The Settlers (56 page)

Kristina loved her stove as if it had been a living being. She looked after it carefully, dusted it every day, and polished away spots and grease and soot. The Prairie Queen always sat shining clean in its elevated place, an enduring, elegant decoration for their home. And it was the first object a caller’s eyes would light upon when entering the kitchen. She always received her homage: what a beautiful stove!

The only name they used for it was the Queen: Have you fired the Queen? Has the Queen burned down? Did you empty the Queen’s ashes? The potato pot is boiling over on the Queen! Get some wood for the Queen! And they were proud they had a stove they could speak of as royalty, even though it was their servant.

Karl Oskar said that of course an Englishman must have named it; an American would have called it Mrs. President of the Prairie. But he himself was a man who insisted the real truth be known in his house.

“You, Kristina,
you
are the queen in our kitchen!”

To this she laughed heartily, her hands and face sooty. Pastor Törner had once said something similar when she mended the seat of his pants; he had said that with thread and needle and nothing else she could turn herself into a queen and their house into a palace. But she had never before heard a man use such fair and poetic speech to his own wife.

Karl Oskar insisted. No one but she reigned in their house. While he had his domain outside, she was the absolute ruler inside their timbered walls; he made the decisions in stable and barns, in forest and field. And neither one ever interfered in the other’s rule. In this way their power had always been divided, both in Sweden and America, and it suited him well, and he hoped it suited her too.

The fine stove was queen in name only—Kristina was a queen in reality. She stood faithfully at her stove, she kept her house in order, she managed to make new clothes for all of them and kept their clothing clean. She milked their cows, churned butter, made cheese, spun and spooled yarn, wove and sewed, and during the rush seasons she helped Karl Oskar in the fields with sowing, mowing, and harvesting.

But every day she fought her fatigue. Each day there came a moment when she was tempted to give in to it and suddenly drop what she had in hand, when in the midst of a chore she wanted to lie down on her back and do nothing except this: only rest quietly. How rest tempted her—she longed to taste the wonderful rest! She forced herself to go on; this must be done! It was her work, her duty and no one else’s. No one in the whole world would do it for her. If she didn’t do it, it remained undone. There was no recourse, no grace. It was necessary, and what was necessary a person always managed.

Kristina was not yet an old woman; as yet she had not earned the right to sit down and rest during the day. Only after another twenty or thirty years as the household ruler would she be permitted this. Then she could abdicate her queenly kitchen affairs and surrender to her great wish: rest.

The depressing evening fatigue, with worry in its wake, was nothing new to her; it was part of the lot of every working person. But in the past the fatigue had disappeared after a night’s sleep and rest, and a new day had brought its gift, new appetite for work and new assurance. In this respect it was now different for Kristina; the morning no longer brought back her courage and confidence.

XXVII

THE YEAR FIFTY-SEVEN

—1—

During the open-river seasons in 1855 and 1856 the steamboats carried sixty thousand passengers up the Mississippi to settle in Minnesota Territory. Because of the great immigration, a steamboat costing $20,000 returned twice this sum to its owner within a year.

A story is told of one ship which paddled up the Mississippi with two hundred passengers who had already in New York bought, through a real estate broker, land for their settling in Minnesota. They asked the captain to put them ashore at a town called Rolling Stone, located on the river.

The captain pulled out his charts with all the landing places along the river. There was no place called Rolling Stone. He found a later map of Minnesota Territory on which all towns and places of settlement had been marked. It showed no town called Rolling Stone. He pursued his investigations further, he inquired from old river captains whose boats they met and who had traveled this route for years, he asked early settlers who came down to meet the boat at the piers: no one had heard of a town or place called Rolling Stone.

And the captain turned regretfully to his passengers: he could not put them ashore at a place which did not exist.

