Lake Wobegon Days (13 page)

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.

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 did 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.

They were certain of one thing, though: they would not migrate to the city, as others had done. Years of fervent preaching had taught them that Oslo was a sinkhole of Swedish depravity and Danish corruption, where honest people quickly descended to atheism and indolence and a taste for worldly display. They had seen young men depart for Oslo with a promise to remain pure on their lips, only to return a few years later, decked out in silken European waistcoats and feathered hats and prissy satin slippers, talking with the fashionable Oslovian stammer, the sophisticated Oslovian lisp, and making fun of their own families, not with the hearty Stavanger laugh
(hor-hor)
but with the despicable Oslovian nose-laugh
(hhnn-hhnn).

To maintain their honest rural way of life, they decided they must leave the homeland, and America loomed large in their imagination as a country with plenty of country in which to settle and prosper and hold to all they kept closest to their hearts. Some friends had gone to America already and sent back glowing letters that were posted in the churches and copied and passed from hand to hand.

My dear Christian [wrote Gunder Muus, in Wisconsin, to his Stavanger cousin in 1867], you will scarcely believe my good fortune in the six short months I have been in America. I was warmly received in New York from whence I travelled by train to Chicago and thence to here in Muskego where I found a fine situation with a merchant. He is from Norway as are most citizens here, so one feels quite at home instantly but without the deprivation and worry. The air is sweet, the land is good, timber is plentiful, and the fishing is excellent. In the lake near town, two Sundays ago, I caught ten pounds of fish in only an hour—real fighters, both of them, but I hooked them, using only worms for bait, and hauled them onto the shore after an exhilarating duel. This is quite ordinary here. Everyone catches fish! Not like back home where the few good spots are reserved for landowners. Perhaps someday you yourself will come to America, and then I promise you a good time at the lake.

The next year, Muus had relocated in Goodhue County, Minnesota, where he settled down to try his hand at farming, but fishing was uppermost in his mind.

My dear Christian, I have many thoughts of home, most of them sad and full of longing, but when I feel most dissatisfied and lonely, I can always improve my disposition with a few hours on Lake Roscoe or the Zumbrota River. Truly America is a
great
country where a poor Norwegian immigrant can drop his humble line and bring in great fish. Only string do I use and a hook! No aristocratic contraption for me! And yet with a little patience and industry and some cunning, the ordinary man can lure five-pound fish, as many as he likes, where others much wealthier may not get a single nibble. Thus do we prosper here, and I pray that you will soon be here with us, cousin, and enjoy the bounty of America.

Muus lost all in the Panic of 1873 and had to move to Minneapolis and take a job as a stockboy in a grocery store, a terrible disappointment for him.

My dear Christian, so much has happened since last I wrote and none of it good, but why burden you with my endless troubles? I have a bed and a roof over my head and three meals a day, so I should not complain. God will look after us.

I pray daily that He will show me the way out of this noisy, filthy, disease-ridden city full of scoundrels and liars and thieves—a city of men who want to get rich any way they can as soon as possible—a city on a great river which they have filled with poisons and excrement so that no fish can be taken from it. There are lakes nearby, but on Sunday I am too tired to walk so far, and when I
have
gone I found them crowded with ignorant people who spend a fortune on a pole and then stand and beat the water with it! They fling the line to and fro until it is tangled around their necks and meanwhile they curse and drink whiskey and drop garbage on the ground and talk disgusting talk. This is no place for a decent man. I am saving my
money toward the day when I can go north, where they say the lakes are pure and bountiful and uninhabited. When I reach there, I will write again.

Muus saved $165 in four months by refraining from all entertainment, and the following September he rode the train north to St. Cloud, where he continued on foot, looking for a good lake where Norwegian was spoken. He walked through a pouring rain, carrying his rucksack under his thin coat, singing hymns to give himself strength, and felt weak when he reached the settlement of New Munich two days later, and collapsed on the street, feverish and out of his mind, and was treated there for consumption by a Mrs. Hoppe who decided the poor man was dying and put him on a wagon for Lake Wobegon, where, at least, he could expire among his countrymen. The wagoneer, approaching the town, saw no life in his passenger, lying under the canvas, and dumped him in a ditch, knowing what a lot of trouble a person has when he drives into town with a dead man, and there Muus awoke a few hours later. His fever was gone, and the sun shone down on him. He heard water lapping. He crawled out of the ditch and saw he was thirty feet from the shore of a fine lake. Out on the water, a man sat motionless on a log raft, holding one end of a line. Muus felt as weak as a baby and his throat was parched, so he was surprised at the strength of his voice as it hollered out of him: “How are they biting?”