[181] Ibid., 62.
[182] Annual Report of the Adjutant General of Minnesota, 1866, II; Nelson, History of the Scandinavians, I, 303-304. Similar figures for Iowa are in Nelson, II, 67.
[183] Church, Life of John Ericsson.
[184] Fædrelandet og Emigranten, July 21, 1870; interview in 1890 with the Rev. U. V. Koren, the first Norwegian Lutheran minister permanently located west of the Mississippi. Miss Bremer in October, 1850, described the road over which the early settlers in Wisconsin went 30 and 40 miles to market: “the newborn roads of Wisconsin, which are no roads at all, but a succession of hills and holes and water pools in which first one wheel sank and then the other, while the opposite one stood high up in the air.... To me, that mode of travelling seemed really incredible.... They comforted me by telling me that the diligence was not in the habit of being upset very often!” Homes of the New World, II, 235-236.
[185] It was on faith in the future of the northern zone of the Northwest, based upon observation, that the Great Northern Railroad was built without any land-grant or subsidy such as the Northern Pacific and other roads demanded and got.
[186] A copy of this interesting little pamphlet, without signature, was found in the National Library in Stockholm.
[187] Young, Labor in Europe and America, 696. Laing, Journal of a Residence in Norway (1834), 151, describes the conditions in a parish, Levanger, near Throndhjem. There fifty estates were entered to pay land tax. Out of a population of 2465, 124 were proprietors cultivating their own land; 47 were tenants leasing lands, and 144 were “housemen” or tenants owing labor for their land.
[188] Bremer, Homes of the New World, II, 314-315.
[189] The charm of this name was illustrated in a curious way during the journey of the writer and another American through the mountains of central Norway in the summer of 1890. One early evening they came to the cabin of a sæter, or summer pasture, high up on the side of Gaustafjeld, and asked to be lodged for the night. It appeared that the only room available for strangers was already occupied by two young men from Christiania; but when the conversation developed the fact that both the late-comers were from America, and one from Minnesota, the woman of the house hastened off into the next room, ordered out the two Norwegians, and announced on returning that the room was at the service of the foreigners!
[190] Report of the Board of Trade of Great Britain on Alien Immigration to The United States, 211, 212.