The Emigrants (4 page)

A. E. Strand: A History of the Swedish-Americans of Minnesota. I–III. (Chicago 1910.)

Theodore C. Blegen: Building Minnesota. (Minnesota Historical Society. 1938.)

———. Norwegian Migration to America. (Northfield 1940.)

———. Land of Their Choice. (Minneapolis 1955.)

Lawrence Guy Brown: Immigration. (New York 1933.)

W. J. Petersen: Steamboating on the Upper Mississippi. (Iowa City 1937.)

Herbert and Edward Quick: Mississippi Steamboating. (New York 1926.)

Joseph Henry Jackson: Forty-Niners. (Boston 1949.)

———. Gold Rush Album. (New York 1949.)

Henry K. Norton: The Story of California. (Chicago 1923.)

G. Catlin: Nord-Amerikas Indianer. övers. från eng. (Stockholm 1848.)

Colin F. MacDonald: The Sioux War of 1862.

I. V. D. Heard: The History of the Sioux War. (New York 1863.)

J. F. Rhodes: The History of the Civil War. (1917.)

C. Channing: A History of the United States I–VI. (1925.)

Edvard A. Steiner: On the Trail of the Immigrant. (New York 1906.)

Francis Parkman: The Oregon Trail. (New York 1950.)

Oscar Commetant: Tre år i Förenta Staterna. lakttagelser och skildringar. (Stockholm 1860.)

Clarence S. Peterson: St. Croix River Valley Territorial Pioneers. (Baltimore 1949.)

John R. Commons: Races and Immigrants in America. (New York 1907.)

A. W. Quirt: Tales of the Woods and Mines. (Waukesha 1941.)

The Frontier Holiday. A collection of writings by Minnesota Pioneers. (St. Paul 1948.)

Robert B. Thomas: The Old Farmers Almanac. First issued in 1792 for the Year 1793. (Boston 1954.)

Minnesota Farmers Diaries: William R. Brown 1845–1846.

———. Y. Jackson 1852–1863. (The Minnesota Historical Society. St. Paul 1939.)

Swedish-American Historical Bulletin. 1928–1939. (St. Paul.)

Year-Book of The Swedish Historical Society of America. 1909–1910. 1923–1924. (Minneapolis.)

G. N. Swahn: Svenskarna i Sioux City. Några blad ur deras historia. (Chicago 1912.)

Roger Burlingame: Machines That Built America. (New York 1953.)

Railway Information Series: A Chronology of American Railroads.

———. The Human Side of Railroading. (Washington 1949.)

Andrew Peterson: Dagbok åren 1854–898. En svensk farmares levnadsbeskrivning. 16 delar. (Manuskript i Minnesota Historical Library. St. Paul.)

Mina Anderson: En nybyggarhustrus minnen. (Manuskript tillh. förf.)

Alford Roos. Diary of my father Oscar Roos. (Manuskript d:o.)

Peter J. Aronson: En svensk utvandrares minnen. (Manuskript d:o.)

Charles C. Anderson: Levernesbeskrivning. (Manuskript d:o.)

Eric A. Nelson: My Pioneer Life. (Manuskript d:o.)

V.M.

Locarno, June 1, 1959.

Suggested Readings in English

Compiled by Roger McKnight

About Vilhelm Moberg:

Holmes, Philip.
Vilhelm Moberg.
Boston: Twayne, 1980.

McKnight, Roger, “The New Columbus: Vilhelm Moberg Confronts American Society,”
Scandinavian Studies 64
(Summer 1992): 356–89.

Moberg, Vilhelm.
The Unknown Swedes: A Book About Swedes and America, Past and Present.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988.

Thorstensson, Roland B. “Vilhelm Moberg as a Dramatist for the People.” Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1974.

Wright, Rochelle. “Vilhelm Moberg’s Image of America.” Ph.D. diss., University of Washington 1975.

About Swedish Immigration:

Barton, H. Arnold.
A Folk Divided: Homeland Swedes and Swedish Americans, 1840–1940.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994.

