. It was a great distance to that town in Illinois, and to the settlers in Minnesota Old Abe seemed like a saga giant — good and strong beyond the measure of ordinary mortals.

In the Minnesota-Posten, Karl Oskar and Kristina saw a picture of their new leader, “taken,” the paper wrote, “in the most complete likeness in which a human being can be taken.” They studied Honest Abe’s picture closely, and Karl Oskar expressed his satisfaction with the long, forceful nose.

“His nose is almost as big and clumsy as mine!”

“Not quite that bad!” insisted Kristina.

“Well, it’s more shapely, perhaps. Wonder if Abe’s nose will give him luck!”

“Why do they call him Honest Abe?” wondered Kristina. “It sounds as if honest men were rare in America.”

The man in the picture — with a nose almost as big as the Nilsa-nose — wanted to liberate the three million slaves in the southern states, those people who, like cattle, were listed among their owners’ possessions and valued at three billion dollars. From Hemlandet’s serial, “Fifty Years in Chains,” Kristina knew of the cruel lot of the Negroes in the South. Must people be treated like that only because God had made their skin black instead of white? It would only be fair if owners and slaves were to exchange skin for the rest of their lives, she thought.

Sheriffs from the South had been all the way up to Taylors Falls looking for runaway slaves, but people there had hid them from the pursuers and helped them on their flight. Kristina had hoped runaway Negroes would come to their house so she could give them lodging. Their own white skin, which protected them from being hunted like animals, had been given them as an unearned gift; they ought to pay something for it.

Karl Oskar cut out the picture of the man who wanted to abolish both masters and slaves. Old Abe had said: In this country one man is as good as another, and sometimes better. This wonderful expression the settlers heard often, laughing heartily and proudly each time. It was a good slogan for free men in America, especially for those who handled ax and plow.

— 5—

In the following year’s general election, the Republicans won and Alexander Ramsey was elected governor of Minnesota by a majority of more than 5,000 votes. The people’s self-governing ability had developed since last year: only a few hundred nonexistent voters participated this time, and only a few votes were bought for whiskey — and a much better whiskey at that than the year before.

The settlers’ own party was at the helm in Minnesota and would hold it for many years to come.

The Republicans had won with a great majority in all the counties with Swedish settlers, especially Chisago, Marine, and Goodhue. “Minnesota has shed the Democratic yoke!” was the jubilant expression of the Minnesota-Posten. But shortly after this the Swedish-language paper died an early death. Unlike people dying of old age, the paper died of youth. The number of Republicans had increased, but the number of subscribers had decreased. The paper was often late, which the editor excused by saying he had been on long journeys and delayed by bad weather, which had prevented him from getting the paper out on time. But people grew tired of a paper whose editor never traveled in good weather.

Hemlandet was again the only paper in the Duvemåla settlement. They need no longer fetch their paper in Taylors Falls, and it now came to Klas Albert’s store in Center City. Klas Albert was usually referred to as Mr. Persson, but the old Ljuder people continued to call their storekeeper the churchwarden’s Klas Albert. His first months had been rather hard, but gradually his business flourished. He served his countrymen well, buying a horse and wagon to deliver groceries to his customers, summer and winter. And the young man understood how to treat his women customers so that they always came back; many of them, it was rumored, not to make purchases, but to propose marriage to the young businessman. The number of women in the St. Croix Valley had during the last years increased so much that there now was one woman to seven men — but seven for Klas Albert, according to the rumor.

One humid summer day, during the hay harvesting, the young storekeeper drove up to Duvemåla with his load of groceries. He was waving their copy of Hemlandet, and called out before he stepped down from the wagon:

“The king is dead!”

Karl Oskar was busy stacking hay, aided by Johan and Marta. He thrust the hayfork into the ground and leaned against the handle.

“What king, Klas Albert?”

“Oskar, of course! Our Swedish king!”

He handed the Hemlandet to Karl Oskar, who read: “An electric telegraphic dispatch from Stockholm July 8 announced that His Majesty King Oskar I’s valuable life had flickered out this date at 8 A.M.”

Karl Oskar said he would take a few minutes’ rest and they walked into the kitchen, where Kristina lit a fire in the Prairie Queen and put on the coffeepot. She was greatly moved by the news that Sweden’s king had died; her eyes grew moist and she dried them intermittently with the corner of her apron.

“But he was no longer our king,” said Karl Oskar.

“It is sad anyway. He too was a human being.”

“Even a king can’t escape death — that might be some comfort for us.”

She reminded Karl Oskar that he had been named after Oskar’s father, Charles XIV John, who had reigned at the time of his birth, and that his second name had been given him after Oskar, who was then Crown Prince. He could thank the dead man for one of his royal names.

“A name doesn’t honor a man,” said Karl Oskar. “The man must honor the name.”

Later, at the table, Klas Albert read from Hemlandet: “Oskar I was a gracious father to his subjects and wielded a prosperous scepter. During his reign he fostered liberalism among his people to the comfort and advantage of every inhabitant. Therefore all his subjects now mourn the loss of a king who won the affection and love of his people through his mild and just rule. .”

“King Oskar I’s High Remains will lie in state in the Serafimer Hall for three days where the mourning subjects can view it.”

Karl Oskar Nilsson, the Swedish-born settler with two royal names, listened skeptically as he sipped his coffee. “Well, well, so is there really such an awful weeping in Sweden!”

“It sounds like a great funeral wailing throughout the country,” said Klas Albert.

“It says all his subjects mourn him — that’s a lie that we won’t fall for out here in America!”

“Perhaps they put that in to fill out the space in the paper,” suggested Kristina.

But Karl Oskar said further that if everyone in Sweden had been so happy and satisfied during Oskar’s mild and just reign, why, then, had so many thousands of his subjects emigrated to North America?

“Do you understand it, Klas Albert?”

“No. I know as well as you, Karl Oskar, how miserable things were at home.”

“The king was probably a kind man,” said Kristina. “But perhaps he didn’t rule alone.”

“He became king the same year I took over Korpamoen. He has reigned ever since I became a farmer, fifteen years.”

“The new king is Charles XV,” said Klas Albert, and turning again to the paper, he read: “In the fullness of his manhood Charles XV has inherited the glorious scepter which his father’s weakened hand relinquished even before his death. Charles XV has assured his subjects that he wants to be their most gracious king, that he will discharge well the duties of his high office which Providence has entrusted to him, and that he will pursue a mild and just reign.”

At the last words Karl Oskar nodded in recognition. “Yes, the government in Sweden has always been mild and just! The new king has already learned that by heart!”

Yes, of course. All the people in Sweden had donned their black mourning clothes and were weeping for their king from morning to night. Except the peasants, of course — they must get in their hay while the sunshine lasted.

