Authors: Garrison Keillor
The oldest living Wobegonian, Mr. Henry Anderson, eighty-nine, is in a state of decline, and his memory of town history now includes such things as President Warren G. Harding living at the Sons of Knute temple and elephants in the woods and people running down the street after the Great Earthquake, so the oldest reliable memory may be Hjalmar Ingqvist’s, of his grandfather standing with an arm around an elm tree on a summer night singing
“Til Norge In Sogn Or Rein”
(“To Norway in Sun or Rain”) with tears running down his cheeks. He was sixty years away from Norway, still he sang—
O Norway, your rugged mountains and towering pines call to me though I have crossed the ocean never to return.
O bird in the sky, fly quickly and tell all of my dear ones that my heart is filled with unspeakable love and sorrow.
Homesickness hit the old-timers hard, even after so many years, and it was not unusual, Hjalmar says, to see old people weep openly
for Norway or hear about old men so sad they took a bottle of whiskey up to the cemetery and lay down on the family grave and talked to the dead about home, the home in Norway, heavenly Norway.
America was the land where they were old and sick, Norway where they were young and full of hopes—and much smarter, for you are never so smart again in a language learned in middle age nor so romantic or brave or kind. All the best of you is in the old tongue, but when you speak your best in America you become a yokel, a dumb Norskie, and when you speak English, an idiot. No wonder the old-timers loved the places where the mother tongue was spoken, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Sons of Knute lodge, the tavern, where they could talk and cry and sing to their hearts’ content.
O Norway, land of my childish fancies, thy dark green forest is where my soul goes to seek comfort.
O bird in the sky, tell me—do they remember me in the old home or am I a stranger wherever I roam?
Hjalmar was ten years old, the president of the fifth grade, and when his grandfather cried, Hjalmar got up and left the room.
His father heard the old man out and said, “Well, Father, if you’re unhappy here, I will be happy to pay your fare back.” The old man sighed. He remembered the trip over. Fourteen days across the North Atlantic in heavy weather. Men, women, and children packed into dark rooms that stank like a stable. The room rolling, rising and falling. Everyone lay on wooden pallets. A girl from near his village in Trond-heim fell ill the first day at sea. An old woman took one look and said,
Mother
, but the girl cried, No! And died four days later in childbirth. The baby died too. They were buried at sea.
That was the voyage over, and in the old man’s mind that would be the voyage back. In America where he lived, he was dying, and the ship back to his true life in Norway was the ship of death. He would take that ship eventually. He was not ready to go just yet.
Hjalmar’s father owned the majority interest in the Farmers’ Grain Elevator and Flour Mill, traveled regularly on business to Chicago, once spoke to William Howard Taft (on the train, in English), and was a considerable man, not the sort to suddenly burst into tears for another
country. He spoke Norwegian only when spoken to. At seventeen, he had gone to work for Mr. Weeks who owned the elevator and mill, a gentleman who avoided the office whenever possible, preferring to stay home and read Emerson, and Jonson Ingqvist, left to his own, learned the business quickly. He was glad to run it and, in 1908, after three years of poor crops, when Mr. Weeks panicked, Jonson was glad to take it off his hands for a modest price, no cash in advance. There were rumors that Jonson had juggled the books. He said only, “Mr. Weeks read too much. He wasn’t so bad off as he thought.” Jonson outsmarted him in the English language, and he was proud of it. Mr. Weeks was foolish and lacked faith in the land and the farmers, and Jonson had faith, but he also had very good English and spoke it with little trace of an accent.
He campaigned for English in the Lutheran church. “When we preach in Norwegian, we preach only to ourselves and to fewer and fewer of us,” he said. “This is no preaching, this is speaking in tongues!” He believed that since they were in America, they should be Americans. (“Of course, America had been good to him,” says Clarence Bunsen. “The rich can afford to be progressive. Poor people have reason to be afraid of the future.” Clarence’s grandfather worked for the Ingqvists, filling flour sacks.)