———, ed.
Letters from the Promised Land: Swedes in America, 1840–1914.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press for the Swedish Pioneer Historical Society, 1975.

Beijbom, Ulf, ed.
Swedes in America: New Perspectives.
Växjö: Swedish Emigrant Institute, 1993.

Blanck, Dag and Harald Runblom, eds.
Swedish Life in American Cities.
Uppsala: Centre for Multiethnic Research, 1991.

Hasselmo, Nils.
Swedish America: An Introduction.
New York: Swedish Information Service, 1976.

Ljungmark, Lars.
Swedish Exodus.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979.

Nordstrom, Byron, ed.
The Swedes in Minnesota.
Minneapolis: Denison, 1976.

By Way of Introduction

The Peasants

This is the story of a group of people who in 1850 left their homes in Ljuder Parish, in the province of Småland, Sweden, and emigrated to North America.

They were the first of many to leave their village. They came from a land of small cottages and large families. They were people of the soil, and they came of a stock which for thousands of years had tilled the ground they were now leaving. Generation had followed generation, sons succeeded fathers at harrow and plow, and daughters took their mothers’ place at spinning wheel and loom. Through ever-shifting fortunes the farm remained the home of the family, the giver of life’s sustenance. Bread came from the rye field and meat from the cattle. Clothing and shoes were made in the home by itinerant tailors and cobblers, out of wool from the sheep, flax from the ground, skins from the animals. All necessary things were taken from the earth. The people were at the mercy of the Lord’s weather, which brought fat years and lean years—but they depended on no other power under the sun. The farm was a world of its own, beholden to no one. The cottages nestled low and gray, timbered to last for centuries, and under the same roof of bark and sod the people lived their lives from birth to death. Weddings were held, christening and wake ale was drunk, life was lit and blown out within these same four walls of rough-hewn pine logs. Outside of life’s great events, little happened other than the change of seasons. In the field the shoots were green in spring and the stubble yellow in autumn. Life was lived quietly while the farmer’s allotted years rounded their cycle.

And so it was, down through the years, through the path of generations, down through centuries.

About the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the order of unchangeableness was shaken to its very foundations. Newly discovered powers came into use, wagons moved without horses, ships without sails, and distant parts of the globe were brought closer together. And to a new generation, able to read, came the printed word with tales of a land far away, a land which emerged from the mists of the saga and took on the clearing, tempting aspects of reality.

The new land had soil without tillers and called for tillers without soil. It opened invitingly for those who longed for a freedom denied them at home. The urge to emigrate stirred in the landless, in the debt-bound, the suppressed and the discontented. Others again saw no mirage of special privilege or wealth in the new land, but wanted to escape entanglements and dilemmas in the old country. They emigrated, not
to
something but
from
something. Many, and widely different, were the answers to the question: Why?

In every community there were some men and women who obeyed the call and undertook the uncertain move to another continent. The enterprising made the decision, the bold were the first to break away. The courageous were the first to undertake the forbidding voyage across the great ocean. The discontented, as well as the aggressive, not reconciling themselves to their lot at home, were emigrants from their home communities. Those who stayed—the tardy and the unimaginative—called the emigrants daredevils.

The first emigrants knew little of the country awaiting them, and they could not know that more than a million people would follow them from the homeland. They could not foresee that, a hundred years hence, one-fourth of their own people were to inhabit the new country; that their descendants were to cultivate a greater expanse of land than the whole arable part of Sweden at that time. They could not guess that a cultivated land greater than their whole country would be the result of this undertaking—a groping, daring undertaking, censured, ridiculed by the ones at home, begun under a cloud of uncertainty, with the appearance of foolhardiness.

Those men and women, whose story this is, have long ago quitted life. A few of their names can still be read on crumbling tombstones, erected thousands of miles from the place of their birth.

At home, their names are forgotten—their adventures will soon belong to the saga and the legend.