Karl Oskar added that he expected a still greater immigration after this. All the Swedes unable to endure the loss of their king would probably show up in Minnesota, sooner or later.

XXXIII. IF GOD DOESN’T EXIST.

— 1—

The fire burned and crackled on the hearth in the big room where the Nilsson family sat within the circle of light this November evening. Kristina was carding wool for stocking yarn while Marta, who had just learned to spin, picked up the wool wads as they came from her mother’s carding combs. Johan sat like a man reading the latest issue of Hemlandet, while Harald spelled his way through a chapter in his First Reader. Dan was working on the runners for a sled he was building; with some help from his father he hoped to have it ready for the first snow. Ulrika was dressing a doll, given to her by Ulrika Jackson; when the doll was dressed she removed all the garments and began to dress it again. Of the children, only Frank was not with them; he had been in bed for a few days with a sore throat, although he was improving. Karl Oskar, too, was missing from the fire-lit circle this evening. He had gone to St. Paul to look at horses; a drove had just arrived from Iowa. He would be away for the night and was not expected home until tomorrow evening. The children were in a state of great anticipation at the prospect of their father returning with a new horse.

Undisturbed by the din of loud child voices, Harald went on reading his lesson, the same piece over and over:

“All things are made by God. He has made me. I am only a child but I know I am more than a dog or a horse. What has a child above a dog or a horse? A horse or a dog can stand and walk as well as a child. Horses and dogs have sight, smell, and taste like me. But I have a soul. I can see my body. But my soul I can’t see. My body will die. But my soul will never die. It ascends to God when my body dies.

“God is with you in good and evil days. He is your comfort in sorrow, he is your support in need, if you only pray to him. He wants to be your help. .”

Now and then a burned-out log broke and the pile of firewood caved in a little. The crackling of the fire, the screeching from Kristina’s wool combs, and the buzz of the spinning wheel mingled with the boy’s singsong reading.

But not one word of the lesson escaped Kristina’s ears. It was truly astonishing how much those short simple words contained.

Harald resumed: “He is your comfort in sorrow, he is your support in need, if you only pray. .”

The words rang in her ears, piercing like a sword in her heart: “He wants to be your help.” No — she didn’t understand it, it didn’t agree, it had not turned out as she felt it must. It was not as these words promised; she had known this for some time now.

On the evening last summer when she had prayed under the huge oaks up on the hill, she had felt confident her prayer had been heard. This confidence had grown in strength for four months. Now it was completely shattered; for two weeks she had known she was again with child.

The Kristina who sat here this evening combing wool for her children’s stockings was for the eighth time a blessed woman. And the lesson in the First Reader with its short words seemed to her a raw and inhuman parody on the prayer she had prayed last summer.

“Listen, Mother!” It was Johan, who had discovered something in the paper.

“A report from New York says that engineer Elias Howe’s sewing machine with shuttle sold to the number of twenty-five thousand last year within the United States. Wouldn’t you like to have a sewing machine, Mother?”

She continued her carding without a reply. The boy repeated his question: Didn’t she want a sewing machine?

“Why. . Yes. . Yes, of course!”

A machine with hands that could sew, thereby saving one’s own hands. Well, that was really something.

Johan looked askance at her and wondered what was the matter with Mother lately. Often she was so slow in answering that he must repeat his questions. Mother seemed to be losing her hearing. And she was so silent these days — she hardly spoke to anyone unless she had to. Was she sad about something?

Johan went back to read to himself about the comet with the growing tail which the Italian stargazer Giambattista Donati had discovered last summer and which had caused great consternation throughout the world. In June the comet had no tail at all, but by August it was a million miles long, by September four million, and now in November six million miles long. Soon the tail of that comet, it was said, would stretch across the whole firmament. Johan had been out looking for it on several evenings but it had been cloudy and he hadn’t discovered the smallest tail spark of the terrifying heavenly body.

Kristina could not stop listening to Harald: “. . if you only pray. .”

Who could have prayed more fervently than she? But God had not heard her. He had remained deaf to her prayer. He had given her neither reply nor sign — unless her new pregnancy was the reply? During the very moment of prayer she had felt the Almighty’s mild hand upon her forehead, but she had made a miserable mistake. He was unmoved, unresponsive. It was not the fatherly hand she had felt stroking her brow during the prayer last summer — it must have been nothing but the wind.

“He wants to be your help.”

But now she knew the truth: God did not wish to help her.

She must go through it all again, all she had prayed to be relieved of: first the sick and miserable feeling for a few months, then carrying the increased burden of her body, shuffling about on heavy feet, and at last the terrifying labor, her strength spent, and the great weakness and fatigue afterward with her limbs heavy and aching. And just at the time when most was required of her, she would have to get up nights to give the breast to the baby, stay up till all hours when it was sick or fretted, caring constantly for the tender life day and night. All this she must go through again; for the eighth time since her twentieth year it was demanded of her. And this time she met the pregnancy with less strength than at any of the other seven times. Her weariness was great when she went to bed in the evening, it was almost as great when she arose in the morning.

God was omniscient; he knew that her strength was barely sufficient for all her chores, for the care of the children she had already borne. He knew she was worn out, young in years though she still was. He knew she would not be able to stand another birth, another child, and to make sure, she had told him so in her prayer last summer. Yet he was creating a new life in her. Why did he do this to her? Why hadn’t he heard her prayer?

She had waited as long as she could to tell Karl Oskar. She had told herself she might be mistaken. Her period had been late before. No need to hurry with this information — she must be sure. And now she was sure. And this morning before he left for St. Paul she had told him. It was her time again; she must go through it once more.

No one could expect him to be happy over it. When Frank was born he had said, “Now it is about right.” Six had not seemed too much for Karl Oskar, but a seventh would be. And then the seventh was announced. What would he say now when it was more than about right, when moderation was exceeded?

He said just about nothing. He stood silent for a moment at first. If he was disappointed, he didn’t show it. Never had he shown any disappointment at this sort of news. Already? he used to say in the old days, his joy perhaps a little forced. But this time he just said nothing.

“Well, hmm, time again? Well — if we can feed six brats, I guess we can feed seven! As long as you can take it.”

That was all he had said this morning, and it was about what she had expected him to say.

In Korpamoen in Sweden she had been afraid to bear too many children lest she couldn’t feed them. Then she had said to Karl Oskar, “If we could leave each other alone, then we wouldn’t have any more.” Now she felt this had been a childish suggestion; in a true Christian marriage the mates belonged to each other physically also. And this physical need for her husband had grown stronger with the years, that was the strange thing about it. To Karl Oskar it had been a necessity from the very beginning.

“All things are made by God.”

