Volume XXIII of the Society’s _Collections_ (_Frontier Advance on the

Upper Ohio, 1778-79_) and Mr. Merk’s _Economic History of Wisconsin During the Civil War Decade_ have been distributed too recently to have attracted much attention at the hands of the reviewers at the time of our going to press. On the part of the newspapers of Wisconsin, however, Mr. Merk’s volume has already evoked much notice and comment. The Milwaukee _Sentinel_ and other papers of the state have republished numerous extracts from the book, while the Chippewa Falls _Independent_ devoted special attention to the chapters on the history of the lumbering industry in Wisconsin. The expected comment of our historical neighbors on these two volumes will be noted in a future number of the _Magazine_.

The annual volume of _Proceedings_ of the Society for the year 1916 came from the press and was distributed to our members and exchanges in July. The volume is longer than any of its predecessors, and the workmanship of the printer is probably the best of any in the long series of annual volumes put out by the Society. Aside from the business report and other routine proceedings, the book contains eight historical papers. The most interesting and valuable of these is Captain Arthur L. Conger’s study of “President Lincoln as War Statesman,” delivered as the annual address before the Society in 1916. Unless we mistake greatly, this paper will quickly gain recognition as one of the most trenchant studies yet made of Lincoln’s career. Four studies of a biographical character are the reminiscences of Father Chrysostom Verwyst of Bayfield and of Mary Elizabeth Mears, early Wisconsin authoress; “New Light on the Career of Nathaniel Pryor,” sergeant on the exploring expedition of Lewis and Clark; and an account of the military career of Major Earl, noted Wisconsin Civil War scout. A study of “The Beginnings of the Norwegian Press in America” reveals the fact, interesting to citizens of Wisconsin, that this state, rather than its western neighbor, was originally and for long the chief seat of Norwegian development in America. Hence the story of the beginnings of the Norwegian press in the United States is almost wholly a Wisconsin story. Another local study is that of the long-drawn-out “Watertown Railway Bond Fight,” one of the notable legal contests in American history. Finally, and of more general import, is “The Dream of a Northwestern Confederacy,” which recites the story of the rise and decline of the hopes of the Southern people to draw off the Northwest from the remainder of the Union and in so doing to win the struggle for its disruption.

By the will of Joseph Pulitzer, the noted New York journalist, provision is made for the establishment of an annual prize of $2,000 by the authorities of Columbia University for the best book of the year in American history. It is interesting to note that the first award, announced at the 1917 commencement of Columbia, was made, not to a professional historian but to a busy man of affairs, the French ambassador to the United States, Monsieur J. J. Jusserand, for his volume _With Americans of Past and Present Days_. The book includes four important and charming historical studies. The longest, “Rochambeau and the French in America,” presents a narrative, based largely on hitherto unused sources, of this able but neglected soldier in the war for our national independence. The other studies deal with “Washington and the French,” “Major L’Enfant in the Federal City,” and “Abraham Lincoln.” The latter paper is particularly interesting as showing the contemporary French estimate of President Lincoln and the popular sentiment in France in favor of the Union. Thoroughly scholarly and charmingly written, the volume is commended as an agreeable companion for a leisure evening.

A second annual prize established by Mr. Pulitzer is one of $1,000 awarded for the best American biography teaching patriotism and service. It was first awarded to Mrs. Laura E. Richards and Mrs. Maud Howe Elliott for their biography of their mother, Julia Ward Howe. The noble career of this talented woman should ever serve as an inspiration to her countrymen. Especially at this time of stress are we grateful for her immortal “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Like M. Jusserand’s book, the work is unreservedly commended to our readers.

One of the most important and scholarly studies in the field of western history to appear in many years is Clarence W. Alvord’s _The Mississippi Valley in British Politics: A Study of the Trade Speculation, and Experiments in Imperialism Culminating in the American Revolution_. The book is beautifully printed in two volumes by Arthur H. Clark of Cleveland. It is Professor Alvord’s contention that the seeker after the causes leading to the American Revolution will find them chiefly in connection with the policies and efforts of the British ministers to organize the imperial American domain which came to it from France in the Seven Years’ War, rather than in the incidents and events along the Atlantic seaboard to which historians have paid chief attention hitherto.

Of particular interest to Wisconsin readers is the volume, _Early Narratives of the Northwest, 1634-1699_, edited by Louise P. Kellogg of the Society’s staff for the _Original Narratives of American History_ series. In this volume have been gathered, with appropriate editing, the principal classics of northwestern exploration in the seventeenth century. Included are the narratives of (or concerning) Nicolet, Radisson, Perrot, Allouez, Dollier and Galinée, Jolliet and Marquette, La Salle, Duluth, and St. Cosme. Thus at length we have assembled in convenient form the more important sources for the earliest history of this region, so that anyone who will, may easily avail himself of them. With this volume the important series of _Original Narratives of Early American History_, sponsored by the American Historical Association and under the general editorship of Dr. J. Franklin Jameson of Washington, concludes. It is interesting to note that the series was begun and finished by Madison scholars, Prof. Julius Olson having edited (jointly with Professor Bourne) the first volume and Miss Kellogg the final one.

Mr. Lucius C. Colman of La Crosse has had reprinted by photomechanical process from the copy in the Wisconsin Historical Library the rare _Brief Sketch of La Crosse Wisc’n_ published in 1854 by Rev. Spencer Carr. The work, a pamphlet of twenty-eight pages, may be regarded as a city history, directory, census, and promoting tract all in one. From it we learn that in January, 1854, La Crosse had a total population of 745. Indicative of the character of the place at this time is the further information that, among this population were 78 “single Gentlemen” and but 38 “single Ladies.” In view of the fact that less than three years earlier there were but five families in La Crosse, the author’s generally optimistic view of the town’s advantages and future prospects seems fairly justified. A further indication of the roseate future which the townsmen saw in prospect is afforded by the enumeration among the 745 persons in the community of 9 physicians and 12 lawyers.

Of Ulysses S. Grant, conqueror of the Confederacy, many biographies have been written. The recently published biography by Louis A. Coolidge is one of the best in the series, although it still remains to write an entirely satisfactory account of Grant’s career. Mr. Coolidge’s biography devotes a relatively large amount of space to Grant’s later civilian career (over three-fifths of the volume). The author believes and seeks to show that Grant was a greater statesman and more successful president than he is commonly believed to have been.

The Historical Department of Iowa has issued _Downing’s Civil War Diary_, edited by Prof. O. B. Clark of Des Moines. Alexander G. Downing was a sergeant in the Eleventh Iowa Infantry. He served from 1861 to 1865, a period during which he succeeded in participating in nearly forty battles and skirmishes. Like the _Artilleryman’s Diary_ of Jenkin Lloyd Jones, published by the Wisconsin History Commission three years ago, Downing’s diary gives a valuable first-hand picture of the war as seen from the standpoint of the soldier in the ranks. Unlike the _Artilleryman’s Diary_, however, Downing’s diary, as printed, does not reproduce the original record. Instead, it is a composite made up by the editor from the original diary plus a revised version written out by Mr. Downing in old age, together with such alterations as the editor deemed desirable. The editor’s work seems to have been done skillfully on the whole, and author, editor, and historical department are to be congratulated on the publication of the book. As with the _Artilleryman’s Diary_, not much of commendation can be accorded the physical makeup of the book. So worthy a record was deserving of a better dress.

For several years the Lakeside Press of Chicago has published an annual Christmas volume of a historical character for complimentary distribution to patrons and friends. The volume published in 1916 was a reprint of the autobiography of Black Hawk, the famous Sauk chief, and was edited by M. M. Quaife of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. So great was the demand for the book that although 3,500 copies were printed the edition was exhausted within a brief period. For the year 1917 the Indian-captivity narrative of Rev. O. M. Spencer is being edited by Mr. Quaife. The work was originally written for the _Western Christian Advocate_ of Cincinnati, from whose files the numerous reprint editions in volume form of seventy years ago were taken. For the new edition under preparation, recourse has been had to the rare file of the _Advocate_ preserved in the newspaper division of the Wisconsin Historical Library.

An elaborate report of _Perry’s Victory Centennial_ has been issued by the Perry’s Victory Centennial Commission, State of New York. As usual with politico-historical publications of this character, the physiognomies of the several members of the commission are adequately presented to public gaze in a series of full-page half-tones. The numerous historical addresses delivered in connection with the celebration constitute the more interesting portion of the contents of the volume. Included is the address of Hon. John M. Whitehead of our Society at the laying of the cornerstone of the Perry Memorial at Put-in-Bay, Ohio, July 4, 1913.

One of the most laborious, and at the same time useful, pieces of historical workmanship of recent years is being prosecuted towards its conclusion by Mr. Clarence Brigham, secretary of the American Antiquarian Society of Worcester, Massachusetts. This is the compilation of a calendar of all American newspapers published down to (and including) the year 1820. Newspapers are as the breath of life to the serious student of American history, but with no comprehensive guide to enlighten him as to what papers were published and where files of these have been preserved, the individual student has been sadly handicapped heretofore in his efforts to avail himself of this source of historical information. Aside from its value to students of American history generally, there are at least two reasons why the progress of Mr. Brigham’s enterprise should afford peculiar interest to members of this Society; first, because our Society was a pioneer in the field of publishing newspaper catalogues, the last edition of our _Annotated Catalogue_ got out by Doctor Thwaites a few years ago still standing as one of the two chief American publications of this character in print; and second, because of the creditable showing made by our Society’s collection of early American newspapers in Mr. Brigham’s calendar; this notwithstanding the fact that the major strength of our newspaper collection lies in a period more recent than that covered by Mr. Brigham.

Publication of _The Louisiana Historical Quarterly_ was begun by the Louisiana Historical Society in January, 1917. The initial number contains 119 pages of material, bearing chiefly upon the history of the state. The Georgia Historical Society issued in March the first number of the _Georgia Historical Quarterly_. These two new publications afford gratifying evidence of renewed vigor on the part of their sponsors, each of which is upwards of eighty years of age.

To the October, 1916, number of the _Missouri Historical Review_ Duane Mowry of Milwaukee contributes an interesting collection of letters of Carl Schurz, B. Gratz Brown, and other prominent Missourians, contained in the collection of papers of Senator James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin, now in Mr. Mowry’s custody. The January, 1917, number of the _Review_ contains a further instalment of Senator Doolittle’s correspondence with leading citizens of Missouri.

