When Birgit Tollefson, Hjalmar’s sister, moved back from Honolulu in 1964 after her husband died, she plunged into service for the Mist County Historical Society, gathering up old letters, papers, and other artifacts, doubling the Society’s collection in a year’s time, much to the displeasure of Mrs. Halvorson, who, before Birgit showed up, had been the Society. “We don’t have room for all that junk!” Mrs. Halvorson complained to anyone who would listen to her. “She’s hauling in everybody’s attic! I looked in one of those boxes and found ten pairs of ladies’ underwear! Underwear, mind you! Are we going to have a display of underwear? Get a big glass case and fill it up with underwear? Why not enema bottles and thunder jugs? Why don’t we collect all the outhouses? We could have forty or fifty of them, all in good working order!”
There wasn’t room for both of them in the Society, so Birgit founded the Daughters of the Pioneers, membership limited to descendants of Norwegian families who settled in Lake Wobegon by 1895, which neatly cut out Mrs. Halvorson, whose grandfather had come in 1896.
After Honolulu, Birgit’s Norwegian heritage appeared wonderful and exotic to her. “Marvelous,” she cried, holding up some old rose-maling painting that had been on someone’s kitchen wall for fifty years. “Marvelous! Incredible!” Anything Norwegian held fascination for her: any antique that had been in Norwegian hands, old Norwegian newspapers that she could not read, old family pictures held her spellbound for minutes, even pictures of families she had never known—they were Norwegian and that was all that mattered.
For Syttende Mai of 1965, the Daughters planned a procession to the cemetery, and the question arose: who should carry the flag? The committee voted for an honor guard of seven Daughters whose ancestors had arrived first, and the club archivist, Darlene Tollerud, set about looking through old letters and church records to see whose ancestors would be the winners.
In a chest that Birgit had gotten from Luther Rognes, Darlene found a packet of letters written by Magnus Oleson to his family in Norway, which the family brought when they joined Magnus in the New World, and what was clearer than day in the letters was the fact that Magnus was not only the first arrival, he was also a deserter from General George McClellan’s army. Magnus, on reaching New York in 1861, had accepted $200 from a man named West to take his place in the Army which Magnus understood would be for only a few weeks, and when he found that army life was brutal, the food was not fit for animals, the camp was full of sickness, the officers were cruel, and he, who scarcely spoke English, was being put in places where people shot at him, he decided it was no war for a Norwegian. His only good words were for General McClellan who did not push the army too hard to go into battle. That was fine with Magnus. He had written to Lincoln, explaining the odd circumstances that had brought him into a war that he wanted no part of, and got no reply. “He does not care, he is a butcher and a barbarian,” Magnus wrote to his family.
A few days later, he wrote again. He had stolen an officer’s horse and was in Kentucky. He went from there to Wisconsin and then to Minnesota, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the fighting. He arrived in Lake Wobegon on the stolen horse in the summer of 1863, about the time his regiment was being destroyed in the battle of Gettysburg. He bought land north of town where he lived all his life, dying in 1911. He fathered eight children, two of whom died in infancy. The six others bore children of their own, and one way and another, the name of Magnus Oleson was in the family tree of almost every Norwegian in town.
The idea of the honor guard was quietly put aside. A baton twirler carried the flag. The Daughters marched together in a group.
Clarence Bunsen told his wife Arlene, a Daughter, “I don’t see how you can hold it against your ancestor for not getting himself killed. If all of us had heroes for ancestors, then where would that leave us?” She said it was a shock, that was all, and people would get over it in time.