But Kristina couldn’t endure hearing Harald read the piece any more tonight. There was one way to silence the studious youngster.

“Get to bed now! All of you!”

The children were a little surprised at Mother’s sudden and firm command and obeyed hesitantly. She gave each a lump of sugar to urge them on. For little Frank was already in bed and for him Kristina warmed a cup of milk, stirred some honey in it, and fed it to him with a spoon. Yellow mucus still came from his infected throat and this mixture eased the soreness.

Frank was a lively and keen boy. His soft, flaxen hair curled all over his head and his eyes were a clearer blue than those of any of the other children. But he would not remain the little one much longer — only till midsummer next year. By midsummer a new childbed would be awaiting a blessed woman.

— 2—

Kristina was unable to finish her prayer that evening.

She began several times: Our Father in heaven, let me this night rest within thy protection! But after a few sentences the words choked in her throat, clung to her tongue. She stopped. She began again, but couldn’t get any further. The prayer remained stillborn in her thoughts, unspoken by her tongue. She lay awake, her eyes wide open against the room’s darkness.

The hours passed, it was close to midnight, and as yet she had not said her evening prayer.

What was the matter with her tonight? She wasn’t worried because Karl Oskar was away and she was alone with the children. Karl Oskar had been away many nights during the last years and she wasn t afraid; the Indians hereabouts were by now so few that no one feared them any longer; besides, they now had neighbors all around them. It was not fear that kept her awake. What was it then? She always said her evening prayer before she went to sleep. Now she couldn’t go to sleep because she had been unable to finish her prayer.

Something lay heavy on her chest, choking her. She began to imagine a pair of forceful, hard hands held her throat in a vise; she sat up and took a deep breath to rid herself of this feeling of imminent choking, then eased, she lay down. After a short respite the sensation returned.

Finally she rose from her bed, put on a skirt and jacket, and stuck her feet into her soft deerskin moccasins. The choking in her throat was still there. She gasped for air like a fish on dry land. What had come over her tonight? She had never had these choking sensations before. The house felt unbearably close. She must go outside so she could breathe fully.

Cautiously, silently, she unlocked the front door and stepped out on the stoop. It was midnight and so dark she seemed to have stuck her head into a big sack. She could not see the sky or the moon or the stars. It was black at her feet, black above her head, and black all around her. Night had lowered its deepest darkness over the earth. It was as dark as it could possibly be on a November night in Minnesota.

It was cold, perhaps near freezing, but the cold felt fresh and dry; the clear night air rinsed her throat and she breathed more easily. Vaguely she discerned the tall sugar maples, stretching above the roof. She stepped down from the stoop and walked along the side of the building, groping about for the house timbers. The wall guided her through the deep darkness. She felt her way, stumbling a few times, but walked on. She turned the corner; now she was at the back of the house. She was wide awake but moved stiffly, as if walking in her sleep. Her hands lost touch with the wall, but she walked on. She felt the soft ground under her slippers; she was walking through her flower bed. She raised her hands in front of her, fumbling, groping, like a blind man.

She walked a little farther, until her foot hit a large tree stump. Here Karl Oskar had felled the big elm that shaded the field and sucked nourishment from it. The huge stump was all that was left of that tree — it seemed to her now a comfortable seat. She sat down, slumped forward, shivering in the cold; she huddled over, bundling inside her jacket.

It was a silent night, without wind. Above her she could see no heaven, around her no earth. All she was aware of was emptiness and desolate silence. This autumn night was without sound of any kind. No leaves rustled in the trees, not a single crackling noise came from the stripped cornstalks in the field, not one monotonous complaint from the crickets. Even the screech-hoppers’ eternal wailing was silenced. Sitting on the stump, enveloped in night’s black mantle, her eyes could see nothing, her ears hear nothing.

She was inside a black, empty hole. She was abandoned, alone in a desolate world.

She was lightly dressed and she pulled the jacket tighter around her, her limbs trembling: Kristina, what are you doing? Why have you left your warm bed this night to walk out in the dark, to sit on a stump behind the house? You had trouble with your evening prayer, something pressed at your throat and stopped the breath in your windpipe. You could not go on praying to God, who does not listen to you, won’t answer you! Your faith failed you, doubt drove you from your bed into the night.

And out here the same questions assail you:

Why didn’t God listen to you when you prayed to be spared another childbirth? Why didn’t he listen, why didn’t he grant your prayer? If God exists, why doesn’t he hear your prayers, Kristina?

If God exists. .! For the first time in her life Kristina caught herself putting an if before God.

What she had done shocked her. The heavenly father — did he not exist? This had never been possible for her to imagine before. It would never have entered her mind. It would have been absurd, something one never even thought of. But suddenly she was sitting here and thinking: Suppose God didn’t exist?

Here was an answer to her questions. It would explain all. It gave her a definite answer. If it were true, she need not wonder and question and worry any more. Then she need not anxiously ask herself why her prayer hadn’t been granted. If God didn’t exist, then he could not hear the prayers she addressed to him. She would have prayed all these years to a heavenly father who wasn’t in heaven.

Tonight a frightening answer confronted her. Every evening she had prayed: Our Father in heaven. . But if he weren’t in heaven. .?

If God didn’t exist. .? was it reasonable to believe this: that God didn’t exist?

Darkness engulfed her mercilessly as she sat there on the stump. In this November night, heaven was invisible to her, the earth was invisible. The world around her was completely empty. Silently, without a single sound, the night enveloped the lone settler wife. Even the interminable wailing of the crickets had died down. Perhaps they had grown tired of their persistent complaint when no God heard them. This night was only silence and emptiness and darkness. There was no heaven and no earth — and no God.

Kristina, the mother of six living children, carrying still another life in her womb, sat on a stump outside her home in the middle of the night instead of lying asleep in her bed. She was a blessed woman but she felt tonight as if God did not exist.

— 3—

The night air chilled her body; she shivered, her arms and legs trembling. She had come out without a shawl. But she did not go in, she was not aware of the cold. Tonight she was oblivious of her body. She was only aware of her disturbed soul.

What could she do if God didn’t exist? In whom could she trust? Who would help her? Who would protect her against danger? Who would in the future give her strength to take care of her home and her children? Who would help her endure life in this new country, which to her always remained away from home, never home? And who would in the end receive her after death?

If God didn’t exist. .?

No, she couldn’t become reconciled with that idea. She could not be satisfied with the answer that came to her tonight. All the strength of her soul rose in defiance; the answer was unacceptable. The least a person could ask of God was that he existed. It wasn’t something she wished — she demanded it, she required it more surely than any other being on earth could.

She demanded of God that he exist. The creator must assume the responsibility of looking after his creation, as a father was responsible for the children he begot. Without a father in heaven she could not endure living her life on earth.