When Birgit Tollefson, Hjalmar’s sister, moved back from Honolulu in 1964 after her husband died, she plunged into service for the Mist County Historical Society, gathering up old letters, papers, and other artifacts, doubling the Society’s collection in a year’s time, much to the displeasure of Mrs. Halvorson, who, before Birgit showed up, had
been
the Society. “We don’t have room for all that junk!” Mrs. Halvorson complained to anyone who would listen to her. “She’s hauling in everybody’s attic! I looked in one of those boxes and found ten pairs of ladies’ underwear!
Underwear
, mind you! Are we going to have a display of
underwear?
Get a big glass case and fill it up with
underwear?
Why not enema bottles and thunder jugs? Why don’t we collect all the
outhouses?
We could have forty or fifty of them, all in good working order!”
There wasn’t room for both of them in the Society, so Birgit founded the Daughters of the Pioneers, membership limited to
descendants of Norwegian families who settled in Lake Wobegon by 1895, which neatly cut out Mrs. Halvorson, whose grandfather had come in 1896.
After Honolulu, Birgit’s Norwegian heritage appeared wonderful and exotic to her. “Marvelous,” she cried, holding up some old
rose-maling
painting that had been on someone’s kitchen wall for fifty years. “Marvelous! Incredible!” Anything Norwegian held fascination for her: any antique that had been in Norwegian hands, old Norwegian newspapers that she could not read, old family pictures held her spellbound for minutes, even pictures of families she had never known—they were Norwegian and that was all that mattered.
For
Syttende Mai
of 1965, the Daughters planned a procession to the cemetery, and the question arose: who should carry the flag? The committee voted for an honor guard of seven Daughters whose ancestors had arrived first, and the club archivist, Darlene Tollerud, set about looking through old letters and church records to see whose ancestors would be the winners.
In a chest that Birgit had gotten from Luther Rognes, Darlene found a packet of letters written by Magnus Oleson to his family in Norway, which the family brought when they joined Magnus in the New World, and what was clearer than day in the letters was the fact that Magnus was not only the first arrival, he was also a deserter from General George McClellan’s army. Magnus, on reaching New York in 1861, had accepted $200 from a man named West to take his place in the Army which Magnus understood would be for only a few weeks, and when he found that army life was brutal, the food was not fit for animals, the camp was full of sickness, the officers were cruel, and he, who scarcely spoke English, was being put in places where people shot at him, he decided it was no war for a Norwegian. His only good words were for General McClellan who did not push the army too hard to go into battle. That was fine with Magnus. He had written to Lincoln, explaining the odd circumstances that had brought him into a war that he wanted no part of, and got no reply. “He does not care, he is a butcher and a barbarian,” Magnus wrote to his family.
A few days later, he wrote again. He had stolen an officer’s horse and was in Kentucky. He went from there to Wisconsin and then to Minnesota, putting as much distance as possible between himself and
the fighting. He arrived in Lake Wobegon on the stolen horse in the summer of 1863, about the time his regiment was being destroyed in the battle of Gettysburg. He bought land north of town where he lived all his life, dying in 1911. He fathered eight children, two of whom died in infancy. The six others bore children of their own, and one way and another, the name of Magnus Oleson was in the family tree of almost every Norwegian in town.
The idea of the honor guard was quietly put aside. A baton twirler carried the flag. The Daughters marched together in a group.
Clarence Bunsen told his wife Arlene, a Daughter, “I don’t see how you can hold it against your ancestor for not getting himself killed. If all of us had heroes for ancestors, then where would that leave us?” She said it was a shock, that was all, and people would get over it in time.
When Magnus arrived in 1863 from the bloody campaigns of the Union army, the town was still New Albion, the citizens were New Englanders, whom he called Woodmen—from the name of their lodge, The Mystical and Enlightened Order of Woodmen, and also from their appearance; their faces looked like lumber. Nobody greeted him in Norwegian. He knew only enough English to ask for what he wanted. He got a job in the New Albion Mill shelling corn, which was done by walking horses over it, and boarded with a family named Watson, which treated him like a young and not very bright child. In a photograph of townspeople gathered at the church after hearing of the assassination of President Lincoln, a short figure in a white shirt whose face is blurred appears to the far right of the crowd of black suits; it is assumed to be him. He appears to have only stopped in passing and then not to have stood still enough; certainly his loyalty to Lincoln’s cause was very slight. He wrote home to Norway:
Men will walk ten miles for a scrap of news about the war and then walk back and discuss it late into the evening. A newspaper from St. Paul or Chicago is a feast to them although it is full of lies. They are all strong for the Union here, having never fought for it or seen the bodies stacked like firewood. I lie in my bed and listen to them. Their voices sound like woodsaws!