The June number of the _Mississippi Valley Historical Review_ contains as a leading article a valuable account of the Doukhobors in Canada. Other articles worthy of note are Professor Robertson’s “Sectionalism in Kentucky from 1855 to 1865,” and the annual survey of historical activities in the Old Northwest for the preceding year. Our Wisconsin readers will be gratified by the opening sentence of the survey: “The State Historical Society of Wisconsin continues to maintain its leading position among historical agencies of this region.” To those of our readers who are as yet unacquainted with the _Review_ we are glad to commend it as the livest and best historical periodical in America, saving only the _American Historical Review_. Because it belongs to our own section of the country its contents are probably of greater interest and value to most middle-western readers than are those even of the _American Historical Review_. Membership in the association is open to all; members receive the quarterly _Review_ together with the annual volume of _Proceedings_ of the association.

The leading articles in the July number of the _American Historical Review_ possess an unusual degree of timeliness. Prof. S. B. Fay writes on “The Beginnings of the Standing Army in Prussia.” Two Civil War articles are “The Northern Railroads, April, 1861,” and “The Confederate Government and the Railroads.” The former of these is by Prof. Carl R. Fish of the University of Wisconsin. Finally, James A. Robertson, who went from Wisconsin to the librarianship of the Manila Public Library, gives an account of “The Philippines since the Inauguration of the Philippine Assembly.” Included in the book reviews are full-page notices of the two recently issued volumes of this Society’s _Collections_, No. XXII and No. XXIII.

Of military history and principles most Americans are woefully ignorant. Those who would improve their knowledge of these things can hardly do better than to become readers of _The Military Historian and Economist_ edited jointly by Capt. Arthur L. Conger, U. S. A., and Prof. R. M. Johnston of Harvard. Timely and stimulating articles in the July number of the magazine are Émile Laloy’s discussion of “French Military Theory” and an anonymous contributor’s “Estimate of the Situation.” The writer believes that the most effective military course for the United States to take is to keep at home the larger part of the army now in process of creation, and by so doing enable our navy to be sent into the Pacific to establish there a secure Anglo-American predominance. The considerations which lead to these conclusions cannot, of course, be set forth in this brief note.

VOL. I, NO. 2 DECEMBER, 1917

THE WISCONSIN MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

PUBLICATIONS OF THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN. Edited by MILO M. QUAIFE, Superintendent

CONTENTS

Page

THE FRONTIER A WORLD PROBLEM _Carl Russell Fish_ 121

EARLY RECOLLECTIONS OF LAKE GENEVA (BIG FOOT LAKE), WISCONSIN _George Manierre_ 142

DESCRIPTION OF A JOURNEY TO NORTH AMERICA Foreword _Rasmus B. Anderson_ 149 Description of a Journey to North America _Ole Knudsen Nattestad_ 167

EDITORIALS: History Repeats Itself; Our Military Record; What of the Future?; An Appreciation and a Suggestion; Cannon Fodder 187

QUESTION BOX: Daniel Webster’s Wisconsin Investments; Names Proposed for a New Town; Origin of the Word “Winnequah”; The Discovery of Lake Superior; The Potawatomi during the Revolution; Father Allouez among the Kickapoo; The Indian Tribes of Iowa 193

COMMUNICATIONS: Old Copperheads and New; A Presbyterian Objects 202

SURVEY OF HISTORICAL ACTIVITIES: The Society and the State; Some Wisconsin Public Documents; Some Publications 206

Copyright, 1917, by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin

THE FRONTIER A WORLD PROBLEM[82]

BY CARL RUSSELL FISH

Only by a study of local history can we hope really to understand the development of human society. The historian like the scientist must base his knowledge on what can be seen through a microscope. Wisconsin, from the time of its formation as a state, has realized this, and has steadily confirmed itself in the opinion. This institution, which it founded in the days of its youth and scant resources, it has supported with a liberality, public and private, growing as its wealth has grown. Of late years, a corps of local societies, city and county, have been forming about the central institution. The University has directed its students to the study of the localities from which they have come, and stores in its stacks the facts which they glean. No one of the newer states of the country knows itself so well as Wisconsin, and if, as is so often the case, acquired knowledge seems merely to reveal the knowledge still necessary for real understanding, we have carefully developed plans to extend it still more widely and intensively.

Yet how insignificant any locality seems today, when practically all are plunged into the same calamity, when the resources of all are concentrated in one struggle. Races and breeds, nationalities and castes are merged together on the same battle-field. Their similarities of plight and object dominate their differences, the protective barriers each erected to preserve that distinctiveness so dear to human nature seem leveled, and history has become world history. Men thrown thus physically into the maelstrom find themselves intellectually also torn from their safe anchorages and adrift they know not where. What does the individual count for, what the locality, what the past? What counts it to study the development of Rock County cheese-making, when its cheeses and cheese makers are tumbled promiscuously with those of all counties and nations, simply as units in a staggering sum total?

The world has changed, but that is not startling. The world is always changing. This change is greater, and for us in America more sudden and dramatic, than any which preceded, but everything has not changed. The relation of the past to the present and the future is permanent. The relations of the individual, the locality, and the whole, shift, but they are the permanent factors of which life consists. The world war has not changed these factors, but it should bring us up sharply to a realization of what they really mean. Socrates’ dictum “know thyself” was not given in any selfish spirit. He did not mean that we were to devote ourselves to ourselves, but that we could know ourselves more thoroughly than we could know others, that self-knowledge was the completest knowledge, and therefore the Archimedian lever to open up knowledge of others. Self-examination has often become an obsession excluding all else, the study of local history has often become antiquarianism. The real reason for the cultivating of both is the formation of known bases from which to calculate. The German historian, Lamprecht, became so familiar with the little city of Trêves that he could have conversed intimately with its inhabitants of any year during the Middle Ages if he might have been dropped into it, but this devotion was not for the sake of Trêves, it gave the understanding knowledge necessary for his great work on German civilization as a whole. We can know no generation unless we have delved deep into the souls of its greatest men, but such biographical studies are not for themselves alone, but to contribute to a sympathetic comprehension of their contemporaries.

Local history to justify itself must be as exact and absolute as studies dealing with human nature may be, but if no effort is made to utilize it for an understanding of national and world history, it has missed its mission. Local history is not an end in itself. Moreover, if it is written without a wide knowledge of outside conditions, conditions in other localities, and other times, it will be but a warped product, as useless to the community for which it is written as for the outside world. Such selfishness and egoism have never been profitable. The only difference today is that for the moment at least they have become impossible.

The most striking feature in the history of Wisconsin has been the transformation within a lifetime of a virgin forest into a civilized area, the drawing together of the sons and daughters of many widely differing localities and their welding into a commonwealth. This conquest of the frontier has been but a portion of that vast movement which in a period historically short has created the United States, and more particularly it has been an important and typical battle in the campaign for the Mississippi Valley, which has resulted in our sister states of the Middle West.

Different as has been the history of each, the history of the frontier movement is a whole; the study of any state contributes to an understanding of all. As the occupation of Wisconsin has been but a part of the American frontier movement, so that has not been unique, even in the nineteenth century. We have liked to think of ourselves as carrying on a special and distinct task; to its difficulties and inspiration we have attributed many of our virtues, and on them we have laid the burden of our defects. The task, however, has not been unique. The results have, indeed, had their distinctive differences, but these have come rather from the way the task has been performed than because we have had a different thing to do. We know our own frontier with scientific thoroughness, but we cannot understand it unless we contrast it with such other frontiers as Australia, Siberia, South America, and Africa.

One of the essential features of a frontier is that both labor and capital come from without, and much of the capital is contributed by people who do not come to the frontier. Exception must, indeed, be made to this statement. The Spaniards found labor in Peru and Mexico, and they found also capital, as did the miners of Australia and California, the lumber barons of Wisconsin, and the fur traders of Canada. In none of these instances, however, did either the local labor or local capital suffice, and in all the instances to be cited later the bulk of the labor came from away, and the owners of an important portion of the capital remained away; the frontier community, therefore, was a debtor community, and the debt was due to an outside community.

This common condition has in all cases had an important bearing not only on economic development, but on the whole texture of the social fabric which was created; it affected not only the frontier itself, but its reflex influence on the sections from which the labor and capital were drawn set at work influences which at times became leading factors in their existence. So important have their influences been, that where the study is confined to any one frontier, they seem to dominate development, and make history their creature. When we extend our study, however, we find that in spite of the fundamental resemblance, each has followed its separate course; that the different balance of other factors, and even such secondary considerations as laws and constitutions, have radically altered the actual operation of these powerful natural resemblances. The control of the frontier’s natural resources, the distribution of proceeds, the very content of politics have varied with every frontier. The problem has been one, the methods and results have been as varied as the fields in which it occurred.

In the United States the larger part of the capital came from or through another section of the same country. That is, the East furnished nearly all that was supplied, although to do so it had to borrow somewhat from Europe. The direct loans from Europe to the West were comparatively unimportant. Consequently the interests of the debtor and creditor sections conflicted in the arena of national politics. Two unique features made the working out of the problem different in this country from any other. The first was the division of the country into a large number of states, sovereign within a restricted range of powers, some controlled by the debtor element, some by the creditor. The other was that at one time, and that the most critical, the frontier was strong enough at least to veto the action of the national government.

The result of these conditions was a struggle unusually complex. The control of banking, of the currency, of natural resources, such as lands, minerals, and oil, and of transportation or, as it is phrased in our politics, internal improvements, were the bone of contention. The desire to have these controlled by national or state governments varied with the political situation. The frontier wished banks that would not be too particular, a currency that would be easy to get; it wished, and wishes, control of its own systems of transportation and its natural resources.

The sections furnishing the supplies were more interested in the capital to which strings were tied, than in the labor which cut its apron strings on leaving home. The struggle antedated the Revolution; the high points in its later history were the Shays Rebellion, the Jackson régime, the greenback movement, the Bryan campaign, and it finds present expression in the opposition in the Far West to the national conservation policy.

When the frontier secured the reins of power in the sinewy hands of Andrew Jackson, it was not in a position to impose its policy upon the nation, but it was powerful enough to wrest banking, the currency, and internal improvements from the control of the national government, and turn them over to the states. The frontier states, elate, started on a mad career of making their own internal improvements, by means of borrowed capital diluted by paper issues, till money ran like fairy gold into the pockets of the needy. For one golden moment the problem of the frontier seemed solved to the satisfaction of the frontier. Jackson himself caused the first crash. Unable to tell good paper from bad, he could at any rate tell paper from gold, and in the Specie Circular of 1836 he brought credit to the touchstone of real value and sent the house of cards toppling. Feverishly rebuilt within the next few years, it fell again in 1841, carrying with it the whole dream of its builders. So severe was the blow that numbers of the states took advantage of their sovereign rights, and repudiated a portion of their debts. Securely entrenched behind their sovereign inviolability to legal attack, they still enjoyed the inviolability to force which their position as part of a larger nation afforded. They snapped their fingers at their creditors; but they could borrow no more. The nation had left the task of national development to the states; the states, by impairing their credit, had rendered themselves incapable of handling it.