Stiffly she folded her hands trembling with cold, she clasped them tightly in prayer. She began in a low voice, haltingly. But after a few words, new life informed her tongue. Her voice grew strong, the words flowed from her mouth clear and sure. Her soul’s need was the power driving her to prayer, and she was able to pray again:

“God, you must be! Listen to me, you must! Haven’t you created me? Then you must not abandon me! Without you I would be a miserable creature — lost and alone in the world.”

Kristina addressed her prayer to the black desolation of the November night, she called into the dark loudly, her prayer became a cry of anguish: “You must exist, God! I cannot fulfill my life’s lot without you!”

But when her voice had died down, silence again took over. Nothing more was heard, not even the faintest echo. No answer came; the night around her remained still. The night had devoured her prayer. It was as though she had hurled it into a black, yawning abyss. Her call to God had been devoured by a bottomless emptiness. The darkness around her kept silent, the desolation did not reply, nothing answered her.

— 4—

She did not know how long she had been sitting on the stump behind the house when something startled her. She rose as if suddenly awakened from a deep sleep. Why was she here? She felt stiff and cold through and through. She strained her ears and listened; she could hear something. A sound had reached her ears, a very faint sound, the first sound her ears had caught out here tonight. It did not come from the leaves rustling in the trees, not from the dry cornstalks, not a screech from the crickets — it was the sound of a voice, however faint it seemed. And she felt in her heart someone was calling her.

She held her breath while she listened, her face heavenward.

Didn’t it come from up there? Wasn’t it God replying to her? Didn’t he call her: Kristina! Kristina! I hear you!

But no sound came from above. And it wasn’t her name she heard. Yet — she did hear a voice and she felt that it called her.

Someone near here was replying to her prayer of a moment ago. She heard a creature with voice and tongue. She was not alone in the world.

Just then her ears caught the sound clearly; it came from inside the house, a baby weeping, faintly, pitiably, and only one word was she able to understand: Mother! was one single word, and it was uttered faintly, but it was enough for her.

Heaven above her remained silent, deaf and dumb; it was not the father in heaven who called to her, it was her boy who lay sick with his throat infection. He had awakened and he missed his mother and now he called for her.

A wholesome, comforting calm descended on Kristina as she hurried in to her child. Tonight she needed to flee to a living creature who was more helpless than she.

XXXIV. PRAYER GRANTED

— 1—

Spring this year was the earliest since the Nilssons had settled in Minnesota. Already in March the powerful flow of sap in the sugar maples had risen, and Karl Oskar pushed his auger deep into their trunks to collect more sap than he had ever tapped before — fifty gallons during the spring of 1859, as he recorded in his almanac. And early in April the fields were dry enough for sowing.

And this spring Kristina’s Astrakhan apple tree bloomed. She had watered, weeded, fertilized her tree, but however much she cared for it, it grew too slowly for her. She wanted to see wider boughs, heavier foliage, more height from year to year. She felt the severe winters were hard on the roots and delayed the tree’s growth. Karl Oskar jokingly suggested she move the apple tree inside during the cold season. But now it had developed enough to bear fruit; unexpectedly it was covered with blossoms, a cope of beautiful white flowers lightly tinged with pink. Suddenly, at their east gable, a most decorative tree gladdened their eyes.

Next fall they would be able to gather a precious crop of juicy apples, refreshing apples with such transparent skin you could almost mirror your face in it. Astrakhan apples had a wonderfully fresh taste and a fragrance that filled the room; it was an apple as pleasing to the eye and nose as to the tongue.

In a few months Kristina would be able to eat apples from the tree that she had grown from a seed. Over the years she had tended the seedling as if it had been a living, feeling being. She felt close to this tree that had begun in one country and moved to another, sharing her fate.

Each morning, as soon as she awoke, Kristina looked out the window to enjoy the blossoms. The tree from Duvemåla, blooming so beautifully here in North America, gave her new comfort and confidence in her own strength.

But the tree bloomed for only a few days. Unexpectedly, one night there was a severe freeze; in the morning the ground was covered with frost, the flowers hung limp and dead. There remained nothing for Kristina to see other than how her tree shed its cope, how the wilted blossoms flew away with the first morning wind like a swarm of butterflies.

The Swedish tree had blossomed too early, but the tree itself was healthy and green, and it would grow and branch out and bloom again another spring.

The time had come for Kristina’s great spring washing, which she took down to the lakeshore to pound and rinse. It was her heaviest chore of the year, and her body felt stiff and clumsy already even though she was only in the beginning of her sixth month. Her back ached from being on her knees at the beating board and her washing dragged on longer than usual.

Toward the evening of the third day, as she was about to rinse the last few garments in the lake, a sudden pain cut through her back so sharply that she had to sit down and rest on the beating board.

She must have strained herself lifting the heavy washtubs or some other burden, she thought. If she remained sitting quietly for a few moments perhaps the pain would subside. Instead, it grew in intensity and spread from the small of her back through her whole body. And then she recognized it; it was not the first time she had experienced it: it was labor pain.

Johan was fishing in the reeds a short distance from her. She called to the boy: he must go and fetch Father, who was sowing wheat in the field.

The pain forced Kristina to lie down on the steeply slanted beating board, which was far from comfortable as a bed. As she lay on the board she suffered a sharper pain than any she had ever experienced in her seven childbeds. Afterward, she believed she must have fainted.

Karl Oskar came running; he would help her get inside the house. She bent double when she tried to walk; her legs failed to support her. He had to carry her to her bed. Once there she pulled off her clothes and discovered red runnels on the inside of her legs: the bleeding had begun.

Karl Oskar hurried to his nearest neighbor, Algot Svensson, to fetch his wife Manda to come and help. Meanwhile Kristina had another hemorrhage, and before Karl Oskar returned with their neighbor she had borne a lifeless child.

For a few days before this happened she had noticed a faint bleeding. She had not realized that this, and the backache, were the signals of an imminent miscarriage.

— 2—

Ulrika sat at Kristina’s bedside. It was the day after her miscarriage, and Mrs. Jackson had hurried to New Duvemåla as soon as the message reached her.

Kristina lay spent, badly worn. A great weakness had come over her after the hemorrhaging, which had continued long after the stillbirth. Today the bleeding had finally stopped and now she felt as if she were torn to pieces inside. She was uninterested in everything about her and had only one desire: to lie still in bed.

“This was my first ‘lost journey,’” she said. “My time was more than half gone. .”

“A miscarriage is harder on a woman than a natural birth,” said Ulrika. “It can be fatal to lose a brat before its full time.”

She asked how much blood Kristina had lost. Approximately how much — she knew Kristina couldn’t have measured it, but couldn’t she tell almost how much? It was difficult to judge, even approximately, said Kristina, but she guessed she must have bled at least a quart last evening and during the night. For a while, during the night, the blood had run as it does from a stuck pig.

