The Settlers (5 page)

Great was the land and without measure, and the land broadened their dreams.

This is a continuation of a story of a group of people who left their homes in Ljuder, Sweden, and emigrated to North America.

Sweden was the land they left behind; the American republic received them; and the fertile valley near Lake Ki-Chi-Saga—between the Mississippi and the St. Croix rivers—was the land they changed.

I

NEW AXES RINGING IN THE FOREST

—1—

One day in May Karl Oskar Nilsson was out on his claim cutting fence posts. When the height of the sun signaled noon he stopped his work to go home for dinner.

He took off one of his wooden shoes and emptied out a few dried lumps of blue clay which had chafed his heel. On his shoe was a deep gash from his ax. What luck that he wore wooden shoes today; in the morning, while shaping the first linden post, his ax had slipped and fastened in the toe of his right shoe. Had he worn leather boots the ax would have split his foot. Not that he could choose. His high boots—of finest leather, made by the village cobbler before he had left his Swedish home parish—were long since worn out and thrown away. After all the many miles he had tramped in them, in all weathers and on all types of roads during his three years in North America, they were now entirely gone. He had tried his hand at the shoemaker’s craft, as well as all other crafts, and he had mended and patched his Swedish boots, he had plugged and resoled and sewn as much as he could. But nearly all the footgear and clothing from Sweden was now useless, worn to shreds.

With his ax under his arm, he walked beside the lake on the path he had cleared, through groves of larch trees and elms, through thickets of maple and hazel bushes. It was pleasant along the path today with the multitude of newly opened leaves and all the fresh greenery. Spring was early this year in the Territory. The wild apple trees were already in full bloom and shone luminously white in the lush greenery. A mild night rain had watered the earth so that a fragrance rose from grass and flowers. Between the tree trunks the whole length of Lake Ki-Chi-Saga’s surface glittered blue.

For great stretches the lush green growth hung over the lake and no one could make out where the ground ended and the water began. Farther out the bay was full of birds—ducks, swans, and wild geese in such multitudes they might have been strewn from heaven by generous hands. From the shore could be seen a thick wall of tall elms. At first Karl Oskar had thought it was the opposite side of the lake but when he rowed out in his holed-out canoe along the shores he had discovered it was a wooded island, with still another great island beyond. He had discovered that Ki-Chi-Saga consisted of seven small lakes, connected by narrow channels so that the shores formed a confusing and ever straying coil. This was a lake landscape, a conglomeration of islets, peninsulas, points, inlets, bays, necks, headlands, isthmuses. Each islet, bay, or tongue of land had another islet, bay, or tongue of land behind it.

It took a long time for a settler to get to know this lake. Ki-Chi-Saga spread like an inundated deciduous forest where water had remained in the indentations as the ground had risen above the ancient flood. From a distance of a few miles it appeared the thickets of leaf trees on the out-jutting tongues of land grew far out in the lake.

High above the shore rose the imposing sandstone cliff resembling an Indian’s head and thus called the Indian. The cliff’s red-brown face with the deep, black eye holes was turned toward the lake, straining toward the east like a watchman over land and water.

The lake contained much that was unknown and undiscovered. The Chippewa name itself sounded strange; Ki-Chi-Saga—beautiful lake—sounded to a settler’s ears as alien as all the foreignness he must familiarize himself with and make his own.

A wide flock of doves came flying over the bay, like a darkening cloud; their shadows reflected in the clear surface like quick-moving spots.

When the doves had passed, Karl Oskar stopped and listened: the whizzing sound of bird wings was followed by another sound; he could hear the ring of an ax.

The May day was clear and calm and the sound carried far. Karl Oskar had two good ears, accustomed to discriminating between noises and sounds in the forest, and he was not mistaken. He could hear the echoing sound of a sharp ax in a tree trunk. The sounds came from the southeast and were fairly close: someone was felling a tree near the lake.

His eyebrows drew together. It could not be an Indian at work—the Indians did not fell trees with axes. It must be a white man; an intruder had come to his land.

