The name of at least one Norwegian who fell in the early wars against the Indians has come down to us. Frank Peterson, who had enlisted on the fifteenth of June, 1808, was among those who fell at Fort Dearborn in 1812, among the “first martyrs of the West,” in an attack by five hundred Pottawattamie Indians. In this battle two-thirds of the whites were killed and the rest taken prisoners.
At a later date some other names also appear, but those given are the only ones of which we have any record. I shall mention here that of Ole Haugen, who probably was the first Norwegian to settle in the State of Massachusetts. Haugen was from Bergen, Norway, and located in Middlesex County, that state, in 1815. Alexander Paaske, himself an early immigrant from Bergen, living in Lowell, Mass., and who was present at Haugen’s deathbed, is the source of the above fact. Though going beyond the scope of our brief survey of this earliest immigration, it may be of interest here to know that as early as 1817, a girl from Voss, Norway, Anna Vetlahuso, emigrated to America with her husband, a German sailor in Bergen, and settled somewhere in South America. The next recorded names in the order of emigration to the United States are Kleng Peerson and Knud Olson Eide, who in 1821 became the advance guard of a group of fifty-two emigrants that in 1825 founded the first Norwegian settlement in this country. It is of this sailing and the leaders of this group that I now wish to speak; of Peerson I shall give a brief account below.
CHAPTER IV
The Sloopers of 1825. The First Norwegian Settlement in America. Kleng Peerson.
The story of the Sloopers from Stavanger, Norway, who came to America in 1825, has often been told; I shall therefore be very brief in my account of that expedition. Under causes of emigration I shall have occasion below to note briefly some of the circumstances that seem to have led to their departure for America in that year. The director of the expedition and the chief owner of the boat was Lars Larson i Jeilane; the captain was Lars Olsen. The company consisted of fifty-two persons, all but one being natives of Stavanger and vicinity; the one exception was the mate, Nels Erikson, who came from Bergen. Relative to the leading spirit in this first group of emigrants, Lars Larson, I shall say here: He was born near Stavanger, September twenty-fourth, 1787. He became a sailor, was captured in the Napoleonic wars and kept a prisoner in London for seven years. Being released in 1814, he remained in London, however, till 1815, when he and several other prisoners returned to Norway. In London they had been converted to the Quaker faith by Mrs. Margaret Allen, and upon returning to Stavanger, Lars Larson, Elias Tastad, Thomas Helle and Metta Helle became the founders of the first Quaker society in that city, a society which is still in existence.
In 1821 the Stavanger Quakers began to form plans for emigrating to America. It seems that Kleng Peerson and Knud Eide, whom we have mentioned above, were deputed to go to America for the purpose of learning something of the country with a view to planting there a Quaker colony. Kleng Peerson returned to Stavanger in 1824 with a favorable report and many of the members of the Quaker colony began to make preparations for emigrating to the locality selected by Peerson, namely, Orleans County, New York State. A sloop of only forty-five tons capacity which they called Restaurationen, built in Hardanger, was purchased and loaded with a cargo of iron and made ready for the journey. Larson himself had married in December, 1824, Georgiana Person, who was born October 19, 1803, on Fogn, a small island near Stavanger. Besides him there were five other heads of families. On the fourth of July, 1825, they set sail from Stavanger. The following fifty-two persons made up the party: Lars Larson and wife Martha Georgiana; Lars Olson, who was captain of the boat, Cornelius Nelson Hersdal, wife and four children;[27] Daniel Stenson Rossadal, wife and five children;[28] Thomas Madland, wife and three children,[29] Nels Nelson Hersdal and wife Bertha, Knud Anderson Slogvig, Jacob Anderson Slogvig, Gudmund Haugaas, Johannes Stene, wife and two children, Öien Thorson (Thompson) wife and three children,[30] Simon Lima, wife and three children, Henrik Christopherson Hervig, and wife, Ole Johnson, George Johnson, Thorsten Olson Bjaaland, Nels Thorson, Ole Olson Hetletvedt, Sara Larson (sister of Lars Larson), Halvor Iverson, Andrew Stangeland, the mate, Nels Erikson, and the cook, Endre Dahl.
After a perilous voyage of fourteen weeks they landed in New York, October ninth. An account of that voyage, which also it seems was a rather adventurous one, was given by the New York papers at the time; it was reproduced in Norwegian translation in Billed-Magazin in 1869, whence it has been copied in other works. The arrival of this first party of Norwegian immigrants, and in so small a boat, created nothing less than a sensation at the time, as we may infer from the wide attention the event received in the eastern press. Thus the New York Daily Advertiser for October twelfth, 1825, under the head lines, “A Novel Sight,” gives an account of the boat, the destination of the immigrants, the country they came from, their appearance, etc. For this citation I may refer the reader to page 39 of my article on “The Coming of the Norwegians to Iowa” in The Iowa Journal of History and Politics, 1905, or to R. B. Anderson’s First Chapter of Norwegian Immigration, 1896, 70–71.
In New York the immigrants met Mr. Joseph Fellows, a Quaker, from whom they purchased land in Orleans County, New York. It seems to have been upon the suggestion of Mr. Fellows that they were induced to settle here, although it is possible that the land had already been selected for them by Kleng Peerson, who was in New York at the time. The price to be paid for the land was five dollars an acre, each head of a family and adult person purchasing forty acres. The immigrants not being able to pay for the land, Mr. Fellows agreed to let them redeem it in ten annual installments. For the further history of the colony, with which we are here not so much concerned, the reader is referred to Knud Langeland’s Nordmaendene i Amerika, Chicago, 1889, pp. 10–19, or to Anderson’s First Chapter, pp. 77–90.
We have already mentioned Kleng Peerson, a name familiar to every student of Norwegian pioneer history. Much has been written about this pathfinder in the West, and romance and legend already adorn his memory. It would be interesting to recount what we know of his life in America, but as this has been dealt with at length by Professor R. B. Anderson in his monograph on Norwegian Immigration, which is in large part devoted to the slooper’s history, I may refer the interested reader to this work. Symra (Decorah, Iowa) for 1906 also contains a brief, somewhat eulogistic account in Norwegian of Peerson’s stay in New York and his journey of exploration to Illinois, Missouri, and Texas. The briefest facts I may, however, relate here.