“A hell of a lot! That sounds bad!” Ulrika was deeply concerned. “I read somewhere a person only has about three quarts in the body!”

“Well, I guess then I have only about half left.” Kristina’s pale lips attempted a smile.

In Alex Turner’s drugstore in Stillwater, Ulrika had bought several kinds of medicines, pills, and powders for her friend, which she arranged on the bedside table. She knew what was needed for a woman who had lost blood from a miscarriage. Here were the excellent blood pills; no one less than Mrs. Sibley, the governor’s wife, had written a testimony to their excellence; they had healed her. And this was the blood-rejuvenator-powder, discovered by a Swedish Methodist priest in Chicago; his pills were really miraculous even though he was lost in religious matters. And then she had brought a bottle of medicine called Gift of Blood, which had been manufactured in Washington, and she felt sure anything made there, especially medicines, must be first-class, for undoubtedly the President himself was sure to test and try the products of the capital.

But Kristina felt better from Ulrika’s presence alone. She looked at the label on the bottle: Gift of Blood. “Gift!? Does it mean the medicine has poison in it?”¹

“Oh no! Not a drop! I wouldn’t want to poison my best friend!”

Kristina was overwhelmed by her thoughtfulness and concern. Tears of appreciation came to her eyes: “My dear Ulrika — you’ve gone to a lot of trouble for my sake. .”

“You never take care of yourself, Kristina. I’ve told you before: you have too much to do. You wear yourself to a frazzle!”

Now she must rest and gain strength after her miscarriage, emphasized Ulrika. Staying in bed was utterly important. And she mustn’t do any heavy work for a long time. She would send Miss Skalrud over to take care of the household for a while. That Norwegian was a stubborn, bull-headed woman, but very capable if you left her alone and didn’t interfere with her work. Norwegians were easy to get along with if you let them have their way.

“Skalrud helped me through my last childbed.”

Last winter Ulrika had borne her third child since her marriage to Pastor Jackson. This time the ministerial family had been increased by a son.

Kristina asked, “How’s your little one?”

“My little priest! He’s wonderful! He weighs twenty pounds already. He eats like a pig, my boy. He’s as fat as a bishop. Who knows — perhaps the Ljuder parish whore has borne a bishop for America! Wouldn’t that be something, Kristina!”

The Lord had finally heard Ulrika and given her a male child, whom the mother long in advance had dedicated to the Church. She had been granted the deep grace to carry in her womb for nine months a man of the Church, and she enjoyed the honor, several times a day, of offering her breasts to a future dignitary of the Church. Only now did she feel fully recompensed for having once been denied the Holy Sacrament in Ljuder and excluded from the Swedish Church. By giving her a son, God had meant to poke the Swedish Church in the nose, give it a hell of a poke.

One of her wishes, however, could never be fulfilled. She had wanted to write Dean Brusander of Ljuder and tell him that in her marriage to an American minister she had herself given birth to a minister. Then Karl Oskar had told her the dean had died, and there was now no earthly post office where she could direct her letter. The dean had died before he knew whom he had pushed out of his church. Anyway, she was willing to let bygones be bygones and forget about the old insults and let them rest in their grave in Sweden. Perhaps God, too, was willing to forgive that devil’s ilk, the Swedish priests.

“Well, I guess I mustn’t be too proud and vain because I’ve borne a son,” added Mrs. Jackson in quiet modesty. “A human being mustn’t blow himself up till the skin bursts.”

Before she left she took Karl Oskar aside and warned him that undoubtedly Kristina’s misfortune had been caused by her heavy work. Why couldn’t he help her with the worst chores from now on? By now he ought to be Americanized enough to scrub the floor, milk the cows, and wash dishes.

And Karl Oskar retorted that quite often it happened that he milked the cows and washed dishes. But he was still Swedish enough so that he had never scrubbed a floor. Perhaps he had better rid himself of this Swedish trace.

— 3—

Kristina enjoyed eight days of bed rest while Miss Skalrud took charge of the house for her. Meanwhile, Ulrika returned at intervals to see that her friend followed her advice and took the blood-giving, blood-strengthening, and blood-renewing pills, powders, and medicines. But rest itself was Kristina’s best medicine. Her births had become more difficult each time because she didn’t have the strength for them, thought Ulrika.

Kristina as well as other settler wives ought to learn from the Indian women; they lay down on their backs and rested completely for two days each time their period came. That was why they had such easy and quick labor. It was quite simple for a squaw to have a child: she simply squatted down to expel the infant, in the same way as she took care of her needs.

The wife at New Duvemåla was soon on her feet again, but she was still weak and tired. She must do only lighter chores for some time. Karl Oskar lugged in wood and water and milked the cows for her; she need not do any outside chores this spring. Marta, now twelve, was willing and handy and quite a help to her. After some weeks Kristina again felt fairly well physically, but her spiritual welfare was far more important to her at that time.

A killing frost had this spring ravaged her apple tree and her womb. A life that had grown and increased for more than twenty weeks inside her had suddenly left her body. As it left, she had felt as if part of her inner organs had gone with it, a part of dead, bloody tissue. She had managed to give it only one horrified look; it appeared as if the life had been choked by her own blood. While the child was still within her, she had felt it move many times. It had been alive in her womb, but it could not live outside it. A human being had begun its life inside her but had been forced from its mother-shield too early and had perished. And the mother who was unable to become a mother to her child did not even have a grave to tend. The child in her dream, born on the church steps, had also been taken from her, but it had been alive, and its cries, as Samuel Nöjd carried it away, still echoed in her ears. Her stillborn child had been mute, a lifeless lump of flesh and blood. Thus the dream had come true in one way, but not in another: a half-true dream, as it were.

After her miscarriage, Karl Oskar had taken the child away, and she realized he must have buried it somewhere in the forest. Where was the. .? she had once asked. He would never tell her, he had replied. And perhaps it was as well. She knew herself: the child had been returned.

One secret remained between God and her. She had prayed to be relieved of another birth, and she had been. He had granted her prayer. He had taken the child back. He had not dared trust it to her, for she had prayed to be relieved from fertility and wished for barrenness, she had rejected blessing and prayed to be cursed. Now it was clear to her: she had sinned with her prayer in the oak grove on the hill that evening last summer.

And she had committed a still greater sin with her dark doubt in the night last fall. She had doubted the Almighty — in a moment of great weakness her faith had faltered until she had doubted that God existed.

She had been given her reply; she had been rebuked. He had taken his creation away from her womb.