When Magnus arrived in 1863 from the bloody campaigns of the Union army, the town was still New Albion, the citizens were New Englanders, whom he called Woodmen—from the name of their lodge, The Mystical and Enlightened Order of Woodmen, and also from their appearance; their faces looked like lumber. Nobody greeted him in Norwegian. He knew only enough English to ask for what he wanted. He got a job in the New Albion Mill shelling corn, which was done by walking horses over it, and boarded with a family named Watson, which treated him like a young and not very bright child. In a photograph of townspeople gathered at the church after hearing of the assassination of President Lincoln, a short figure in a white shirt whose face is blurred appears to the far right of the crowd of black suits; it is assumed to be him. He appears to have only stopped in passing and then not to have stood still enough; certainly his loyalty to Lincoln’s cause was very slight. He wrote home to Norway:
Men will walk ten miles for a scrap of news about the war and then walk back and discuss it late into the evening. A newspaper from St. Paul or Chicago is a feast to them although it is full of lies. They are all strong for the Union here, having never fought for it or seen the bodies stacked like firewood. I lie in my bed and listen to them. Their voices sound like woodsaws!
Three veterans returned to New Albion of the twelve young men who left, including Albert Watson, who asked Magnus questions about his whereabouts the past few years. “It is a great advantage at times not to understand English,” he wrote, “and at times I find it better to understand less than I do.” One night Albert arrived home late from a lyceum at which a Horatio Stevens had spoken on “The American Republic as a Movement Of Regeneration” and seized the young millhand by his leg and hauled him out of bed, but Albert was too weak to beat him. He sank to the floor exhausted. He was flushed and feverish. He was coming down with diphtheria.
The diphtheria epidemic swept through New Albion in three horrible weeks of October 1865, and devastated many families, killing thirty-seven children, eleven women, and four men, including Albert. Dr. Thompson drove himself to exhaustion, riding for miles into the country from bedside to bedside late into the night, dozing off in the buggy when his horse finally headed for home, awakening a few hours later with a new call for help, a new case, another frantic father at his door. There was little that a doctor could do. The only treatment was to offer hot raw alcohol to try to keep the throat open: at first by the spoonful, and then, if the patient got worse, by the cup, until the poor person began to choke and gasp for the last few gulps of breath; then the doctor could only hold them as they struggled.
All that month and for weeks after, New Albion was practically a ghost town. People were terrified of contagion and avoided any contact with their neighbors. What with his daily contact with the sick, Dr. Thompson was shunned by the well. His own wife and children left for St. Cloud, and when people there learned where they had come from, the family was told to move on to St. Paul. School was closed, of course, and church. Those merchants who still could stand retreated to a back room when customers came in. Any communication was shouted from a distance. Out in the country, men on their way to town stopped their teams fifty yards from an infected house and shouted, “Do you need anything?” and if the inhabitants were strong enough to shout back what they wanted, their neighbors brought it—flour and pork, beans, coffee, maybe brandy, liniment, Dr. Clarke’s Oil of Arnica—and left it on a stump, but if the passerby heard nothing, he went on. Days passed before someone came out and looked in the house.
That someone was often Magnus, who was untouched by the disease, having encountered it in the army, and who devoted himself to burying the dead. He was offered money for this and after giving it thought he accepted it. The work was hard, and he was the only one who seemed up for it.
The word came at night—a farmer stopped and shouted up at my window, and in the morning I hitched up the horse and drove out six miles across the fields where corn rots for lack of able bodies to pick it, arriving at the silent little house about ten o’clock. I knocked and heard a very slight scraping inside,
the door opened slowly and a man who looked almost dead himself looked out the crack and then withdrew. A moment later he reappeared and with great difficulty opened the door wider and passed out to me the sad little bundle of his dead son wrapped in a piece of blanket. He did not weep for he was too sick, and I did not weep either for I have done this so many times. I carried the precious cargo to a grove of trees about thirty feet away where I had already dug the hole and placed the child in it and set to work. I prayed as I shoveled. There was not even time for a hymn! I did not pray for the child’s soul, for of that I had no doubt that it was with the angels, but rather prayed that God would give me many children of my own. I would like to have twenty or thirty!
It was not until 1867 that the woman arrived from St. Paul to become his wife, and while he waited for her, he began to prosper a little. During the epidemic he did the work of six men, and when the town recovered, he was promoted to foreman of the mill, the old foreman having left in a panic, and he bought a house in the woods about a half-mile from town for $30, the former inhabitant having died of the disease. He carried all the furniture out of the house, piled it in the field, doused it with kerosene, and burned it: a featherbed and bedstead and black walnut dresser, a rocking chair, a fine oak table and two chairs, a sideboard, a divan, and much more—the deceased, a young man by the name of Ward, having been prosperous, though Magnus had never seen him work a day. He left behind a closetful of fine suits and white shirts, which Magnus also put to the torch. Only the two stoves remained.
