In the spring of 1874 we moved to Gothenburg, where we stayed until the work at Hammersjö was completed, and in January, 1876, we said good-bye to Sweden, and arrived in America after a stormy voyage of nineteen days across the Atlantic. For sixteen days the storm was so violent that the life-boats and everything which was loose on the deck was swept away by the waves, and the officers serving during the night had to lash themselves to the rigging by ropes, not daring to rely on their hands and feet.
It is strange how easily people in the course of time get used even to the most unpleasant circumstances. This was illustrated in a striking manner by the few cabin passengers who sat packed together in the cabin during this storm. After a couple of weeks we got so used to it that we finally found our voyage quite endurable. Still we were very glad when the beautiful steamer Circassian of the Allan Line brought us safely to shore in Portland, Me. A few days more on rail, and we were again safe and sound in our dear Minnesota.
[ CHAPTER XIII.]
Grasshopper Ravages in Minnesota—The Presidential Election—Chosen Presidential Elector—Minnesota Stats Tidning—Svenska Tribunen in Chicago—Farm in Northwestern Minnesota—Journalistic Work.
“The world do move” nowadays, and most emphatically so in the great American Northwest. An absence of four years is almost enough to bury one out of sight, at least that is what I found on returning to Minnesota. The crisis of 1873 had left my finances in anything but a flourishing condition, to which was added the ravages of the grasshoppers, which caused considerable losses to me on my farm at Litchfield, that being about the only property I then owned.
My attention was soon drawn from these private reverses to public affairs. The first steps toward re-entering the field of politics was my nomination for presidential elector by the Republican state convention, held at St. Paul in the summer of 1876. At the request of the Republican state central committee, I took an active part in the campaign that followed, as in fact I had done at every previous election since my residence in this state, but this time I spent the whole autumn in making a thorough political canvass through most of the Scandinavian settlements in the state. During that canvass it was my good fortune for a long time to be associated with the late William Windom, then a United States senator, and afterward twice secretary of the treasury.
Mr. Windom was at that time in the very prime of his noble manhood; his fine mental and physical endowments made him an object of love and veneration among the people. Though a man of the purest character and exemplary life, he was a pleasant, boon companion, fond of a joke and a good story, liberal and charitable in his judgment of others, easy and polite in his manners, open-hearted and kind toward all. He was a large, broad-shouldered man, weighing over two hundred pounds, with a high forehead, dark eyes, and smoothly shaved face. As a speaker he was earnest, though quiet, fluent and humorous. He never used tobacco or spirits in any form. We traveled together in all sorts of conveyances, and held meetings in country stores and school houses; ate and slept in the lowly cabins of the farmers, but everywhere Mr. Windom felt at home, and made every body else feel at ease also. I was afterward with him often and in many places,—from the executive mansion in Washington to the frontier cabin in the west,—and for the last time in New York city, when he went there in August, 1890, to save the nation from a financial crisis, but never did I notice any difference in his conduct toward the humblest laborer or the highest in power. In sorrow and adversity he was a tender friend; in manners he was a Chesterfield; in the senate a Roman, and in the treasury department a Hamilton. By his death the nation, the state of Minnesota, and his numerous friends, among whom for many years I had the honor to be counted, sustained a heavy loss.
Soon after the close of the campaign I commenced to publish a Swedish weekly newspaper called Minnesota Stats Tidning, in Minneapolis, to which place I had just removed with my family, and continued as its chief editor until the summer of 1881.