The Country Which They Left

The Parish

Ljuder Parish in Konga County is about twelve miles long and three miles wide. The soil is black loam, interspersed with sandy mold. Only smaller bodies of water exist—two brooks and four lakes or tarns. Dense pine forests still remained a hundred years ago, and groves of deciduous trees and thickets spread over wide areas which now are used as pasture.

On January 1, 1846, Ljuder Parish had 1,925 inhabitants: 998 males, and 927 females. During the century after 1750, the population had increased almost threefold. The number of nonassessed persons—retired old people, cottagers, squatters, servants, parish dependents, and people without permanent homes—during the same time had increased fivefold.

How the People Earned Their Living

According to the assessment books Ljuder Parish originally consisted of 43 full homesteads which in 1750 were divided among 87 owners. Through further division of property at times of death, the number of independent farms had by 1846 increased to 254, two-thirds of which were one-eighth of an original homestead, or smaller. Only four farms now included more than one homestead: the freeholds of Kråkesjö and Gösamåla, Ljuder parsonage, and the sheriffs manse at Ålebäck.

The means of livelihood a hundred years ago were mainly agriculture and cattle raising and to a small degree handicraft. Included in agriculture was the distillation of brännvin; the price of grain was so low that the peasants must distill their produce in order to farm profitably. In the eighteen-forties the number of stills in the parish was around 350. About every sixth person had his own vessel for producing the drink. The size of the still was decided by law, according to the size of the farm; if a one-half homestead farm possessed a thirty-gallon still, then a one-quarter homesteader had only a fifteen-gallon one. The biggest still was at the freehold of Kråkesjö, and the next largest at the parsonage, which came as number two in homestead size. All distillers sold part of their product in order to earn their living. However, when Pastor Enok Brusander in 1833 became dean of the parish, he ordered that no brännvin be sold or served in the parsonage on Sundays, except to people of the household or workmen on the place. At a parish meeting in 1845 it was further decided that no brännvin should be sold during church services at a distance of less than six hundred yards from God’s house. It was also stated that any parishioner who gave brännvin to a child who had not yet received Holy Communion must pay a fine of one riksdaler banko to the poor purse (in present-day currency, one krona and fifty öre, or approximately twenty-nine cents). The same meeting admonished parents not to let their children get into the habit of drinking “drop by drop.” Only in those cases where the children showed “decided inclination for the drink” should they be allowed to “enjoy the drink in so great quantities that they might get sick and thereby lose their taste for brännvin.”

Those Who Governed the Parish

The most important man in Ljuder during the eighteen-forties was the dean, Enok Brusander, who in his capacity as minister represented the Almighty, King in heaven and on earth. Next to him in power was the sheriff, Alexander Lönnegren in Ålebäck, who had his office from the Crown and represented worldly majesty, Oskar I, King of Sweden and Norway. The foremost man in the parish as to birth and riches was Lieutenant Sir Paul Rudeborg, owner of Kråkesjö freehold. He and his lady were the only people of noble birth and corresponding rights. Representing the parish on the county council was Per Persson in Åkerby, churchwarden and storekeeper, and next to Lieutenant Rudeborg the wealthiest man in the community.

These four men governed the parish, holding the spiritual and worldly offices in accordance with Romans 13, verses one to three: “. . . For there is no power but of God. . . .”

The Others Who Lived in the Parish

Besides the 254 peasants and cotters who owned and lived on assessed land, there were 39 persons listed as artisans and apprentices, 92 squatters, 11 enlisted soldiers, 6 innkeepers, 5 horse traders, 3 house-to-house peddlers. There were also 274 farm servants, 23 bedesmen and bedeswomen, 104 “ordinary poor,” 18 sick and crippled, 11 deaf and dumb, 8 blind, 6 nearly blind, 13 almost lame, 4 lame, 5 near idiots, 3 idiots, 1 half idiot, 3 whores and 2 thieves. On the last page of the church book, under the heading “End of the Parish,” were listed 27 persons who had moved away and never been further heard from.