The house gave him fresh hope that the life he had longed for was soon to arrive. He walked through the rooms, a kitchen and front room and bedroom downstairs and two little bedrooms up under the eaves, and imagined them filled with his family. That winter he bought himself a large bed. “It is not so beautiful to some perhaps,” he wrote to his cousin Bjorne, “but to me it is like a temple. Here someday my lonely existence will be filled with laughter. I hope that she is young and beautiful and all the children are loud and strong.”
On May 15, 1867, sitting in the shade of a stone abutment at the mill, eating his lunch, he saw a party of four wagons and some men on horseback ride slowly down the hill into town. Even at a distance, something about them caught his eye, and he got up and walked in their direction, and then a word of Norwegian flew like a bird on the wind, and he began to run. He tore down the dusty street past the church to the square and leaped at the youth on the first horse and pulled him down and got him on the ground and hugged him. It was Oskar Tollefson, 16, leading thirteen of his countrymen back from the desolate Dakota Territory where they had migrated in hopes of resuming their livelihood as fishermen. Magnus went from one to the other, touching their faces, kissing the women, embracing the men, hoisting the three little children high in the air, and seeing how happy he was, not realizing it was on their account, they assumed this must be a fine home for Norwegians and fell to their knees and thanked God for bringing them here. Then he took them to his house and all of them lived there for a few weeks, during which he stopped talking only long enough to sleep and work. At last he could speak intelligently and with feeling! About anything under the sun!
The Tollefson party’s misbegotten journey to Dakota was due to their own lack of English when they arrived in St. Paul in October aboard a train from New York. They managed to recover four pieces of baggage that had been marked for points west and got rooms for the night at a hotel and even bargained with a livery for wagons and horses, but when they asked about a great lake, nobody knew what they were talking about.
“I stood in the street in front of our lodging and watched for a kind and patient face, and when a man came along, I said, ‘Please help me,’ and then tried to indicate by gesture what it was we were seeking,” Oskar wrote years later. I indicated a very large lake such as we had heard about from Norwegians in New York. I indicated a fishing boat with two sets of oars and a small mainsail and indicated the nets and big fish in the nets and myself pulling them in, and then sailing home and the great happiness that awaited us on shore, and cleaning the fish, and eating them.”
Evidently Oskar indicated a great calm lake, for the man who saw the pantomime assumed that the youth was looking for open prairie. He led him to the end of the street and pointed up the hill to a train of Red River oxcarts just making their way over the crest, where the Cathedral of St. Paul stands today, and indicated that he should follow them a great distance. The man also indicated that the carters were drunks and wild men, and that Oskar should keep his money on his person at all times.
The trip north and west to Dakota took three weeks. The cart drivers weren’t drunks; they drank every drop of their whiskey the first night out and after that were cold sober. They weren’t wild men, despite the brilliant sashes and beads they wore, and their impenetrable language, a mixture of French, Ojibway, and Gaelic, and the wrestling matches they put on at night, the singing and dancing, the coffee they drank that dropped Oskar to his knees. When it came to pressing forward, they were all business. The trail followed woodlines and rivers and led them through sloughs that looked impassable, but the carts plunged right in and the wagons followed, linked to each other by long leather straps. One day thick fog set in and the train never paused: the screeching of wooden cartwheels on ungreased wooden axles could be heard for miles, and nobody got lost. From settled country where little homestead shanties were planted three and four to the mile across the undulating prairie, they slowly moved into another country, not only unsettled but unsettling: absolutely flat, unbroken by a tree, flat as a table, straight to the horizon, like a dream, the earth stripped of scenery, of every feature by which one finds his way.