But he had his papers as squatter for this ground; he had made two payments for his claim at the land office in Stillwater. His claim had been surveyed—it was number 35 of the section—and its borders were blazed. No one could now push him out, no one could deny him his rights. Here in his forest he had up till now heard only his own ax ringing; he would permit no other ax here.

Karl Oskar turned and retraced his steps to locate the intruder.

Last year, because of the danger of Indians, he had always carried his gun while working in the forest. It might also happen that he would come across an animal that would do for food. He often said that he did not feel fully clothed without his gun. Nowadays, however, he frequently left his weapon at home hanging on the wall, and this he had done today. Nor did he think he would need a firearm against the stranger; a man using the peaceful tool of the ax must be a peaceful man.

Karl Oskar strode toward the sound. The timberman was farther away than he had anticipated; sounds could be heard a great distance on a calm day like today. It appeared that the stranger with the ax was outside his border; no intruder was on his land.

Who could the woodsman be? He had no close neighbors; it could not be anyone he knew. He climbed a steep cliff, and now he could see that the sounds came from a pine grove near a narrow channel of the lake. A man was cutting at a straight, tall pine, his broad felling-ax glittering in the sun. The chips flew like white birds that might have been nesting in the trunk and were frightened away by the blows.

Just as Karl Oskar approached, the tree fell with a thunderous crash, crushing the smaller trees near it. The undergrowth swayed from the force of the fall.

The tree cutter held his ax in his left hand while he dried perspiration from his forehead with his right. He was a powerful man, dressed in a plaid flannel shirt, yellow, worn skin breeches, and short-legged boots. Judging by his clothes he must be an American. And he used the same type of long-handled American felling-ax with a thin, broad blade that Karl Oskar recently had got for himself.

Suspicion of any stranger was still ingrained in the Swedish settler; apprehensively he stopped a few paces from the stump of the newly felled pine. The stranger heard him and turned around. His face was lean and weather-beaten, with high cheekbones and deep hollows. Tufts of sweaty, thin hair clung to his forehead; his chin was covered with a long brown beard.

The man eyed Karl Oskar from head to toe, his alert eyes those of a person accustomed to danger.

Before Karl Oskar had time to phrase a greeting in English, the stranger said, “You’re Swedish, I guess?”

Karl Oskar stared back in astonished silence; deep in this wilderness he had encountered a stranger who spoke to him in his native tongue.

Leaning his ax against the stump, the man offered Karl Oskar his hand: “I’m Petrus Olausson, from Alfta parish in Helsingland. I’m a farmer.”

Karl Oskar Nilsson gave his name in return, and added that he was a farmer from Ljuder parish in Småland.

“I knew you were a Swede!”

“How did you know?”

“By looking at your feet!” The Helsinge farmer smiled good-naturedly and pointed to Karl Oskar’s footgear. “Your wooden shoes, man! Only Swedes wear wooden shoes!” He grinned, showing long, broad upper teeth.

Karl Oskar knew that the Americans called the Swedish settlers the wooden-shoe people.

Petrus Olausson took off his hat and uncovered a bald spot on top of his head. He seemed to be about forty, ten years older than Karl Oskar. His clothes and his speech indicated he was no newcomer to America. He used the same mixed-up language as Anders Månsson of Taylors Falls, one of the first Swedes in the Territory.

“What kind of wood do you use for your wooden shoes, Mr. Nilsson?”

Karl Oskar replied that as alder trees did not grow in this valley he used basswood, the American linden tree. It was softer than Swedish linden wood and easy to work. But he had poor tools and was unable to make comfortable, light shoes.

He looked at the newcomer’s ax next to the stump; it had an even broader and thinner blade than his own American felling-ax.

“You can work faster with American tools,” said the owner of the ax. “The Yankees do everything easier. Better take after them.”

He took Karl Oskar for a newcomer here and looked disapprovingly at the Swedish ax he was carrying, with its clumsy head and thick edge. Karl Oskar explained that it was an old split-ax he used for post-making, and added, “From Helsingland, eh? You look like an American to me.”

He need not ask Petrus Olausson his errand here; no one felled trees for the fun of it. Olausson had come to stay.