However, the two hundred passengers, having bought lots in the fair city of Rolling Stone on the beautiful shores of the Mississippi, showed the captain their maps and descriptions of the new town. The real estate man in New York had supplied them with these papers. The pictures showed tall houses in the town, churches, hotels, shops, and taverns. All the streets in Rolling Stone were well marked. The captain could see the market place. The passengers pointed to the city hall. They had been given the name of the mayor, they knew the number of inhabitants. They showed pictures of the beautiful surroundings. Anyone seeing these pictures must be caught by an irresistible desire to own a home in this wonderful town. And each one of the two hundred passengers had paid three hundred dollars for a lot in Rolling Stone.

The captain replied: Rolling Stone was without doubt a beautifully situated and well laid out city. It was only that the city was missing. If Rolling Stone had ever existed in Minnesota Territory, it must now have rolled to some other territory.

The captain regretted it sorely, but he was forced to put his passengers ashore where they could continue their search for the town in which they had bought lots for their new homes. They could themselves choose a place along the wild shore where they would leave his boat; it couldn’t house them for the rest of their lives. And so they were put ashore. They built themselves brush huts along the bank, they dug themselves down near the river, they were seized with cholera, dysentery, fevers; the greatest number of the lot-owners in the non-existent town died; the survivors gradually scattered and were swallowed up by the great country. But none of them ever found his way to Rolling Stone. Because this town had never existed, except on paper.

This incident took place in Minnesota Territory in the year 1856.

In seven years seven hundred towns were surveyed and laid out in the Territory, and the number of inhabitants increased from six thousand to one hundred and fifty thousand. After the 1851 treaty with the Sioux the whole country west of the Mississippi lay open to settlers. In the capital, St. Paul, there were ten thousand people in 1856. The settlers called this town the Pig’s Eye. Close by, at St. Anthony Falls, the new town of St. Anthony was growing up, later to be renamed Minneapolis.

Not all of the one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants had come to Minnesota to farm. In the tillers’ wake came the speculators who would become rich without tilling the earth. To these, land was a commodity, to be bought one day, and sold for a profit the next. The speculators’ only implement of labor was paper. They printed bank notes and swamped the country with wildcat money; wrote sales contracts and obtained deeds to land; drew maps and built towns on paper. Thus, a large part of the country came into the hands of people who never touched the handle of an ax or a plow.

Under the speculators’ hands, land quickly rose in value. The price of a lot might double overnight. Claims were staked out with feverish haste: “Take what you can, and take the best!” The man who came yesterday obtained a better piece than the one who arrived today. The speculators sold their land and bought more, farther west, which in turn was sold when it was time to raise the price. Those who handled paper became rich on the backs of those who handled the heavy tools of labor. Money men grew rich, while the ax- and plowmen remained poor.

Exploiters and exploited have existed in all countries in all times. This was a country and a time for one who saw the opportunities, for one who was handy with paper.

Minnesota Territory had been established in 1849, and its blossoming during the next seven years was amazing and without precedent. Everything rose in value, all kinds of objects—including the solid ground—were sold and bought, money was abundant, and new stacks of bills were issued as required. There was immeasurable prosperity in the country.

But what was the foundation for this great prosperity?

The foundation can be found in the story of Rolling Stone.

—2—

After the prosperous years came the year 1857.

It began with a disturbing occurrence in the East: New York banks closed. This crash quickly spread westward; the Chicago banks toppled. By the autumn of 1857 it had reached Minnesota—St. Paul and Stillwater. The banks in these towns closed. People who had been rich in the morning were destitute before the sun set. People with no property except money were penniless. The paper bills no longer had any value. There was no gold and no reliable bills, no acceptable currency. No one could buy without money, and no one could sell. Business came to a standstill.

New bills, warrants, and scrips were issued by the authorities; these would take the place of currency but were accepted with suspicion, and soon were worth only half the printed value. The people in the Territory had lost their confidence in bills.

What could money be used for when it was no longer trusted? What could money men do without money? The speculator’s twilight was at hand; the great revolution in money matters swept them from the Territory; those who had hoped to get rich by buying and selling had nothing more to gain here. The great horde of speculators, brokers, and jobbers left Minnesota. In one year St. Paul’s population dropped by four thousand.