This situation left the field free for, in fact rendered necessary, the intervention of individuals or of individuals organized as corporations. The legal position of the latter had already been prepared. The decisions of Justice Marshall had given corporation charters an unusual degree of legal sanctity, which the state constitutions modified rather than reversed. The fears of the Jeffersonian democracy had incorporated into the national constitution itself special restrictions upon the government in dealing with the individual, which the decisions of the Supreme Court under Justice Taney went far in applying to the corporations. Corporations became so firmly entrenched in their position as the chief agency in national development, that even when, after the Civil War, the national government became more active and once more assumed control of banking and the currency, and the credit of the states was reëstablished, both agencies used their powers chiefly to assist corporations. When, in the present generation, the necessity of public control became obvious, it took the form, for the most part, of regulation of corporations, rather than that of absorbing or supplanting them.

The direction of the development of transportation and the exploitation of natural resources, therefore, was, for the most part, in the hands of individuals, and, in the case of large projects, of individuals organized as corporations, and, with the exception of farm land, of individuals and corporations representing nonresident capital. Many influences, of course, modified their activities, but these affected rather the security of their capital than the initiative of their plans. Many lost the capital which they poured into the new region, and the result was that the prospect of large returns was demanded by others before venturing; speculation, lost investments, and abnormally productive investments characterized the process as a whole. Politicians concerned themselves rather with the means, the questions of banking and currency, than with the end, the character of the development which should take place.

The other independent portions of the American continents, for the most part, resembled the United States in organization, but the distribution of the economic factors differed and produced different results. Except in the United States, the capital which has been necessary for the occupation of the wilderness has come, for the most part, not from other portions of the same country, but from foreign countries.

The most important of these frontiers during the nineteenth century has been that of Argentina. Here the established section was until recently comparatively unimportant, both labor and capital came in large measure from abroad; the greater portion of the labor from Italy, of the capital from Great Britain. The conflict between the debtor and creditor sections, therefore, was not one of politics, but of diplomacy. Argentina might have what system of banking and currency it wished, but most creditors had to be paid in an international standard of value. In a world state, doubtless, all the frontiers would unite to further their interests, as the frontier states have in the United States; in the world as at present unorganized the ultimate appeal is to force. A debtor country, and one relatively weak as compared with its creditor, Argentina has not been without its plans, conceived like those of the American frontiersman without moral dishonesty but with incapacity or unwillingness to think the thing through, for easing its burden. In the efforts of Calvo and Drago to incorporate into international law the principle that debts between nations and their citizens may not be collected by force, we see as surely the reflection of frontier views, as in the programs of Greenbacker and of Populist. In the greater interest in international affairs in Argentina than in the United States, we see a new illustration of the aphorism “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

In the long run, Argentina has had to pay up, and has had to pay also in high interest rates, for the lack of a feeling of absolute security on the part of the investor. Probably few countries have had more expensive statesmen than Drago and Calvo.

To attract capital, moreover, it has been necessary to offer it abundantly the undeveloped natural resources of the country. On the other hand, the logic of the situation has kept development in the hands of the nation to a greater degree than in the United States, for the nation has been able to borrow money more cheaply than individuals or domestic corporations, and public ownership has played an important part in her upbuilding.

Argentina has paid, and so we have a situation which has never culminated in a crisis. The republics of the Caribbean have not been so fortunate. Much of the money has been borrowed, not for the purposes of improvement, but to finance revolution and for personal expenditure. Frittered away instead of put at productive work, it has become an increasing burden, in many cases an unbearable burden, and countries like Hayti, San Domingo, Honduras, and at times Mexico, have become internationally bankrupt. Protected against legal action by their sovereignty, the creditor and the debtor stood in a situation where force alone could determine their relationship. What the result would normally have been, is clearly enough indicated by the intervention of France in Mexico in 1861, and of Germany in Venezuela in 1902. The subjugation of the weak debtor by the strong creditor has been prevented not by sovereignty, but by the interposition of a third force, the United States inspired by the Monroe Doctrine.

While, however, the Monroe Doctrine served to maintain the appearance of independence for the nations concerned, it produced an _impasse_ in the development of the frontier. Capital did not have to go to countries which could not be relied upon to pay up and which were protected from foreclosure by an outside force. The United States served the republics in somewhat the same manner that it did its own repudiating states. It was, however, unable to do as much for them as it did for its own. The wayward republics found themselves debarred from directing their own development as did our states in the critical forties, and there was no domestic capital to undertake the task. The capital willing to engage in work under such circumstances was that of the most speculative sort. Some gamblers staked their money on presidential contenders, seeking to gain control of the government. Others, more powerful and trusting in their power, offered to embark huge sums on condition of receiving stupendous grants of the natural resources and practical control of the whole development to be made in certain regions. Such was the much-discussed Morgan syndicate proposal to Honduras, and that of the English Pearson syndicate to Columbia. In the latter instance, the United States again intervened, fearing the influence of such aggregations of foreign capital, and expressed its opinion that such special concessions violated the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine and could not be allowed.

From the tightening deadlock thus produced, Diaz extricated Mexico for a time, but it lapsed, and the others showed no signs of the power to emerge. Such European capital as had been loaned felt not unjustly angry, such as was for hire sought other avenues and frontiers less peculiarly hedged in. The situation shouted for action, and action could come only from the United States, which would not permit simple logic to work its own conclusion. It was under such circumstances that President Roosevelt assumed the financial administration of San Domingo and inaugurated a policy which has been followed and extended by his successors. Justice, or approximate justice, has been done between debtor and creditor, but the active development of these frontiers is still halted for lack of a machinery for the future.

In striking contrast with these American frontiers has been that of Siberia. Here has taken place one of the greatest frontier advances of history, here the same localization of creditor and debtor has existed, yet the conflict of classes and sections has led neither to politics as in the United States, nor to diplomacy as in Latin America. Much of the capital has been provided by France, but the money has, for the most part, been borrowed by the national Russian government, representing a strong nation and an essential ally. The security of the creditor has rested in the good faith, not of the frontier but of an established society, which has wished constantly more and more money and has realized that an atmosphere of credit must be preserved.

As the frontier has had nothing to say concerning its credit relationships, so it has been equally powerless in controlling the expenditures of the money borrowed and the disposition of its natural resources. The sole check upon the absolute will of the central government has been the desire to attract labor to the frontier. Few laborers, as few capitalists, seek the wild for the mere adventure of subduing it. The bids and rival bids for settlers by those controlling various sections of the world-frontier for the last three centuries have been to a large extent the basis for those more liberal institutions which have developed on the fringe of society. Their bids have been determined by the character of the settlers they desired or found available, and have in considerable measure determined the character of the communities built up. Force has played its part as well as lure, and has given incurious Africa a share in the development of the Americas that the most psychological advertiser would never have secured for it. In the nineteenth century, Russia has had more command of force to populate her waste spaces than any other country. Consequently the actual frontiersmen have had less to say about the development of their own region than elsewhere. Yet it is easily possible to exaggerate the coercive power of the central government, in popular estimation it is probably exaggerated; and the plans for the settlement of Siberia have been to no small degree influenced by consideration for the ideals of the typical Russian and the incentives which would coerce him to move his hearthstone. Yet on the whole, simplicity and the carrying out of preconceived plans have worked the opening of this great frontier. That the great release which has just occurred in Russia will reveal where these plans have bound, and that the politics of the new republic will be colored by frontier problems, is inevitable.

Australia and New Zealand have, to an even greater extent than the American frontier, secured their labor and capital from another section of the same empire. The relations between the sections, however, are quite different. The local organization of the debtor communities resembles that of the American states; in fact, the scope of their power is much broader, but they do not possess that inviolability to legal attack which sovereignty gives, and have not been represented in the central government. Credit, therefore, has been a matter of neither politics nor diplomacy, but has been as firmly controlled by the lending section, England, as that of Siberia has been by Russia. Judicial unity, which has been the only organic bond of empire, makes the sovereign, like the Crown, identical in Brisbane and in London. There is no chance of reducing debts save by a separation, which other considerations have rendered furthest from the wishes of the debtors.

General diplomacy also has been largely excluded from local consideration. The creditor-debtor relationship was almost exclusively one within the empire, and the handling of other diplomatic questions was in the hands of the British government in which the frontier sections were represented only by influence. The attempts to arouse an imperial, not to say international, mind found hard sledging during the real development period, and only partially succeeded just before the Great War.

On the other hand, the locality has been absolute master of the expenditure of its borrowings. No subordinate communities in the world, most decidedly not the states of our Union, have been left so entirely free to control their development, not only to plan their transportation and allot their natural resources, but even to regulate their tariffs. It is not surprising that these governments, with credit carefully maintained by outside and unquestionable forces, found their politics in the working out of such development, and that, in large measure, borrowing has been done by the local governments, which have themselves spent the money borrowed. There can be no better security than that of a government incapacitated from repudiation. Creditors have lost comparatively little money to these frontiers, and so Australia and New Zealand have received their needed capital upon better terms, perhaps, than any of the other regions treated. How wisely they have spent it, is a matter of the most violent dispute.

Politics in communities barred from the great questions of credit and diplomacy yet organized on the basis of the broadest democracy and local autonomy, have naturally had their strikingly significant characteristics. Everyone knows how rich their statute books have been in laws relating to the distribution of natural resources and of all kinds of wealth, and to conditions of living. Everyone knows the sharp antagonism between labor, in the narrower sense of wage earner, and employers. That these frontiers have been experiment grounds in social legislation has not been due to their being frontier communities but because they have been frontier communities freed from some of the most characteristic frontier problems.

Rhodesia resembles Australia and New Zealand in local autonomy and lack of representation in the national government. In other respects, however, it is widely different. Here capital came first, and labor afterward. The capital, moreover, was not of the timid sort seeking small return and security, such as invested in the securities of New Zealand, Victoria, and New South Wales, nor did it entirely resemble that of the United States during the development period, which sought returns both large and immediate. The capitalists of Rhodesia could wait, in fact, are still waiting. Alone among the frontiers, Rhodesia has not been under the strain of seeking to make returns on its invested capital before development has reached the stage where returns can properly be expected. It may well hope to be freed from those complications of individual indebtedness, which have filled our courts with business, and strewn our advance with such tragedies as are even today occurring in northern Wisconsin.