The sound of timber axes in the forest had brought together two Swedish farmers. They had met as strangers but as soon as they had inspected each other’s axes they felt they had known each other before and were now merely renewing acquaintance. They were both men of peaceful occupation, wielding the tools of peaceful labor. Karl Oskar Nilsson from Ljuder, Småland, and Petrus Olausson from Alfta, Helsingland, sat down on the stump and talked at ease, talked intimately as if for many years they had lived on neighboring homesteads in the same village.

Around the men rose the great, ageless pines, and as far as the eye could see not a human habitation was in sight. It was an unbroken, uninhabited land, these shores of Lake Ki-Chi-Saga.

“Good land,” said the Helsinge farmer. “I aim to settle at this lake.”

“You are welcome,” said Karl Oskar, and he meant it. “Plenty of room, empty of people so far.”

“Yeah, we needn’t push for space.”

Olausson pointed to a hut of branches between two fallen pines, about a gunshot’s distance from where they sat; that was his shanty. He had begun felling timber for his cabin, and as soon as it was ready his wife and children would come. He had come to this country with his family, he told Karl Oskar, in the company of the prophet Erik Janson; that was seven years ago, in 1846. They had been living in Illinois but did not like it on the flat prairie; they wanted to live in wooded country, like their home province Helsingland. Another farmer from Alfta, Johannes Nordberg, had been up looking over Minnesota, and he had come back and told them the country up here was rich growing land and suitable for settling. It was on the advice of his neighbor that Olausson had come here. Nordberg himself would never return—he had died of cholera in Andover last summer.

Karl Oskar had heard that a farmer from Helsingland by the name of Nordberg was at this lake several years ago; he pointed to an island in line with a tongue of land. There were remnants there of a hut in which Nordberg had stayed. In summertime there were hordes of Indians here, and he had probably lived on the isle to be in peace. This first land seeker’s name was linked to the place; it was still called Nordberg’s Island.

“Johannes told the truth,” said his onetime neighbor. “This is a land of plenty.”

Petrus Olausson had picked a good place for himself, with fine timber forest and rich grass meadows. And he told Karl Oskar that several more countrymen were on their way to the St. Croix Valley, attracted by Nordberg’s descriptions.

“Well, the country is getting to be known,” said Karl Oskar. “How did you happen to stake your claim next to mine?”

“I went to the land office and picked it from the map,” he said. “The east part of section 35, township 34, range 20.”

The Helsinge farmer knew how to claim land; he had been in America twice as long as Karl Oskar, who, talking with him, felt like a newcomer beside an older and more experienced settler.

“I think my wife has something cooking—would you like to eat with us?” he asked.

“How far is it to go?”

“Less than a mile. I have the northeast claim.”

“All right. Might as well see your place.”

From the top of a young pine dangled a piece of venison he had intended to fry for his dinner, but it wasn’t very warm today and the meat would keep till tomorrow.

The settlers got up from the stump. The younger man walked ahead and showed the way.

“When did you come and settle here, Nilsson?”

Karl Oskar told him that next Midsummer Eve it would be three years since he and his family had landed in New York, and they had arrived in the Territory the last day of July. In the same year, 1850, he had taken his claim here at the lake.

Without being conscious of it, Karl Oskar walked today in longer strides than usual. He was bringing home news that would gladden Kristina; after three long years of isolation they now had a neighbor.

—2—

The two men stopped where the path left the shore and turned up the hill to the log cabin. Olausson looked about in all directions: pine forest to the west, oaks, maples, elms, and other leaf trees to the north and east, Lake Ki-Chi-Saga to the south. At their feet lay the broad meadow, partly broken, and a tended field.

“A likely place, I must say! First come gets the best choice!”

And Karl Oskar agreed—he had had good luck when he found this place. He called his settlement Duvemåla (dovecote) after his wife’s home village in Sweden. A most suitable name, thought the Helsinge farmer; here too were so many doves that they obscured the sun.

The children playing outside the cabin had seen their father and came running toward him. They came in a row, according to age: Johan, the oldest, first; next Lill-Marta; after her, Harald; and behind them toddled little Dan, who had walked upright on this earth barely a year; his small, unstable legs still betrayed him so that he fell a couple of times, delaying his run behind his brothers and sister. But he was close to the ground and did not cry when he fell.