Thus Kristina had encountered the father in heaven in all his severity. His punishing hand had fallen on her that her blind eyes might be opened and she might see what she had done. A blessed woman had received the answer, both to her prayer and to her questions of doubt in a moment of despair. God had shown her that he existed, and he had shown it to her in such a way that she never again need doubt.

Now there remained for her only to submit.

— 4—

A Settler Wife’s Evening Prayer:

Tonight again I pray for forgiveness, as I did last night and the night before, and all evenings since I lost my child. I have confessed my sin and endure my punishment with patience, but soon I hope to feel that you have forgiven me a little. I want so to feel that you haven’t turned your face away from me. Otherwise my despair will be great. I have no one to turn to, no one but you. Karl Oskar is kind and thoughtful about me, but my husband can be my staff only in worldly matters. When I worry about my soul, then he can’t help me — no, no more than any other wretched human being.

I’m a simple and ignorant woman but I have repented and wish to better myself. From now on I will patiently endure the life which you in your grace and blessing give me. I will take care of the little ones with all the strength you give me. I shall try as well as I can to look after the other children you have given me. But you know how tired I get at times; in the evenings I feel worn out, and in the mornings I wonder if I will be able to get up.

Sometimes I feel I would be glad to die, because then I would have the enduring rest which I long for. But I worry lest I die before my children can take care of themselves. If I should leave Karl Oskar he would be unable to handle the little ones alone; this you know. Ulrika is barely five years old and little Frank isn’t three yet. Therefore, I pray you, my creator and Lord, let me live still a few years, at least five years more, if you could grant me this. By then Johan and Marta will be nearly grown and can look after the others. Then I’ll be satisfied to die, if only you will receive me in your wonderful rest and peace.

I think often about the words of Robert, my brother-in-law: I’m unable any longer to fight against him who rules creation — I might as well try to lift the whole earth onto my shoulders or tear down the heavens above my head. Therefore, do with me as you wish! I am reconciled to all. Like him I submit to the lot destined for me. Then nothing ill will happen to me in death.

But dear Lord — I cannot think of being dead alone; in time I want Karl Oskar and the children with me in death. I do not wish to be alone in eternity.

Give me strength to last a few years more! Dear God, the first thing and the last I pray for this evening: Don’t make my children motherless too soon!

Bless and keep all of us who sleep under this roof and all the settlers who have come to this foreign land! Amen!

— 5—

It was Kristina’s habit, during this season of the year, to lie awake in the evenings after she had gone to bed and peer into the dark for that land where the evenings in spring were light.

In her thoughts she traveled the road back, piece by piece, mile after mile, down the rivers, across the prairie, over the sea. But the road each time seemed longer — she never reached the end, not even half or a quarter of the distance. She never reached her goal, she spent all her time on the road. And each time she journeyed a shorter distance, while the land receded farther.

By and by, as the land of her childhood and youth faded into a distant memory, it was transformed in her mind’s eye. And as she remembered it in later years, she no longer longed for it: she was already there.

As a small girl she had lost her doll one day, the first doll she had ever had, a china doll in a blue-flowered dress; it had fallen into the farmstead well at home in Duvemåla. She was inconsolable over her loss and cried and begged her father and brothers — wouldn’t they please get the doll out of the well for her? But the well was too deep; whatever was lost in it once remained there. So her doll had stayed at the bottom of the well. On clear days she could look down into the well and see the doll’s dress like a streak of bluing in the water. She would climb up on the fence around the well so that her parents had to forbid her to go near it. But whenever they were out of sight, she would steal back to peek in. She could see the rose cheeks of the doll fade away and the dress fade in the water. Her lost doll existed, and she knew where it was, yet it was lost to her forever.

At the next fair her father had bought a new and much bigger doll for her, with a still prettier dress, but this didn’t help; she could never forget the other one, her longing for the lost one was as great as ever. She talked only of her lost doll, she re-created it, put new dresses on it, envisioned it as the largest and most magnificent doll ever to be bought at a fair. At last it had become a doll no one had ever seen or ever would see.

So it was with her native land. She had lost it in a well so deep that she never could retrieve it. At first she had at times caught a glimpse of it with her inner eye, but during the past years it had sunk ever deeper and farther away from her. The land was there, and she knew where it was; she stood staring after it in the daytime, she had stretched her arms out to it in her dreams at night. But she would never reach it, never get it back. And she had no hope ever on this earth of seeing her beloved ones there at home.

But as the years passed and drew the homeland farther and farther away from her, the memories of that land came ever closer, and the light over them became clearer.

Thus, the same change had taken place with regard to her homeland as with the doll of the blue dress down in the well-bottom. She made a Sweden out of her own longing, a Sweden she carried within herself, a homeland that was hers and no one else’s. In so doing, she built recklessly from anything she could get hold of: all of childhood’s light and happy experiences in her home village, as they appeared across memory’s bridge; the dreams she had dreamed of her home while in this foreign land; happenings in Sweden she had heard others speak of; memories from the reading of the Bible and the saga books. She gathered up experience and dreams, guesses and suppositions, truth and fiction — from all these she wove a land that no one had ever seen and no one ever would see.

Kristina often told her children about Sweden. The two oldest had some faint memory of an earlier home far away, but to the other four, Sweden was only the land where Father and Mother had been born and where their grandparents lived. The mother often told them of her own childhood, her sisters and playmates, of schooling and games, about the seasons — a cooler summer and a warmer winter than here — about the first day of spring when she ran barefoot, about the first wild strawberries in summer and the first apples that fell from the tree in fall, about the wastelands blossoming heather in August, of the ripe-red lingon tussocks in September, the winter’s sleigh rides and the ice on the pond, about the Christmas morn journey to the early service in the light the crackling pitch torches cast over the snowy night.

She told it as it came to her, as the moment supplied her, and she changed it from time in time, added to, or deleted from it. Sometimes the children might find her out: But Mother, you told it so the last time! And now you tell it this way. Which way was it? And she couldn’t reply except to say that it was the way she told it, and that was the right way and it couldn’t be any other. Because that was how it was in Sweden where she was born and had lived as a child.

But her own children listened to her in the same way as they listened to fairy stories. To them, Sweden at last became one of those wonderful countries they read about in storybooks, where only good and pleasant things happened to the inhabitants — a country well suited for children. Once little Ulrika asked her mother: Did Sweden exist in reality? Was it actually a country on earth? Or was it, like that country with the proud prince and the beautiful princess, somewhere east of the sun and west of the moon?

The mother, of course, replied that it did indeed exist and was on earth. Neither to herself nor to her children could she admit that she had described a country which no one beside herself had seen and no one ever would see.

Only one homeland is given to a person. Kristina had lost hers. But she had no home-longing any more, she no longer missed what she had lost; she had won it back in the only way possible to one who has lost her dearest possession.