Upon the capitalists thus far-sighted and enduring rested the full burden of development. The region was autonomous in its relation to the British Empire, but its non-resident creditors mapped out its future, not its settlers as in Australia. Capital under such circumstances looks for large rewards, and in this case expects to secure them by control of the natural resources, when these have been made available by the incoming of settlers. Youngest of the frontiers, the working of the old factors in this new relationship remains a question. One would expect economy and efficiency in planning, but possible conflicts between the resident community and its creditors over the division of the proceeds. The settlers that it seeks are of the most independent type, men not with energy alone, but with some small capital of their own. It offers them not only economic opportunity but also political privileges. How such a population will react under a system which restricts politics one degree more than they are restricted in Australia, by excluding the larger lines of local development such as transportation, is one of the interesting questions of tomorrow. One might look for some clue in the history of the American colonial proprietorships, but how far the intelligent study of those experiments will have enabled the proprietors of Rhodesia to avoid their mistakes, and how far the changed conditions created by two centuries of the most rapid change the world has seen, will modify the interworking of similar forces, no one can tell.

In organization, Canada is today, of course, like Australia, but whereas the commonwealth of Australia is but recent and was formed only after the scaffolding of development had been created, the Dominion of Canada was created in season to direct the most active period of frontiering. During the most significant period, therefore, Canada has had an organization that resembled our federal states. The resemblance, however, is partly superficial; in Canada the specified powers belong to the provinces, the undefined powers to the Dominion. Neither provinces nor Dominion, moreover, have possessed the legal inviolability of absolute sovereignty. The credit of all has been protected by the judicial unity of the empire, and the stability of the currency has not been a subject for politics. Diplomacy, also, has belonged to the mother country, although the proximity of the United States has not allowed it to be the blank it was so long in its Australian sister-colonies.

Economically the development of the Canadian frontier has more resembled that of the United States, for the capital required has come most largely from or through other sections of the same colony. As compared with the United States, however, development has been, until quite lately, slow. Consequently those regions which have passed beyond the frontier stage have continuously controlled the central government. There has been no parallel to the Jackson régime. Credit, therefore, has been doubly guarded, by the majority in Canada, and by Canada’s position within the British Empire. With the credit of the Dominion and of the provinces intact, there have been no intrinsic obstacles to the development of transportation and the control of resources by the public, and public works have played an important part. At the same time the period of greatest need coincided with the high tide of the individualistic movement in the Anglo-Saxon world. The principles of John Stuart Mill, of Cobbett and Bright, of Gladstone, Carlyle, and Emerson, dominated a generation devoted to the task of breaking down time-worn systems of social control and releasing the individual. The period of new regulations dictated by rising democracy had not swung in. Therefore, a very considerable portion of the task was left to private corporations, to whom were granted very considerable proportions of the natural resources. Corporation control and public enterprise, therefore, combined with unusual harmony in developing and exploiting a frontier which was, indeed, represented, but which could control in neither a positive nor a negative sense.

The recent and sudden expansion of the Canadian frontier in the west and northwest has created a new balance. The situation in Canada today resembles that in the United States when the advance of population from the Alleghanies to beyond the Mississippi gave the frontier an unusual political weight, and elected Andrew Jackson. This region is just now in the position where it is so eager to get capital that it is ready to agree to almost any terms to secure its railroads and farm machinery. When pay time comes, its sentiments will change. It is difficult to see how it can upset credit, but that, in combination with the democracy of the older portions of Canada, it will make its voice felt and play a part in Canadian politics that the frontier has never played in the long course of Canadian history, no student of frontiers can doubt.

On the whole, Canada has secured its capital at low interest rates, lower probably than any other frontier except Australia and New Zealand. It has, however, sacrificed the control of its natural resources to a considerable degree. The direction of its development has attracted both public attention and the labor of its strongest men controlling private capital. In none of the frontiers have the two systems been so equally blended.

Most hapless of the frontiers is that of Manchuria. It is at present a represented province of an imperial republic, which furnishes most of the labor required, but can furnish neither capital nor protection. Its capital comes, for the most part, from two rival foreign powers, who are not really creditor nations, but who are so eager to invest in Manchuria that they borrow from still other countries for the purpose. The local community has no more to say in regard to its development or the partition of its resources than Siberia. It does not, indeed, rest under any such obligation of paying as does Australia, for power rather than money return is sought by Russia and Japan, who furnish it with money on their own security and, therefore, at reasonably low rates. Undoubtedly, however, the successful grasp of power will mean such a hold on natural resources as will give those countries, in return for their guarantee, rewards which will be more satisfactory to them than to the actual conquerors of the Manchurian wilds. It will be interesting to see whether sectional interests will unite the Russian and Japanese settlers with the Chinese majority against the foreign capitalists, or whether racial antagonism will prove stronger than economic. Countless cross currents already chop the surface, and conditions point rather to a problem than a state.

Wide as is the field covered by the frontiers discussed, the Mississippi Valley, Argentina, the wilds encircling the Caribbean, Siberia, Australia, Canada, and Manchuria, it covers barely half the area where since the year 1800 European civilization has been struggling to establish itself by the occupation of regions wholly or partly vacant. Different as have been the conditions classified under which the simple underlying factors universally involved have operated, more have been left undescribed. Algiers has had a frontier incorporated as an integral part of France, a centralized republic. In fact, practically every region of Africa has presented a frontier, and the handling of frontier conditions by English, French, and Belgians, Boers, Germans, Portuguese, Italians, Spaniards, and American negroes. The greatest frontier area today is Brazil, and every country of Latin America has a frontier and its own slightly varying organization and balance of forces, while the British, French, and Dutch are all severally trying their hand on the particular problem of a tropical American frontier. Some portions of India, Persia, Arabia, Indo-China, China, Korea, the Philippines, Formosa, and many South Sea Islands, present the problem under special guises. Sweden, Norway, Russia, Canada, and the United States are all dealing with the possibility of pressing civilization into the fastnesses of the Arctic.

When one considers the extent of the world frontier in process of occupation during the last century, the persuasive effect of its call upon the older world for labor and capital, the coloring of the whole world by the natural resources it has unearthed and the institutions it has developed, its conquest can hardly be considered as second in influence to any factor of the time. Naturally it is not intended to present here even a basis for its study. The fundamental factors and the different systems can be accurately enough described in general terms, but the differences in their operation are less precise than has been indicated; private corporations exist in Siberia, state public improvements in the United States. Many of the similarities produced everywhere by frontier conditions have been neglected. The attempt has been merely to indicate some of the tendencies fostered by different types of control. The differences between the various frontiers, resulting from race and geography, which in many cases explain the different types of organization or modify their working, have been left untouched. The problem is immense, its study is one for generations. Yet some things he who runs may read. Even a partial acquaintance with the main features of all cannot but render the work of each statesman and historian more effective in his own particular task.

Some things will be understood only when no frontier, as we know it, exists. Yet even while we are in the current, we have accumulated some material, and it would seem to be contributory negligence not to use it. It must be patent that one must be honest or must pay for it. Can we not secure some rough idea of which system of approach has resulted in the greater justice between the creditor and debtor section, and what is justice? Has community control of its development or creditor control been most economical and most effective? Has exploitation to produce local capital any justification? What system has called to the task the greater proportion of ability? Would the United States have fared better under a system by which Webster, Clay, and Calhoun would have devoted to moulding the transportation system the genius they spent in bolstering up public credit? Which system has been the most responsive to the needs of the situation, and which has stimulated the greatest amount of public virtue, and which has been most easily manipulated for selfish advantage?

I haven’t the slightest intention of answering these questions here; I freely admit that many of them leave me perplexed, but I dogmatically maintain that it is by pondering such questions, by studying the comparisons they suggest, that the frontier problem is to be understood by the historian and comprehended by the statesman. Without such comparisons the student of the problem in any one field is less apt to judge a particular episode rightly than a man with no knowledge and good intentions. The path to wisdom and sure-footed action must be founded on the rock of exact knowledge, but it must be platted on a wide-spread survey.

All life reveals the irony of wisdom attained only by the experience to deal with which it was needed. It is but today we have this rich storehouse of experimental frontier building, and tomorrow we will have no frontier. It might seem that we could let a dead past bury its dead, that the study of frontier episodes, however successful, has become sheer antiquarianism. Such a view, however, minimizes the world frontier that remains and the time and effort that will be required in its conquest. As in science, so with the material world, the nineteenth century made easy sweeping advances; it left much that was difficult for the slower and more laborious labors of the twentieth. It overlooks the facts that great masses of the world’s inhabitants today count the experience of meeting the wild first-hand among the most important of their nearby inheritances, that the frontier set its mark upon them or their parents, or grandparents, and that the present generation cannot be understood unless the frontier is understood. Still more important is the consideration that in many instances the frontier merely localizes problems that are general. The factors with which this paper has dealt are peculiar to the frontier only in that the creditors are assembled in one section, the debtors in another. This is an important peculiarity in large part because it isolates the characteristics of each, and makes them easier of study. When the world has been fully occupied, new frontiers will appear, are already appearing. Natural resources now undreamed of will need capital and labor for their exploitation, will be susceptible of development in more than one way, and will raise problems of control. Our experiences with the rude and simple problem of the first occupation of a waste area will seem as geometry to calculus compared with those raised by these new frontiers, but will be as essential to a wise handling of them as geometry is to calculus.

But the instances that we have reviewed seem to carry a simpler and more immediate moral. When we see in the United States people of all nations laboring for the conquest of the Mississippi Valley, and employing money saved by New England and the Middle States or borrowed by them from Europe, when we see Russia borrowing French money to make Siberia habitable for Russian peasants, when Japan borrows in England, and Russia in France to pay Chinese to develop transportation in Manchuria, when Argentina borrows English money to employ Italians in the pampas, and Transvaal gold passes through English banks to build Rhodesian railways, we get glimpses of a new world. Not that these things are absolutely novel, but that in variety and extent they are unparalleled, and these experiences on the frontiers but bring into clearer view general tendencies of the time. The German invasion of Belgium uncovered for most of us the tens of thousands of Russians working in the Liege factories, the hundreds of thousands of Russians working on German farms, of Italians on the Rhine, of Spaniards in France; the war itself has hastened the movement with its vast importations of Indo-Chinese and Arabs into France, with its tight-woven mesh of international credit. The frontier still reveals most clearly how in the nineteenth century the business of life became international and how poorly devised was the world organization for coping with it.

