CHAPTER XI
Beaver Creek. Ole Rynning.
The immigrants who came in the Aegir seem to have intended to settle in La Salle County, but in Chicago were advised by two Americans not to go there. They were also partly influenced by Norwegian immigrants[72] who were dissatisfied with that locality, and who recommended Iroquois County as a more desirable location to settle. They were told that the Fox River Valley was a very unhealthy place, the settlers were dying of ague and fever, and it was a misfortune that they had ever been induced to locate there. (Knut Langeland also records the fact that the fever raged in the whole of the Fox River Valley from Muskego, in Wisconsin, to the Mississippi River in Illinois, that summer, but that the condition in La Salle was no worse than elsewhere). So the intending settlers deputed three men to explore the country for a site for a new colony.
These, Ole Rynning, Ingebrigt Brudvig and Ole Nattestad,[73] walked south along the line of the present Illinois Central Railroad, selecting the location at Beaver Creek in Iroquois County. Of the further history of this unfortunate and short lived colony, the reader may find an account in Dietrichson’s brief discussion of the settlement, or in Langeland’s or R. B. Anderson’s book. The majority of the settlers died during the spring in the low and unhealthy climate. Ole Rynning himself died and lies buried there. The few survivors left for La Salle County the following spring. Mons Aadland refused, however, to go. He remained in Beaver Creek three years longer; selling his land in 1840 for a herd of cattle and, moving north, he located in Racine County, being therefore one of the earliest pioneers in this part of Wisconsin.
Ole Rynning’s name is most closely associated with the brief history of the Beaver Creek Settlement. We have already seen above how his book, Sandfaerdig Beretning om Amerika, came to have a very far-reaching influence upon Norwegian emigration. This book Rynning wrote that winter in the Beaver Creek Settlement. It was printed in Norway the next year. It soon became widely distributed and continued for over a decade to exert a powerful influence upon Norwegian emigration from Voss, east to Hedemarken, and north to Gudbrandsdalen, in these latter provinces, at the close of the decade, especially.
We have, on page [86] above, observed that Rynning formulated certain questions which he set about answering for the information of intending immigrants. It will be of interest to note here the nature of some of his answers. The first question as to the nature of the country, he answers by giving a very intelligent account of the topography and climate of the country, the soil in the different parts, and of what the produce of the different sections consists. In answer to the third question, he says that the United States is more than twenty times as large as Norway, that the greater part of the country is not yet even under cultivation, and that there is room for a population more than a hundred times as great as that of Norway. There need be no fear, he says, that the country will be full in fifty years.
The fourth question as to where the Norwegian immigrants have located especially, he answers by saying, that in New York, Rochester, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans, there are said to be individual settlers; but he mentions four places where several have settled, namely: (1) Orleans County, New York, but where, he says, there are now only two or three families left; (2) La Salle County, Illinois, where, he says, there are about twenty families; (3) White County, Indiana, on the Tippecanoe River. “Here,” he says, live “only two Norwegians from Drammen, who, together, own about eleven hundred acres of land”; (4) Shelby County, Missouri, where a few Norwegians from Stavanger settled in the spring of 1837; (5) Iroquois County, Illinois. “Here,” he says, “there are eleven or twelve families of those who came last summer.”
The sixth question as to the land in these localities, he answers by praising the beauty and the fertility of the prairie. And as to the price of land, he says, that it has hitherto been $1.25 per acre, but that he has heard that hereafter land is to be divided into three classes and the price of land of the third class is to be half a dollar an acre. He then offers explicit directions as to how to go about securing land. He thereupon gives the prices of livestock at the time, and of produce, etc. A horse, we learn, costs from fifty to a hundred dollars, a yoke of oxen, sixty to eighty. A milk cow with calf, sixteen to twenty, a sheep, two to three, hogs are six to ten dollars a head, pork costs three to five shillings a “mark,” butter six to twelve, a barrel of (wheat) flour, eight to ten dollars; a barrel of cornmeal, two and a half to three dollars; a barrel of potatoes, one dollar; a pound of coffee, twenty shillings; a barrel of salt is five dollars (Norwegian). But in Wisconsin Territory, the prices are two to three times higher, while farther south, everything is cheaper.
Then he speaks of wages, of religious conditions, law and order, how instruction for the young is provided, linguistic conditions, health conditions. He discusses life in the new settlements, its trials and attendant evils. As to the Indians, he says: “They have gone farther west; one need never fear attack by Indians in Illinois.” In answer to the question as to who should emigrate, he warns against unreasonable expectations; advises farmers, mechanics and tradesmen to come, he who neither can nor will work must never expect, he says, that wealth or luxury will stand ready to receive him. No, in America one gets nothing without work, but by work, one can expect to attain to comfortable circumstances. He thereupon discusses the question of the dangers in crossing the oceans, which, he says, are less than usually imagined, and the rumor of enslavement of the immigrant. The latter he brands as false, adding, “yet it is true that many who have not been able to pay their passage, have come upon such terms that they have sold themselves, or their service, for a certain number of years to some man here in the country. Many are thereby said to have come into bad hands, and have not had it better than slaves. No Norwegian, as far as I know, has fared in this way, nor is it to be feared, if one crosses by a Norwegian ship, and with one’s own countrymen.” In conclusion, I shall cite his opinion on the slave trade which is interesting in the insight and judgment it gives evidence of, on the part of an immigrant over twenty years before the war:
The northern states are trying in every congress to abolish slavery in the southern states; but as these always oppose it and appeal to their right to govern their own internal affairs, there will probably soon take place a separation between the northern and the southern states, or else there will be internal conflict.
Ole Rynning was born in Ringsaker, as the son of Reverend Jens Rynning and wife, Severine Catherine Steen, in 1809. In 1825, the father moved to Snaasen. Having finished his education in 1829, he taught school for a time. Then he bought a small farm[74] which he had to give up again, not being able to pay for it. His ultra democratic sympathies were displeasing to his conservative father, and an unhappy love affair, which his father disapproved of as being a mesalliance, seems, at least, to have been, in part the cause of his leaving Norway. We have recited, briefly, his short career in America.[75] Of his nobility of character and the self-sacrificing spirit he showed in helping the grief-stricken and suffering colonists in the unfortunate Beaver Creek Settlement, in the spring and summer of 1838, his surviving associates give ample testimony. His book, Sandfaerdig Beretning, was written on the sick-bed.[76] When he died, there was only one man in the settlement who was well enough to make a casket for him from an old oak which he hewed down. Rynning was buried out on the prairie, but no one knows now where the spot is.