The farmers had for a time been eclipsed by real estate speculators. With the upheaval of ’57 a threatening danger to those settlers who had come to make their homes in the Territory was removed. It was the money men who now were pushed out, while the ax- and plow-men remained in possession of the earth.

And the future state of Minnesota was to be built by those who remained.

—3—

During 1855 and 1856 the weather had been favorable for the crops, and the fields at Duvemåla, in Chisago Township, had brought good harvests. Each fall, as soon as Karl Oskar had done his threshing, he noted down in the old almanac the number of bushels harvested. And in the fall of 1856, recording his sixth harvest in America, he looked back at the earlier figures. He saw that his crop this year was half again as great as last year, and his corn alone had brought him ten times as many bushels as his first year’s crop. Now he was planting the Indian grain on a quarter of his fields; corn might give up to forty bushels per acre and wheat was almost as generous in the deep soil. These new grains were blessed in their growth. And from the figures in his almanac he could follow the improvement on his claim from year to year.

But the following year was to be a year of adversity. Already in spring a severe drought set in which lasted the better part of the summer. The crops withered before they headed. The corn was best able to withstand the persistent drought but the other crops were a failure. Then, about harvesttime, came the locust plague. There had been no grasshoppers in Minnesota since 1849, and the settlers were in hopes they would never return. One day, however, they appeared in immense, ravenous swarms. Like a rain of living black-gray drops they fell over the earth. These repulsive creatures showed an unbelievable hunger, unlike the hunger of other creatures. They consumed everything green in their path, and in their wake left only the black earth behind them.

While these ravages took place, the legislature in St. Paul offered a bounty of five cents a bushel for grasshoppers. Johan and Marta earned two dollars each for catching them. Governor Ramsey proclaimed a day of prayer in the churches against the locust plague, and the authorities also urged the observation of a fast day against the disaster. Few listened to this; the settlers felt they would probably have to starve enough during the winter after the hoppers had eaten their crops.

In Chisago Township the hopper plague was less severe than in other parts of the Territory, but Karl Oskar’s crop was still only a quarter of the previous years. Fortunately, having something left of the old harvest they could manage to get along through the winter.

Then in the late fall of this memorable year came the currency catastrophe.

Karl Oskar had already learned that money was nothing but paper. During 1857, many others were to share his bitter experience; they were stuck with bills the banks could not redeem. During the last years wildcat money from banks in Wisconsin and Nebraska had also been circulating in Minnesota. Few were the settlers who hadn’t one time or another been fooled into exchanging a load of grain or a fatted hog for worthless bills. And thousands of gullible settlers who had trusted the sly wildcats found themselves destitute, their faith in paper money gone. This worthless paper ruler was dethroned. The frosty fall wind of ‘57 blew away the speculators who exchanged land plots as Gypsies exchanged horses.

How hadn’t Karl Oskar’s anger been stirred by these parasites! They were like the rats that fed off the grain and food in the cellar; however well they guarded and hid their food they could still see the teeth-marks or the dung of these pests. “If you won’t eat where I bit, you must eat where I shit,” the rat seemed to say. And it was not easy to separate its droppings from grain and flour bins; with cats, poison, and traps he had tried to rid himself of the vermin. And here were these other thieves the settlers must feed—the speculators, humanity’s rats who grew fat on the crops others had harvested for them. It was more important to root them out than it was to destroy the pests in the granaries and cellars.

The great money upheaval—as long as it lasted—freed the country of them, but, like the rats, they left dung behind. The settlers had a difficult time when business came to a standstill; they couldn’t sell anything, no one had the money to buy. For his grain and pork Karl Oskar would accept nothing but gold or good bills, and neither were available this fall. Thus he was without cash for the purchases he wanted to make. And when he occasionally could sell anything for sound cash, the price offered was pitifully low. Pork was down to two cents a pound; after fattening a hog for half a year until it finally weighed two hundred pounds he received four dollars for his labor. He might as well lie down on his earth and kick himself.