Again, the experience of the frontier in the nineteenth century exhibits one step in the process of readjustment. Can one review the instances which have been noted, without feeling the theory of absolute sovereignty crumbling beneath his feet? The United States has in practice divided the sovereignty, and as a result surrendered the actual control to corporations they themselves created. The British Empire preserved unity in theory, but actually divided it still more effectually. What can a practical man make of the sovereignty of Honduras, where the native government cannot control its own development, the British Empire cannot protect its citizens’ money, and the United States can veto the actions of both but cannot take positive action; or of Manchuria, which is an integral portion of a sovereign republic, but which is actually as to one-half controlled by Russia and the other by Japan, both of whom are somewhat curtailed in their actions by promises to the United States. However one may cling to the legal theory of the absolute and indivisible character of sovereignty in independent localities, a study of the world frontier brings out the fact that no localities are independent in fact, or absolutely sovereign. The inter-growth of the world, which the development of the world frontier has so much facilitated, has already weakened the bulwarks of local independence; let us hope that with its international character the frontier may facilitate the integration of a world organization better adapted to the conditions of today, such an organization as tomorrow will be a necessity.

[82] Delivered as the annual address before the State Historical Society of Wisconsin October 25, 1917.

EARLY RECOLLECTIONS OF LAKE GENEVA (BIG FOOT LAKE), WISCONSIN

BY GEORGE MANIERRE[83]

My grandfather, William Reid, came to Chicago in 1840. At that time, although a mere village of 4,479 inhabitants, it was in the midst of a speculative fever and was even then speaking of its certain future greatness and of Lake Geneva (Big Foot Lake) as a probable summer resort for its citizens. My grandfather came of a well-known family whose ancestor with his tenants fought at the battle of Bothwell Bridge, June 22, 1679, under the flag “For God, King, and Covenant,” and who inherited through him the estate of Kilbryd, situated near Glasgow, Scotland. William Reid inherited wealth which he, as a barrister, increased, so that at about middle life he made up his mind to retire. Unfortunately for his family his investments proved unsuccessful, and after the loss of the greater part of his fortune he came to America and started anew. When he came to Chicago he had a relatively large sum of money, which, if invested in Chicago, might eventually have increased to great wealth; but he was stricken by the Lake Geneva fever and went there with his family, locating at the head of the lake. He invested largely in land by the lake and on Big Foot Prairie, buying a large tract of land on the higher ground and about seventy acres along the lake.

My grandmother, Mary Drew, came of a cultivated family which was distantly related to the family of the Duke of Hamilton. Her niece was the first wife of William Gladstone, the English statesman. Mention is made of these things to show the change from the ease of their former mode of living to the vicissitudes which locating on the frontier entailed.

My grandparents had nine children, five boys and four girls, part of whom were born in the log house at the head of the lake. This house stood about two hundred feet from shore at the bottom of a rise of ground known as the Potawatomi Indian burial ground, upon which site the electric railway depot now stands. I remember as a boy digging Indian relics out of this hill. The house was neatly built of logs and had two large wings; in the center of one room was a fireplace suitable for burning large logs. Among the early settlers in the neighborhood at this time who had land and houses at the head of the lake were the Van Slykes,[84] the Mohrs,[85] the Russells,[86] and the Douglasses.[87]

Here the children grew up with the ordinary opportunities of farmers’ children and had no better advantages; and years later my cousin, Jessie (Reid) Donaldson, my brother, Will, and I used to come here to enjoy the beautiful surroundings of grandfather’s place. Will and I had a little pony called Jenny and a wagon which we used to drive to The Corners for mail. Whenever Jenny wanted to go into the barn or whenever we took her to the blacksmith’s to be shod, she had a funny trick of rapping on the door with her feet.

I remember the Baptist people used frequently to come down to the lake in front of my grandfather’s house, and that the minister would there duck the women under the water, according to their custom. My aunt, with great sympathy, would lead the women into the house, where they could change their clothes.

South of the house, where a stream ran through the inlet into the lake, was a marsh, in the center of which was an island. Here in those early days deer were often to be seen. Prairie chickens were plentiful on Big Foot Prairie, and in the spring wild pigeons, now extinct, flew over it in countless numbers. Woodcock, ruffed grouse, and squirrels were also numerous. In the lake there was a large quantity of game fish, among which were the cisco. These were seen only during the last days of May or the early days of June when they came from the depths of the lake to the shallow water to feed on the May flies and to spawn. Of the wild life existing at that time, only a fraction now remains.

Matthias Mohr owned the old sawmill on the rising ground at the south end of the marsh. The race was fed by a large brook that emptied into the marsh. This beautiful spot, surrounded by bushes and trees, was often visited by me. The old wheel was still, but it was pleasant to listen to the sound of the clear, cold water of the brook as it rushed over the dismantled wheel to its outlet in the marsh. This brook was afterward dammed up and used for raising brook trout.

Numerous beautiful springs were to be found running from the higher ground to the lake. About half a mile north of the house was a small schoolhouse where I remember being spelled down by a little girl. The house was afterward occupied by an English laborer by the name of Blackwell, and I have his son Bill in pleasant remembrance. The road past the schoolhouse at the foot of a high bluff ran south by Douglass’ Mill and north to the farm belonging to my grandfather. From Douglass’ Mill,[88] which was built by C. L. Douglass and first used as a sawmill and then as a gristmill, we used to go on up a very steep hill to the road going west to The Corners, about three miles from my grandfather’s house, where at that early day the mail was obtained. The village located where the mill once stood has since been called Fontana.[89]

Later we went to Walworth for the mail, taking the road running south. The town of Walworth was founded in 1836 by James Van Slyke who made his residence at the head of the lake. The only residents there about 1840 were Christopher Douglass and sons, Marcus Russell, James Van Slyke, Matthias Mohr, and William Reid. Matthias Mohr purchased 50 acres in the town of Walworth in 1840, and in 1843 he purchased 38 acres more. In 1840 William Reid purchased 960¼ acres, in 1840 Marcus Russell purchased 80 acres, and in 1841, Christopher Douglass purchased 480 acres, all in the town of Walworth.

The village of Walworth had a store, a blacksmith shop, the Red Lion Hotel, and the Brick Church. In the Brick Church cemetery are buried today the remains of my grandfather and my grandmother and a number of their children. The Red Lion Hotel was used by many people passing on the main road from town to town in Wisconsin.

A short distance to the north of grandfather’s house was the sugar bush. This was at the bottom of the high hills going north up to Russell’s. Near the place stood the old Potawatomi village and cornfields which Mrs. Kinzie in her book _Wau Bun_ speaks of visiting in 1831.[90] I well remember seeing the Indian trail back of the house leading up to the higher land in the sugar bush.

The country at the head of the lake was filled with large butternut, walnut, hickory, basswood, ash, sugar maple, white-, black-, and burr-oak trees. The sugar bush, through which a clear, cold brook ran murmuring to its outlet in the lake, was notable for its many butternut trees and was one of the most beautiful spots that could be seen anywhere about the lake. I remember well the large oak tree near my grandfather’s house in which a canoe had been placed holding the remains of a relative[91] of Big Foot,[92] an Indian chief after whom Big Foot Prairie was named. The wood of the softer trees near the farm was used by the Reid family for the rails from which snake fences were made. I remember my father and driver taking stakes from a snake fence and putting them in the mud for my mother to stand on.

In the early days my father and mother in going to Lake Geneva had to go by wagon. When the railroads were built, they took a train to Turner Junction (now West Chicago) located thirty miles west of Chicago, and from there took a wagon to Lake Geneva. Later they went by the same railroad (the Northwestern) to Harvard Junction and from there by wagon to the head of the lake.

At Harvard was located a hotel owned by Elbridge G. Ayer,[93] the father of Edward E. Ayer of this city. This hotel was a few feet from the track and its dining-room furnished meals to the people traveling on that road. This dining-room was known all over the West, for at that time there was no other that could compete with it. All the vegetables, meat, poultry, and pastry were cooked in the most appetizing manner and the products furnished for the table came fresh from Mr. Ayer’s farm. My father and mother, my brother Will, and I have often taken meals at this hotel on our way from the Junction to the lake. The village of Harvard was afterward beautified by Mr. Ayer’s son, Edward E. Ayer, who planted fourteen hundred trees about it. Most of these are standing today and are an evidence of the public spirit of the donor, which is seen in Chicago in his activities in behalf of the Newberry Library, Field Museum, and other institutions.[94]

My grandmother’s brother, James Drew, a wealthy barrister from London, England, and his wife visited his sister at the head of the lake in 1842. At this time Mrs. Drew made a small water-color drawing of the house and its vicinity which has recently been placed in the Wisconsin Historical Library.

My recollections of Geneva go back to the early fifties. I can remember going with my uncle in a rowboat from the head to the foot of the lake, some eight miles. At that time there were no steamboats on the lake and an unbroken forest covered its shores. The high ground bordering the lake was about 175 feet above the beach line. The depth of the lake has since been found to be from 80 to 181 feet. The lake is eight miles long and from one to two miles wide. It empties into the Fox River by a deep creek at the east end.

My mother, Ann Hamilton Reid, daughter of William Reid, was born in Glasgow, Scotland, October 23, 1823. She was married to my father, George Manierre, after whom I was named, in Detroit in 1842.

[83] The author’s reminiscences of the Manierre family have been printed in Volume 8 Number 3 of the Illinois State Historical Society _Publications_.

[84] James Van Slyke made the first settlement near the Potawatomi Indian village in that place which later became the town of Walworth. He built a cabin and moved his family there from Geneva in the fall of 1836. Mrs. Van Slyke is supposed to have been the only white woman who spent that winter there. Many stories are told of the courage she displayed in this frontier community.

[85] Matthias Mohr was one of the earliest residents of Walworth County, settling on part of the Van Slyke claim at the head of Lake Geneva in 1837. He later went to Kansas where he died in 1887. Glenwood Springs Park now stands on the site of his farm.

[86] Marcus and Robert Russell settled at the west end of Lake Geneva in 1837. Robert Russell later moved to Iowa. Marcus Russell died in 1875.

[87] Christopher Douglass was born in Connecticut in 1797 and moved to Wisconsin in 1837, settling on Big Foot Prairie. In 1842 he moved to the town of Walworth, where he kept a hotel for several years. In 1857 he took up his residence at the head of Lake Geneva where he died in 1866.

[88] C. L. Douglass, son of Christopher Douglass, was born in New York November 4, 1827, and came to Wisconsin with his father in 1837. In 1857 he built and equipped Big Foot Mills which he continued to operate for thirty years. He died January 6, 1898.