Now when Kristina lay awake during the dark spring nights in Minnesota, her longing soul sought another land in which there was no difference between night and day.

NOTE

1. Gift in Swedish means poison.

XXXV. TO RECONCILE ONESELF WITH FATE

— 1—

The whitewashed fireplace was trimmed with fresh leaves and a young birch had been placed in each corner of the big room; outside, a birch had been raised on either side of the entrance door, and above them the lush foliage of the sugar maples spread its greenery. Above the door, between the birches, hung a wreath of cornflowers, poppies, morningstars, and bluebells. The path to the door had been well swept, and great leaf rushes had been placed on either side, forming a festive arch over the pathway.

It was Midsummer Eve and Karl Oskar and Kristina had raised the summer festival’s green arch before their home. Following the custom of the homeland they had wished to create a holiday air by decorating with young leaf trees and fresh summer blossoms. But they could not make it entirely like the homeland; the light northlands summer night was missing.

They sat behind the birches on the stoop while the short moment of twilight sped by. Today was a great day of remembrance for them: their new Swedish almanac, printed by Hemlandet, was dated 1860; the brig Charlotta of Karlshamn had landed them in New York on Midsummer Eve 1850. Ten full years to the day had passed since they took their first steps on American soil.

And now Karl Oskar and Kristina went over their memories of the long years they had spent in their new land. They went through it all from the beginning: their first shanty of boughs and twigs where the storm in the late fall had been so hard on them, the first long and severe winter when they often went without food. Then came their first spring when Karl Oskar broke ground and planted their first crop. They recalled the first autumn they had a crop to harvest, the smallest ever but the most important of them all; they took the first sacks to the mill and baked the first bread from their own rye flour. It had been one of the greatest joy days in the new land when this bread was taken from the oven, steaming and warm — what a taste!

And they remembered also the heat of their first summers, and the intense cold of the winters in the log cabin, snowy winters that seemed as if they would never thaw out in spring. Their thoughts lingered on the good crops and the poor, on the births of their children, their baptisms, the first Sacrament in their house, the first service in the new church, Robert’s return with the wildcat money, his death and funeral — on all the happenings which during ten years had varied from their daily routine. Three new lives had been added to the family and there would have been still one more, if the birth had taken place in its right order. This one would have been about a year old now at Midsummer, ready to try its first steps across the floor.

But the greater part of the thousands of days encompassed by their ten years in America were gone and lost to their memory. Those were the quiet working days when nothing had happened, nothing except the labor of their hands, the innumerable days which were only work days, work from morning to night, each day confusingly like the next. Now, in retrospect, these uncountable laboring days seemed like one day, one single long day of patient struggle. And that day was of greater importance than any of the others: during its course they had started out, from the very beginning, for a second time in their lives, and for the second time built a home.

That Midsummer Eve when, tired and spent from the long voyage, they had walked down the gangplank in New York harbor was now part of a distant past that seemed incredibly long ago. The ten years of their lives that belonged to America had lengthened in their minds and seemed so very long because they had been years of great changes.

Kristina looked down toward the lake, out over the water which sparkled peacefully in the sunset; her eyes lingered along the shores.

“It has changed since we first came. I can’t recognize a single spot.”

“That would have been hard to imagine when we settled here,” said Karl Oskar. “And that it would change so soon!”

All around the lake the shores were now cultivated. On every surveyed claim stood a house in which lived a settler and his family. The very name of the lake had been changed: the heavy Chippewa word, Ki-Chi-Saga, was almost forgotten and was never used by the settlers when they spoke of the old Indian lake. The metamorphosis of the wilderness where Karl Oskar and Kristina had settled in 1850 was complete.

Karl Oskar sat on his stoop and looked out over the slope where his fields, bearing beautiful growing crops, stretched away; nearly all of the meadow had been turned into cultivated land, almost forty acres of it. And next to this field was a piece of ground with heavy oaks where the topsoil was equally deep; before he was through he wanted to cultivate that piece too, even though it would require heavier labor and take a longer time because of the large oak stumps he would have to dig out.

He was pleased with the work accomplished during these ten years. They had arrived practically penniless, bringing only their poverty. All they owned now they had won for themselves on their new farm. They were far from well-to-do but they had earned security, they got along well. Still it had taken more years than Karl Oskar had thought it would to reach their present situation.

Work itself was as hard and as heavy in the new land as it had been in the old. But there was one great difference between America and Sweden: in America your struggles brought some return, here you were rewarded for your labor.

“We have improved since we settled here, don’t you think so, Kristina?”

“We are better off than I dared hope for when we slept in that shanty the first fall.”

Karl Oskar appraised the sturdy walls of their house, built with seasoned pine of the finest kind obtainable in the forest, fine-hewn on both sides. But this house would be six years old this fall. Next time he built. .!

“But everyone does not improve his lot here in America,” added Kristina.

She could have enumerated several of their countrymen. She could have mentioned the names of two youths, men who had emigrated to find early graves in America. But she needn’t — Karl Oskar knew this as well as she.

And he admitted that the success of an immigrant did not depend on the country alone, it depended as much on the man.

A short silence ensued. Out here on the stoop it felt comfortable this evening; a light breeze from the lake caressed their cheeks. The real summer heat had not come yet — it seldom made its appearance before Midsummer.

“At home the youngsters dance around the Maypole on Midsummer Eve,” said Kristina. “All the old folk dances—‘I weave you a wreath,’ ‘Find the shepherd,’ ‘Catch your partner.’”

It was as if now she had given utterance to the thoughts she had had all the time they had been sitting out here.

“Well,” said Karl Oskar, “I guess everything is as it used to be there.”

He could not imagine that much had changed in his home village during the ten years since he left it forever. In Sweden no changes or improvements ever took place. There people lived as they had always lived, performed their chores over and over as their forebears had performed them. That ancient kingdom was ruled by the Law of Unchangeableness. In the United States new ideas were tried and greater changes took place in one year than happened in a hundred years in Sweden.

Karl Oskar could still see his home village as it had been that April morning when they stepped onto the wagon to drive to Karlshamn. The years had brought no change in the picture he carried in his memory. He saw his parents as he had last seen them from the wagon — his farewell look: Father and Mother standing side by side on the stoop, placed there, immovable as stone monuments, looking after the wagon with their sons driving through the gate, leaving their old home, their village where the family had lived through endless generations. The wagon swings out into the road, the team begins a slow trot, he himself turns once more and sees his parents stand motionless as before, Father leaning on his crutches, Mother beside him, tall, her back straight, perhaps straighter because of this farewell moment. They remain in the same position, until the road turns and they vanish from his sight for time and eternity.

In that position their son in America had seen his parents for the ten years his eyes could not behold them.