Three veterans returned to New Albion of the twelve young men who left, including Albert Watson, who asked Magnus questions about his whereabouts the past few years. “It is a great advantage at times not to understand English,” he wrote, “and at times I find it better to understand less than I do.” One night Albert arrived home late from a lyceum at which a Horatio Stevens had spoken on “The American Republic as a Movement Of Regeneration” and seized the young millhand by his leg and hauled him out of bed, but Albert was too weak to beat him. He sank to the floor exhausted. He was flushed and feverish. He was coming down with diphtheria.
The diphtheria epidemic swept through New Albion in three horrible weeks of October 1865, and devastated many families, killing thirty-seven children, eleven women, and four men, including Albert. Dr. Thompson drove himself to exhaustion, riding for miles into the country from bedside to bedside late into the night, dozing off in the buggy when his horse finally headed for home, awakening a few hours later with a new call for help, a new case, another frantic father at his door. There was little that a doctor could do. The only treatment was to offer hot raw alcohol to try to keep the throat open: at first by the spoonful, and then, if the patient got worse, by the cup, until the poor person began to choke and gasp for the last few gulps of breath; then the doctor could only hold them as they struggled.
All that month and for weeks after, New Albion was practically a ghost town. People were terrified of contagion and avoided any contact with their neighbors. What with his daily contact with the sick, Dr. Thompson was shunned by the well. His own wife and children left for St. Cloud, and when people there learned where they had come from, the family was told to move on to St. Paul. School was closed, of course, and church. Those merchants who still could stand retreated to a back room when customers came in. Any communication was shouted from a distance. Out in the country, men on their way to town stopped their teams fifty yards from an infected house and shouted, “Do you need anything?” and if the inhabitants were strong enough to shout back what they wanted, their neighbors brought it—flour and pork, beans, coffee, maybe brandy, liniment, Dr. Clarke’s Oil of Arnica—and left it on a stump, but if the passerby heard nothing, he went on. Days passed before someone came out and looked in the house.
That someone was often Magnus, who was untouched by the disease, having encountered it in the army, and who devoted himself to burying the dead. He was offered money for this and after giving it thought he accepted it. The work was hard, and he was the only one who seemed up for it.
The word came at night—a farmer stopped and shouted up at my window, and in the morning I hitched up the horse and drove out six miles across the fields where corn rots for lack of able bodies to pick it, arriving at the silent little house about ten o’clock. I knocked and heard a very slight scraping inside, the door opened slowly and a man who looked almost dead himself looked out the crack and then withdrew. A moment later he reappeared and with great difficulty opened the door wider and passed out to me the sad little bundle of his dead son wrapped in a piece of blanket. He did not weep for he was too sick, and I did not weep either for I have done this so many times. I carried the precious cargo to a grove of trees about thirty feet away where I had already dug the hole and placed the child in it and set to work. I prayed as I shoveled. There was not even time for a hymn! I did not pray for the child’s soul, for of that I had no doubt that it was with the angels, but rather prayed that God would give me many children of my own. I would like to have twenty or thirty!
It was not until 1867 that the woman arrived from St. Paul to become his wife, and while he waited for her, he began to prosper a little. During the epidemic he did the work of six men, and when the town recovered, he was promoted to foreman of the mill, the old foreman having left in a panic, and he bought a house in the woods about a half-mile from town for $30, the former inhabitant having died of the disease. He carried all the furniture out of the house, piled it in the field, doused it with kerosene, and burned it: a featherbed and bedstead and black walnut dresser, a rocking chair, a fine oak table and two chairs, a sideboard, a divan, and much more—the deceased, a young man by the name of Ward, having been prosperous, though Magnus had never seen him work a day. He left behind a closetful of
fine suits and white shirts, which Magnus also put to the torch. Only the two stoves remained.