[89] Fontana, a summer resort at the head of Lake Geneva, covers the site of the old Potawatomi village and is part of the old Van Slyke claim. It was purchased of Van Slyke in 1838 by Matthias Mohr, Amos Bailey, and Dr. Henry Clark, who platted and named the village.

[90] Mrs. John H. Kinzie, _Wau Bun, the early day in the North-west_ (New York, 1856), 318-22. Mrs. Kinzie in company with her husband, U. S. sub-Indian agent at Fort Winnebago, was making the trip from Chicago to Fort Winnebago (Portage) in 1831 when she visited Big Foot’s village. She describes the chief as a “large, rawboned, ugly Indian with a countenance bloated by intemperance, and with a sinister, unpleasant expression.”

[91] This was Big Foot’s son, who died about 1830. The body was encased in a rude coffin and fastened to the limbs of a tree overlooking the lake. Big Foot is said to have given as his reason for this mode of burial that his son had been unusually fond of lake scenery, and he would thus enjoy a fine view of it from the land to which he had gone.

[92] Big Foot was the last chief of his band to rule his people in their own land. In 1827, when the Winnebago were on the war path, Big Foot, a sturdy hater of the whites, tried to incite the Potawatomi to join the northern Indians. He was prevented by measures taken by Gov. Lewis Cass which culminated in the treaty of September 15, 1827. Being bound by former treaties, Big Foot remained neutral during the Black Hawk War. By the treaty of 1832 the territory of the Potawatomi and their allies, the Chippewa and the Ottawa, comprising southeastern Wisconsin, passed to the United States government. Big Foot refused to sign the treaty until the other chiefs had done so.

[93] Elbridge Gerry Ayer, born in Haverhill, Mass., July 25, 1813, came to Wisconsin in 1836. In 1847 he moved to Walworth, going from there to McHenry County, Ill. in 1857, where he founded the town of Harvard. There for eighteen years he and his wife conducted one of the best hotels in the state. During the Civil War they gave without pay food, lodging, and other assistance to the wounded Union soldiers detained in that vicinity. On the occasion of their golden wedding in 1885 Gov. James Lewis of Wisconsin, on behalf of the Wisconsin soldiers, presented to Mr. and Mrs. Ayer a gold cup, now in the museum of the Wisconsin Historical Society. The inscription is as follows: “Presented to Mr. and Mrs. E. G. Ayer by the Wisconsin soldiers as a token of remembrance and appreciation of the many acts of kindness toward them during the dark days of the Rebellion, from 1861 to 1865, Oct. 29, 1885.”

[94] Edward Everett Ayer, of Chicago, son of Mr. and Mrs. Elbridge G. Ayer, has long been connected with enterprises relating to arts and letters. He is a director of the Newberry Library, of the Field Museum, and of the Art Institute. He himself has one of the finest private libraries in the United States which contains manuscripts relating to the early history of North America, the Indians, Mexico, the West Indies, and the Philippines.

DESCRIPTION OF A JOURNEY TO NORTH AMERICA

FOREWORD

BY RASMUS B. ANDERSON

I have been asked to prepare a brief introduction for Ole Nattestad’s description of his journey from Norway to America in 1837. In complying with this request I shall make free use of facts and statements published by me in various other works and particularly in my _First Chapter of Norwegian Immigration_ (1906).

The Norsemen have an honorable place in the annals of America. We may, indeed, say that the civilized history of this country begins with the Norsemen. If you look at a map you will at once find that Greenland and even a part of Iceland belong to the western hemisphere, and Iceland became the hinge upon which the door swings that opens America to Europe. It was the occupation of Iceland by the Norsemen in the year 874 and the frequent voyages between this island and Norway that led to the discovery and settlement first of Greenland and then of America, and it is due to the culture and fine historical taste of the Icelanders that carefully prepared records of these Norse voyages were kept, first to teach pelagic navigation to Columbus and afterwards to solve for us the mysteries concerning the first discovery of this continent.

The old republican Vikings well understood the importance of studying the art of ship-building and of navigation. They knew how to measure time by the stars and how to calculate the course of the sun and moon. They were themselves pioneers in venturing out upon the high seas and taught the rest of the world to navigate the ocean. Every scrap of written history sustains me when I say that the other peoples of the world were limited in their nautical knowledge to coast navigation. The Norse Vikings who crossed the stormy North Sea, finding their way to Great Britain, to the Orkneys, the Faröes, and to Iceland, all those heroes who found their way to Greenland and Vinland, taught the world pelagic navigation. They demonstrated the possibility of venturing out of sight of land, and in this sense, if in no other, we may with perfect propriety assert that the Norsemen taught Columbus how to cross the Atlantic Ocean.

That the Norsemen held an honorable place in the annals of America is shown by a fact of the greatest importance in the world’s history, namely, that the Norsemen anticipated by five centuries Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucius and the new world was discovered by Leif Erikson in the year 1000. About the year 860 the Norsemen discovered Iceland and soon afterwards (in 874) they established upon this island a republic which flourished for 400 years. Greenland was seen for the first time in 876 by Gunnbjorn Ulfson from Norway. About a century later, in the year 984, Erik the Red resolved to go in search of the lands in the west which Gunnbjorn as well as others later had seen. He sailed from Iceland, and found a land as he had expected, and remained there exploring the country for two years. At the end of this period he returned to Iceland, giving the newly-discovered country the name of Greenland in order, as he said, to attract settlers who would be favorably impressed with so pleasing a name. Thus, as Greenland belongs geographically wholly to America, it will be seen that Erik the Red was the first white man to boom American real estate. And he was successful. Many Norsemen emigrated, particularly from Iceland, and a flourishing colony with Gardar as its capital and Erik the Red as its first governor was established and became the first settlement of Europeans in the new world. In the year 1261 it became subject to the crown of Norway. We have a list of seventeen bishops who served in Greenland. Erik the Red and his followers were not Christian when they settled in Greenland, but worshippers of Odin and Thor, though they relied chiefly on their own might and strength. Christianity was introduced among them about the year 1000, though Erik the Red continued to adhere to the religion of his fathers to his dying day.

The first white man whose eyes beheld any part of the American continent was the Norseman, Bjarne Herjulfson, who saw this land in the year 986. The first white man who, to our knowledge, planted his feet on the soil of the American continent was Leif Erikson, the son of Erik the Red, in the year 1000; and Leif’s brother Thorvald, who died in 1002, was the first white man and the first Christian who was buried beneath American sod. Thorfin Karlsefne, who landed in 1007, was the first white man to found a settlement within the limits of the present United States, and his wife, Gudrid, was the first white woman who came to Vinland. In the year 1008 she gave birth to a son in Vinland. The boy, who received in baptism the name Snorre, was the first person of European descent born in the new world. In 1112 Erik Upsi settled as bishop in Greenland and in 1121 this same bishop went on a missionary journey from Greenland to Vinland, the first visit of a Christian minister to the American continent. The last of these interesting voyages before the rediscovery of America by Columbus was in the year 1347 when a Greenland ship with a crew of eighteen men came from Nova Scotia (Markland) to Straumfjord in Iceland. Thus it appears that the Vinland voyages extended over a period of about 350 years and to within 145 years of the rediscovery of America by Columbus in 1492. From the accounts of these voyages and settlements we get our first knowledge and descriptions of the aborigines of America.

While Leif Erikson was the first white man to plant his feet on the eastern shores of the American continent, it was left to another plucky Scandinavian to become the discoverer of the narrow body of water which separates America from Asia. Vitus Bering was a Dane born in Jutland, in Denmark, in 1680. He entered the service of Russia and in 1725 was made commander-in-chief of one of the greatest geographical expeditions ever undertaken. He explored the Sea of Kamchatka and during this voyage in 1728 he discovered Bering Strait and ascertained that Asia was not joined to America, thus becoming the discoverer of the extreme western boundary line of the continent.

The first visit of Scandinavians to America proper in post-Columbian times occurred in the year 1619, just a year before the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. In the spring of that year King Christian IV fitted out two ships, the _Eenhjorningen_ and the _Lamprenen_, for the purpose of finding a northwest passage to Asia. The commander of this expedition was the Norwegian, Jens Munk, born at Barby in southern Norway in 1579. Sailing from Copenhagen with his two ships and sixty-six men May 9, 1619, he explored Hudson Bay and took possession of the surrounding country in the name of his sovereign and gave it the name of Nova Dania. All the members of this expedition perished except Jens Munk and two of his crew, who returned to Norway September 25, 1620, the undertaking having proved a complete failure. The ship chaplain on this expedition was a Danish Lutheran minister, Rasmus Jensen Aarhus, the first minister to preach Lutheranism in the new world. He died February 20, 1620, on the southwestern shore of Hudson Bay at the mouth of the Churchill River. His last sermon was a funeral sermon preached from his own death bed.

Norwegians and Danes came to New Amsterdam (New York) at a very early period. Traces of Scandinavians in New York can be found as early as 1617. In 1704 these Norwegians and Danes built a stone church on the corner of Broadway and Rector streets, where regular services were held in the Danish language until the property was sold to Trinity Church, the present churchyard occupying the site of the early building. The first directory published in New York shows many names of unquestionable Norwegian or Danish origin.

It is well known that the Swedes founded a settlement on the Delaware in 1638, and the Swedish language was used in a Philadelphia church as late as 1823. John Morton, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and an active member of the Continental Congress, was a descendant of the Swedes of Delaware. Robert Anderson, the gallant defender of Fort Sumter, against which the first gun of the Civil War was fired, was also a scion of the Swedes on the Delaware, and so it appears that love of freedom and patriotism and statecraft and valor came to America not only in the _Mayflower_ but also in the _Kalmarnyckel_ and _Vogelgrip_, which brought the first Swedish settlers to America in 1638.

How many Norwegians landed in America between the years 1492 and 1821 it is impossible to determine. There are no government statistics to guide us and we know there was no regular or systematic emigration from any of the Scandinavian countries. It is certain that no Norwegians came in collective bodies to form settlements, and we can trace them only through their descendants who have kept family records or through public documents or published works where they happen to be mentioned. In this way some of the Scandinavians who settled in New Amsterdam have been found.