Already, Father had been decaying in his grave in the churchyard for three years, but to Karl Oskar he still stood on the stoop beside Mother, supported by his crutches, looking after his departing sons. There Nils Jakobsson would remain standing as long as his son had a memory.

Father had been against the great decision of Karl Oskar’s life; he had never reconciled himself to his sons’ emigration. The last night of his life he had heard the sound of their departing wagon. To the memory of the dead one belonged something that still hurt Karl Oskar. But it did not change his conviction: he had done the right thing, even though he had acted against his father’s wish.

But how was it now with Kristina? He had harbored through the years a question he had never managed to direct to his wife. Perhaps he feared the answer, perhaps that was why he had never given it voice.

Their emigration, from the very beginning, had been his idea and it was he who had driven it through. His wife was against it for a long time — only the brutal famine winter, when he had been forced to make a coffin for his oldest child, had changed her mind, so that she said she was ready to go with him. Since then it had seemed to him many times that she had accompanied him half regretfully. What did she think now, ten years later, about the decision which had affected them and their children’s lives so deeply?

This memorable day might be the right moment to put the question to her.

“We did the right thing when we emigrated — don’t you think so, Kristina?”

She turned her head and looked at her husband: he could see her face only faintly in the dusk. Kristina seemed surprised at his question, as if it had taken her unawares.

“We did neither right nor wrong. Our emigration was predestined. It was predestined that we should live here. It was our fate.”

“Do you mean that? Predestined? Our fate?”

He in turn was surprised, even astonished.

“It was our lot, as it fell to us. We need not ask about right or wrong.”

“I only wondered if you hold me responsible.”

“No one is responsible for it. There’s only one who rules.”

And before he had time to say anything she went on. She still remembered very clearly the Bible text Pastor Törner had chosen when he gave them the Sacrament in their old log house: God had ordained how far and wide people must travel to find their homes on earth. He chose and decided the places for their settling. And they just happened to be of a family God had moved from one continent to another on his wide earth.

That was predestination.

But now Karl Oskar shook his head, firmly and definitively.

“I can never in life believe that we don’t decide anything for ourselves.”

In his wife’s eyes he was not the instigator of their life’s great undertaking; she relieved him so entirely from all part in it that she demoted him merely to a blind tool of the High One’s will. But in his own eyes Karl Oskar did not even have a partner in the emigration. He only, he alone, was the originator and the one responsible for the decision which had given them and their family a new homeland and decided where their children, grandchildren, and grandchildren’s children, and their descendants for all time would be born and live.

Karl Oskar had now reached the age of his full manhood, and everything he had tried and experienced and gone through strengthened him in the belief of his youth: it was given to man to decide for himself, to take care of his life and make of it what he could. Never must one give up in adversity and distress, always one must seek and try another way. If one wanted something done, one must do it oneself, never leave it to an inscrutable and unreliable Providence. In this faith he had lived his life; it had never failed him and he felt sure he would stay with it until the end of his days.

Since his wife’s miscarriage, he had noticed a great change in her. She often appeared absentminded and preoccupied, she was more closed up within herself than before, yet at the same time she displayed a greater steadfastness of character, an even temper and inner peace. It had seemed to him that her old longing for her homeland, her worries and doubts, had at long last disappeared. And he had felt greatly relieved that she was rid of this bitter suffering.

She had, however, never given him any clear indication that this was so. Now he asked, “If I’m right, Kristina, I believe you don’t long for the old country any more?”

“No, I don’t. It doesn’t matter where a person lives in this life on earth. One corner of the world is as good as another. The only thing that counts for me is that longer life.”

“Have you changed — because it can’t be otherwise?”

“I haven’t changed. On the contrary. I have only accepted this preordained, earthly life. . that’s how I’ve gotten over it.”

Kristina’s voice indicated the truth of her words: it was not a voice of surrender — it was calm, firm, full of conviction. Karl Oskar had a feeling he need not venture any further, need not ask any more.

To reconcile herself to the settler’s lot, to fate, that had been Kristina’s struggle. And when now at last she had reconciled herself to what Providence had ordained, it was not that she had given up. She had not lost her battle: to accept was to her to conquer.

— 2—

In the thickening dusk they could no longer discern the blossoming decorations or the festive arch which they had raised today outside their home. In America the night of St. John was not light. Over the young settlement fell the cloak of darkness and Ki-Chi-Saga’s water turned black under the evening sky.

And so Karl Oskar and Kristina sat up late and talked of the land they never again would see.

XXXVI. THE LETTER TO SWEDEN

New Duvemåla at Center City Post

offis in Minnesota State North

America Christmas Day Anno 1860

Dearly Beloved Sister Lydia Karlsson,

Hope you are well is our wish to you, you must be waiting for a letter from Your Brother, I am slow in writing.

We are well in our family up to date and all is well with us. Our children have grown a lot and are well, Johan is our Hired Hand and Marta our Maid. All the boys are full of life and activity but that is their age. Christmas has come again, I bought a Sewingmachine for Kristina, she was glad for the Christmas Present. She didn’t like it here so well the first years but now it is over. She planted a new flowerbed in front of our house with many Swedish blooms, Reginas, Pionees, Yellow Striped Lilies, Brushblooms and poppies. Kristina astrakhan tree has not yet had any fruit on it on account of because the blooms have frozen two springs in turn. But the tree will undoubtedly give us Fruit in the Future.

You asked in your last letter if I ever regretted my emigration — I cannot say that I have. I won’t boast but my situation here is on a level with the best farmers at home. Last fall I harvested 125 Bushel Corn, 73 Bushel Wheat and 51 Bushel rye, all heaped measure. I have also bought a horse.

I am master on my claim and do not bow to anyone. But no lazy fool will have success in North America. It takes a man’s whole life and daily toil.

All the Land here in our settlement around the big Lake is now taken. This Indian water is in daily talk called Swede Lake. One race leaves this world, another comes along.

I have this year served on the jury in our Swedish district. I have long been a member of our Parish Council. You may well tell people at home that your Brother in North America has become both Churchwarden and Sheriff.

Last November 6 I voted for the first time for Government of our new Country. I voted for Abe Lincoln for President of the United States. He was also chosen. Abe was born in a log house exactly like the one I built the first year I was here.

The Slavestates want another president and there are rumors of war to free the Slaves. We hope to be spared the destruction and devastation of the Country, I am sure Father Abe will find some way to escape war.

How is Our old Mother? Greet her from her Son who lives in a distant Land in the far West.

Anno 1860 is nearing its end and we have also come one year closer to Eternity. To my Dear Sister and all who still remember me in my old Village I send you Christmas Greetings and wish you Peace.

Written down by your devoted Brother

Karl Oskar Nilsson