Day after day the Norwegians searched the horizon for the mountains that must engirdle the great lake, and saw nothing ahead, this country went on forever, until one morning beyond Fort Abercrombie, the leader of the train approached them as they squatted around the breakfast fire drinking coffee, and said, “C’est la wiki wanki, laddies,” indicating with a sweep of his arm that they had come to the place where they wanted to go.
It wasn’t the place at all! They studied it as the carts pulled north and before the screeching had faded away, the Tollefson party turned their wagons around and headed back. “We did not know what would become of us in land so flat,” Oskar wrote. “We would become like dumb animals, oxen, or go crazy, and probably both. It was so far from where anyone else lived, and would anyone else ever come live there? We certainly doubted it.” They reached the Fort and kept on, not seeing any land that looked quite right, feeling ashamed of themselves—pioneers who turned back!—until they reached the little town where the man rushed toward them, shouting “Ar du Norsk?” They were glad to say “Ja!”
Besides Oskar, the members of the party were: his father and mother, Jens and Solveig, and brothers Thorstein and Jacob and little sister Nina; Mrs. Tollefson’s brother, Olaf Tollerud, wife Drude, and son Paul; a Mr. Hans Ager and a Mr. Waldemar Jaeger; Mr. Jaeger’s sister and her husband, Luth and Eva Fjelde; and an old man, J. S. Bjork, who died six months later.
Glad as he was to have them, generous as he was and quick to share anything he had and ready to help them settle, delighted as he was to unfold in Norwegian some thoughts he had kept to himself so long, nevertheless Magnus noted immediately that the party included no marriageable woman, and after asking if by any chance more Norwegians were just behind them and being told no, not that they knew of, he mailed an ad to the St. Paul paper with 35¢ wrapped in tissue and waited.
HE IS HONEST, hard-working, clean, in
good health, has his own house and money in
bank, and sincerely seeks a good woman for the
purpose of matrimony. Norwegian pref. Magnus
Oleson, New Albion.
She rode the St. Paul & Pacific to St. Cloud where he met her, holding a placard with his name on it, and they went straight to a judge and then drove the long miles home in silence, arriving around sunup. The first thing she d
id was fix him a good breakfast. Her name was Katherine Shroeder, and he didn’t know much more than that. She was tall, strong, wide in the hips, had black hair that, unbraided, came to her waist, and looked to be about twenty. When she got off the train and spotted him, she put her hands over her face and wept, she was so afraid he’d be angry with her. They had exchanged letters, and hers were written by her brother. She spoke no Norwegian and very little English. She spoke excellent German.
“He ate his breakfast in silence, her watching his every bite, and tried to think what to do next, it had all happened so fast,” says Clarence Bunsen, a great-great-grandson. “She tried to look pleasant for his benefit but she was terrified because back in Germany the punishment for deceiving a suitor was pretty stiff, and she couldn’t tell him, of course, that it had been her brother’s doing. She must’ve felt like a convicted criminal. He felt sorry for her but he also felt that it was God’s will that she came and it was up to him to take the next step, so what he did was get up from the table, clear it, and over her protest he washed the dishes. She’d never seen a married man do that. It was his way of telling her how much he cared about her, being unable to say it. And then presumably they went up to bed.”
The first Norwegians emigrated from Stavanger on the west coast, later ones from Telemark and Hallingdal, and almost none came from Christiania (Oslo). They were country folk who were squeezed by virtue of living in a small country with large mountains that left only so much land to farm, not nearly enough. Crops were poor, and then one fall, the fishing boats returned to Stavanger, riding high in the water. The herring had disappeared.
The people went straight to church and prayed God to send them an answer. No herring! It was as if the sun had vanished.
They were honest and proud people who had always worked hard, and poverty was no shame to them—a comical trait to the sophisticates of Oslo who flocked to the popular operetta Stavanger! O Ja!, in which the westerners were portrayed as dolts who played fiddles and ate lutefisk and talked funny and who felt flush if they had a kroner in their pocket—but this calamity shook them to the innermost for, without fish, they were faced with death by starvation.
Lake Wobegon Days Page 9