In a similar manner we find the names of Norwegians and Swedes who took part in the war of the Revolution. There is the case of Thomas Johnson. In Volume 28 (1874) of the _New England Historical and Genealogical Register_ we find a full account of Thomas Johnson who served under Paul Jones, first in the crew of the _Ranger_ and afterwards in the crew of the _Bonhomme Richard_. Johnson was the son of a pilot at Mandal, a seaport on the southwest coast of Norway, where he was born in 1758. In the absence of his father, he towed the first American vessel, the _Ranger_, commanded by Paul Jones, into the harbor of Mandal. After their arrival Jones sent for the young pilot and, presenting him with a piece of gold, expressed his pleasure at his expert seamanship, which he had minutely watched during the towing of the ship into the harbor. Jones had made the port of Mandal for the purpose of recruiting the crew of the _Ranger_; and, satisfactory arrangements having been made with his father, Johnson was received on board as a seaman. Thomas Johnson died at the age of ninety-three at the United States Naval Asylum in Philadelphia on July 12, 1851; he had been there for many years a pensioner, and was known by the soubriquet “Paul Jones.” The account of Thomas Johnson led me to investigate further into the history of John Paul Jones, and in his biography, written by John Henry Sherburne, register of the navy of the United States, published at Washington in 1825, I found a roll of officers, seamen, marines, and volunteers who served on board the _Bonhomme Richard_ in her cruise made in 1779. In this roll the native country of every man is given and in it I found two seamen born in Norway and seven born in Sweden.

Here I may also mention the brilliant Swede, Colonel Axel Fersen, who, in 1779, went to France where he was appointed colonel of the Royal Regiment of Swedes. He served with distinction at the head of his regiment in the later campaigns of the American War, distinguishing himself on various occasions, particularly in 1781, during the siege of Yorktown, where he was aide-de-camp to General Rochambeau. He also took part in the negotiations between General Washington and General Rochambeau. He afterwards became Marshal of the kingdom of Sweden.

It is fair to presume that a considerable number of enterprising Scandinavians found their way to their old Vinland during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and particularly during the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

In the early days of the American republic diplomatic and consular relations were established with the Scandinavian countries, and there was more or less commerce between Norway, Sweden, and Denmark and the United States. This financial and commercial intercourse would naturally induce some Scandinavians to visit the United States and others to settle within our gates. The many Scandinavian names found in the old directories of New York, Philadelphia, and other eastern cities are largely to be accounted for in this manner.

From the year 1820 the United States government supplies us with immigration statistics, but in these Sweden and Norway are grouped together down to the year 1868, and hence it is impossible to determine until then how many immigrants came from each country. From the year 1836 we are helped out by Norway, where the government then began to collect and prepare statistics of emigration.

The father of Norwegian emigration to the United States in the nineteenth century was Kleng Peerson from near Stavanger, Norway. In the year 1821 he with a comrade, Knud Olson Eide, was sent from Norway to New York by the Society of Quakers in and near Stavanger for the purpose of making an investigation of conditions and opportunities in the United States. After a sojourn of three years in America, all that time being spent in and around New York City, they returned to Norway. Here their reports of social, political, and religious conditions in America and their description of opportunities in the new world awakened great interest, inducing a resolution on the part of many to emigrate. Lars Larsen, the man at whose house the first Quaker meeting had been held in Stavanger in 1816, at once undertook to organize a party of emigrants. Being successful in finding the number of people who were ready and willing to join him, the heads of families furnished their scanty possessions in money and purchased a sloop which had been built in the Hardanger Fjord between Stavanger and Bergen and which they loaded with a cargo of iron. For this sloop and cargo they paid the sum of $1,800.

This little Norwegian _Mayflower_ of the nineteenth century received the name _Restaurationen_ (the “Restoration”) and on the day of American Independence, July 4, 1825, the brave little company of emigrants sailed out of the harbor of the ancient and grotesque city of Stavanger. The company consisted of fifty-two persons, including the two officers, chiefly from Stavanger City and Tysver Parish, north of Stavanger. They were fifty-two when they left Stavanger, but when they reached New York on the second Sunday of October (October 9) they numbered fifty-three, the wife of the leader, Larsen, having given birth to a beautiful girl baby on the second of September.

From 1825 to 1836 there was but little emigration from Norway. Before 1836 there were no vessels carrying emigrants from Norway to America. Those who did emigrate came either by way of Gothenborg, Sweden, or Havre, in which cities passengers to America could be accommodated.

Gothenborg vessels carried Swedish iron to America but emigrants frequently had to wait for weeks before they found a ship bound for New York. From Hamburg regular packet ships carried German emigrants, but these were so numerous that there was frequently a delay of from two to three weeks before they could be accommodated. In Havre the emigrant packets were also regular but there were not so many emigrants and the Norwegians could count on going on the first ship leaving port. This made Havre the most popular point of departure from Europe for the Norwegians.

Of course, a great number of letters were written by the Norwegians in America to relatives and friends in Norway and these were read by hundreds who were anxious to better their fortunes. Finally, one of the sloop passengers, Knud Anderson Slogvig, returned to Norway in 1835 and the news that he had arrived at his old home in the Skjold district spread far and wide and created the greatest excitement. He was the hero of the day. People traveled hundreds of miles to see and talk with him. Letters from emigrants had been read with the deepest interest but here was a man who had spent ten years in the new world! Through Knud Slogvig the American fever spread beyond the limits of Stavanger Amt and Christiansand Stift. This led to the great exodus of 1836, when the two Koehler brigs, _Norden_ and _Den Norske Klippe_, were fitted out for emigrants in Stavanger and left that summer loaded with about two hundred passengers for New York. On board the _Norden_ my father and mother and my two oldest brothers were passengers. The American fever continued, calling for two ships in 1837, the _Aegir_ from Bergen and the _Enighedon_ from Egershund. Then there was a partial lull, until after 1840, when the American fever set in for good. It has continued to rage ever since, culminating in the year 1882, when over 29,000 Norwegians landed in the United States.

Those who came in the sloop _Restaurationen_ settled in Kendall, Orleans County, New York, on the shores of Lake Ontario. In 1833 we find Kleng Peerson in company with a Quaker, Ingebret Larsen Narvig, who had come from Norway to Boston in 1831 and footed it from there to Kendall, on their way to the far west. Larsen parted company with Kleng and went to work for a farmer in Michigan. Kleng continued his journey westward until he reached La Salle County, Illinois, and there selected the location of the second Norwegian settlement in this country. Kendall and Fox River settlement in Illinois was his undying glory. Most of the settlers in Orleans County, New York, on the advice of Kleng, moved to the Fox River settlement. In 1836 these were joined by the 200 immigrants who came in the _Norden_ and the _Den Norske Klippe_, and in 1837 by many of those who came in the _Aegir_ and the _Enighedon_.

One of the Norwegians who came in the _Aegir_ was Ole Rynning, a name well known in the annals of Norwegian immigration. On reaching Chicago he was persuaded by a couple of Americans to go with some of his friends to inspect lands some eighty miles south of Chicago along Beaver Creek with the view of founding a Norwegian settlement there. Ole Rynning chose as his companions on this journey of inspection Niels Veste from Etne in Norway, Ingebrigt Brudvig, and Ole Nattestad from Numedal, Norway, the latter the author of the book herewith published. Ole Nattestad and his brother, Ansten, had just arrived by way of Gothenborg, Sweden, and Fall River, Massachusetts, and joining a group of other immigrants in Detroit, Michigan, had accompanied them to Chicago. The rest of the company remained in Chicago to await the result. Ole Nattestad stated that he did not like the land, it being sandy and swampy, but as the others were pleased with it, it was agreed that Nattestad and Veste should remain and put up a log house for the reception of the immigrants while Rynning and Brudvig returned to Chicago to fetch their friends.

Some of those who were left in Chicago in the meantime had gone to the Fox River settlement but the most of them went with Rynning and Brudvig to Beaver Creek. There were no settlers in the immediate vicinity and it was difficult to procure the common necessities of life, although the most of these people were well supplied with money. Many of the new settlers grumbled and were inclined to find fault with Ole Rynning and the others who were responsible for the selection of this settlement. All chose land for farms, and before winter set in a sufficient number of log houses had been built. The number of settlers here was about fifty. These people were well and happy in America during the first winter, but the next spring the whole settlement was flooded and the swamp was turned into a veritable lake. In the summer the settlers were attacked by malarial fever. In a short time no less than fourteen or fifteen deaths occurred and among those who here found his last resting place was Ole Rynning. The survivors fled, leaving farms and houses, as there was nobody to buy land where a malarial atmosphere threatened the inhabitants with almost certain destruction. The most of those who fled found their way to the Fox River settlement, reaching there late in the summer of 1838. Only a few remained two or three years, defying the dangers to health and life, the last one to leave the colony being Mons Aadland, a brother of the well-known journalist and author, Knud Langland. He finally exchanged his farm for a small number of cows at auction and went to Racine County, Wisconsin, where he lived to a ripe old age.

Ole Rynning became particularly conspicuous and influential on account of a book which he published in Christiania, Norway, in 1838, the title of which is “Sandfaerdig Beretning on Amerika til Oplysning og Nytte for Bonde og Menigmand forfattet af en norsk, som kom derover i Juni Maaned 1837,” that is, “A Truthful Account of America for the Instruction and Help of the Peasant and Commoner Written by a Norwegian Who Came there in the Month of June, 1837.” The author’s name is given at the end of the preface where we read: “Illinois, February 13, 1838, Ole Rynning.”

This little book of only thirty-nine pages is now exceedingly scarce. I obtained a copy of it from Rev. B. J. Muus of Goodhue County, Minnesota. In the nineties I reprinted it in _Amerika_ and struck off about two hundred copies which I had bound and placed in various libraries. A copy of it may be found in the library of the Wisconsin State Historical Society.

We began with Erik the Red and Leif Erikson and have now come to the brothers, Ole and Ansten Nattestad. Ole K. Nattestad was born December 24, 1807; died May 28, 1886. His wife died September 15, 1888. Ansten K. Nattestad was born August 20, 1813; died April 8, 1889.

The fourth Norwegian settlement in America and the first in Wisconsin was founded by Ole Knudsen Nattestad (changed in America to Natesta) who was accordingly the first Norwegian to set foot on Wisconsin soil. He came to Clinton, Rock County, Wisconsin, July 1, 1838, and this was the beginning of the so-called Jefferson Prairie settlement, which occupies the southeast corner of Rock County and extends into Boone County, Illinois. They came from Vegli, Rolloug Parish in Numedal, Norway, by way of Gothenborg and Fall River, Massachusetts.

When the Beaver Creek settlement was abandoned, Ansten Nattestad, in the spring of 1838, returned to Norway, taking with him the Ole Rynning manuscript and also the manuscript of a journal kept by his brother, Ole Nattestad. Ansten stated that this manuscript of his brother was published in Drammen, Norway, that same year but in spite of the most diligent search I have never been able to secure a copy of that edition. In Norway copies of all publications are placed in the University Library. I had this library searched for a copy of Nattestad’s book but none could be found. In an interview published in _Billed Magazin_ in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1869, Ansten Nattestad made the following statement:

In the spring of 1838 I went from Beaver Creek, Illinois, by way of New Orleans to Liverpool in England and thence to Norway to visit friends and acquaintances in my native land. I brought with me letters from nearly all the earlier Norwegian emigrants whom I had met and in this way information was scattered far and wide in Norway. My brother’s journal was published in Drammen and Ole Rynning’s work on matters of the new world appeared at the same time in Christiania. Of Rynning’s book I brought the manuscript with me from America. The Rev. Mr. Kragh in Eidsvold read the proofs and left out the chapter about the Norwegian clergymen who therein were accused of intolerance in religious matters and inactivity in questions concerning the betterment of the people in temporal affairs and in questions concerning the advancement of education.

In 1869 Ole Nattestad gave the following account of himself in the _Billed Magazin_ referred to above:

As the next oldest of three brothers, I did not have the right of primogeniture to my father’s farm which, according to law, and custom, would go to the oldest son. My ambition was to become a farmer, and I hoped some day to be able to buy a farm in my own neighborhood. Then my brother entered the military school in Christiania and I was to manage the farm during his absence. I entered upon my task cheerfully, worked with all my might and kept a careful account of income and disbursements. To my great surprise, I soon found that in spite of all my toil and prudence, I did not make much headway. When the year was ended, I had little or nothing left as a reward for my labor and it was clear to me that it would not do to buy an expensive farm and run in debt for it. Farming did not pay in the locality where I was born. I then tried the occupation of an itinerant merchant. I could earn a living in this way, but the laws were against me and I did not like to carry on a business of such a nature that it was necessary to keep my affairs secret from the _lensmand_ [undersheriff]. Then I worked awhile as a blacksmith. This furnished me enough to do, but it was difficult to collect the money I earned. The law did not permit me to work at my trade in the city. Then [in 1836] my younger brother, Ansten, and I went across the mountains to the western part of Norway to buy sheep which we intended to sell again. While we were stopping in the vicinity of Stavanger, we heard much talk about a country which was called America. This was the first time we heard this word. We saw letters written by Norwegians who were living in America and we were told that Knud Slogvig, who, many years before that had emigrated in a sloop [_Restaurationen_] from Stavanger, had lately visited his native land and had given so favorable a report about America that about 150 [should be 200] emigrants from Stavanger Amt and from Hardanger had gone back with him and had sailed that very summer [1836] in two brigs from Stavanger across the ocean. They had gone in spite of all sorts of threats and warnings about slavery, death, and disease. This was the first large exodus after the emigration of the sloop party in 1825. All that we here saw was so new and came to us so unexpectedly that we were not at once able to arrange all the reports into a systematic whole and thus get a correct idea of conditions in the new world. But when I spent the following Christmas with Even Nubbru who was a member of the Storthing from Sigdal we discussed the hard times in my native valley and I suggested that I might have better luck in some other part of the country. In replying Even Nubbru remarked that wherever I went in the world, I would nowhere find a people who had as good laws as the Americans. He had accidentally just had the opportunity of reading something about America in a German newspaper and he described the free institutions of America. This information had a magic effect on me as I looked upon it as an injustice that the laws of Norway should forbid me to trade and not allow me to get my living by honest work as a mechanic wherever I desired to locate. I had confidence in the judgment of the member of the Storthing and I compared his remarks with what I had heard about America in the vicinity of Stavanger. Gradually I got to thinking of emigration and while considering the matter on my way home, the idea matured into a resolution. My brother Ansten did not have to be asked a second time. He was willing at once; he approved of my plans and in April, 1837, we were ready for our journey. When we left home, we had together about eight hundred dollars, Norwegian money, but this sum gradually grew less on account of our expenses on the way and besides we lost considerable in changing our money into American coin. Ansten also paid the passage for Halsten Halvorsen Braekke-Eiet who now [1869] resides in Dodgeville [Wisconsin], and is looked upon as an excellent blacksmith.

Our equipment consisted of the clothes we wore, a pair of skis, and a knapsack. People looked at us with wonder and intimated that we must have lost our senses. They suggested that we had better hang ourselves in the first tree in order to avoid a worse fate. We went on skis across the mountains from Rolloug to Tin and thence in a direct line over hills and through forests to Stavanger, where we expected to get passage across the sea. We did not worry about the roads for all three of us were experts on skis and our baggage caused us no inconvenience. In Stavanger we told everybody that we were going to America and wanted to secure passage across the sea. This open-heartedness came near spoiling our plans. The report of three mountaineers soon spread over the whole city and high government officials came to see our passports. We were now told that the bailiff’s passport only permitted us to go to Stavanger while the certificate from the pastor correctly stated that we intended to leave the country and emigrate to America. We were not versed in such things and thought our papers were in order, especially as the documents we carried gave testimony that we were men of good habits and Christian conduct. No suspicious remarks were made but in the evening there came a man who was angry on account of the wrong the officials were going to do us and related that it had been resolved that we were to be arrested the following day and then to be sent from _lensmand_ to _lensmand_ to our native valley as we intended to leave the country without permission being given in the passport from the bailiff. The government here, he said, was in a bitter rage against all emigrants and we could not count on any mercy. On this man’s advice we departed secretly from Stavanger under cover of night in order to avoid the danger that threatened us and without attracting any attention we got to Tananger. Here we met a skipper who, with his yacht loaded with herring, was ready to sail to Gothenborg. He promised to take us on board, but when we told him what had happened to us in Stavanger, he became doubtful. He praised our honesty, and on further assurance that we would assume all responsibility if we got in trouble, he decided to accept us as passengers. We acted discreetly while we were ashore and we felt greatly relieved when we finally got to sea. In Gothenborg we had no mishaps, and we secured passage in a vessel loaded with Swedish iron and bound for Fall River, Massachusetts. The journey lasted thirty-two days and we paid fifty dollars each for transportation and board. From Fall River we went to New York where we met a few Norwegians who helped us to get to Rochester. Here we talked with some of our countrymen who, twelve years ago, had come in the sloop from Stavanger that brought the first Norwegian immigrants to America. Rochester and vicinity did not meet our expectations in regard to the new world. Many of the first immigrants had left the first settlement in Kendall and had gone west to find new lands, particularly to La Salle County, Illinois, near Ottawa on the Fox River. The Fox River colony received a very considerable increment by the great exodus from Stavanger in 1836, that is, the year before I came to America. The most of these immigrants had located in that settlement. This we learned in Rochester, and there we heard for the first time the name Chicago. We determined to go west and see what we could find. When we had reached Detroit, I was walking in the streets to look at the town. There I accidentally met a man by whose clothes I could see that he was from the western coast of Norway. I greeted the man and he returned my greeting, and the meeting was like that of two brothers who had not seen each other for years. He informed me that he had left Bergen some months before, together with about seventy [should be eighty-four] passengers and that the whole company of which the University secretary, Ole Rynning, was the leader, had been waiting a week for transportation to Chicago. We were glad to meet our countrymen and we joined the party, in which there was at least one [Rynning] who could speak English. On landing in Chicago we met Bjorn Anderson Kvelve [the father of the present editor] from the Stavanger company. He had come to America the year before [1836] and had travelled through various parts of Illinois but all that he had heard and seen had only served to make him dissatisfied with this side of the ocean. Broken down in soul and body, he stood before us as a victim of misery and produced a scene so terrible that it never will be blotted from my memory. “God bless and comfort you!” said he. “There is neither work nor land nor food to be had and by all means do not go to Fox River; there you will all die from malarial fever.” These words had a terrible effect on our little flock, many of whom had already lost all courage. Like demons from the lower world, all the evil warnings about the terrors that awaited the emigrants to America were now called to mind and even the bravest were as by magic stricken by a panic which bordered on insanity. The women wrung their hands in despair and uttered terrible shrieks of woe. Some of the men stood immovable like statues with all the marks of frightful despair on their faces, while others made threats against those whom they regarded as the promoters of emigration and the leaders of the party. But in this critical situation Ole Rynning’s greatness appeared. He stood in the midst of the people who were ready for mutiny; he comforted those in despair and gave advice to those who doubted and hesitated and reproved those who were obstinate. He was not in doubt for a moment and his equanimity, courage, and noble self-sacrifice for the weal of others had acquired him influence in the minds of all. The storm abated and the dissatisfaction gave place to a unanimous confidence. A couple of Americans with whom Rynning talked advised him to take the immigrants to Beaver Creek, directly south of Chicago in Iroquois County.

It seems to me that the story told about my father must, to say the least, be overdrawn. The facts as I have them from my mother, from Mons Aadland, and even from Ole Nattestad himself, do not warrant the painting of so weird a picture. All the prose there is in the romance is that my father met these people in Chicago and was unwilling to recommend the Fox River settlement with which he was not pleased, and as he had never seen Iroquois County, he had no share in recommending the immigrants to go to Beaver Creek. His dissatisfaction with the Fox River settlement is further confirmed by the fact that in 1840 he found a new home in Albion, Dane County, Wisconsin. In support of my view, I may here quote the words of Prof. Svein Nilsson in _Billed Magazin_ (1869) where, in alluding to the Beaver Creek settlement he states:

Ole Rynning’s company met Bjorn Anderson Kvelve in Chicago. The unfavorable description he gave of the land both west and north frightened the immigrants from locating in any of the existing Norwegian colonies and this resulted in the founding of the Beaver Creek Settlement whose sad story is well known to the Scandinavian population in the northwest. In this connection bitter reproaches have been directed against Bjorn Anderson Kvelve as being in a great measure to blame for the fatalities of Beaver Creek. But it is usually the case that people like to seek in others the cause of their misfortune. This is true of the individual as well as of corporations and societies and perhaps a little more so in the case of the immigrants visited by adversity. At all events, it is our opinion that we do a justice to the man when we say that the criticism of Bjorn Anderson Kvelve has been too severe, if not utterly unfounded.

Ole Nattestad continues:

In the spring of 1838 my brother, Ansten, went to Norway and I worked by the day in the northern part of Illinois.

The first of July, 1838, I came to my present home in about the middle of the town of Clinton, Rock County, Wisconsin, where I bought land and I am consequently the first Norwegian to settle in this state. So far as known, no other Norwegian had planted his feet on Wisconsin soil before me. For a whole year I saw no countryman but lived alone without friend, family, or companion. Eight Americans had settled in the town before me but they lived about as isolated as I