Emigrants

By Way of Introduction

By Way of Introduction THE PEASANTS THIS is the story of a group of people who in 1850 left their homes in Ljuder Parish, in the province of Smaland, Sweden, and emigrated to North America. They were the first of many to leave their village. They came from a land of small cottages and large families. They were people of the soil, and they came of a stock which for thousands of years had tilled the ground they were now leaving. Generation had followed generation , sons succeeded fathers at harrow and plow, and daughters took their mothers' place at spinning wheel and loom. Through ever-shifting fortunes the farm remained the home of the family, the giver of life's sustenance. Bread came from the rye field and meat from the cattle. Clothing and shoes were made in the home by itinerant tailors and cobblers , out of wool from the sheep, flax from the ground, skins from the animals. All necessary things were taken from the earth. The people were at the mercy of the Lord's weather, which brought fat years and lean years-but they depended on no other power under the sun. The farm was a world of its own, beholden to no one. The cottages nestled low and gray, timbered to last for centuries, and under the same roof of bark and sod the people lived their lives from birth to death. Weddings were held, christening and wake ale was drunk, life was lit and blown out within these same four walls of rough-hewn pine logs. Outside of life's great events, little happened other than the change of seasons. In the field the shoots were green in spring and the stubble yellow in autumn. Life was lived quietly while the farmer's allotted years rounded their cycle. And so it was, down through the years, through the path of generations , down through centuries. About the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the order of unchangeableness was shaken to its very foundations. Newly discovered powers came into use, wagons moved without horses, ships without sails, and distant parts of the globe were brought closer together. And to a new generation, able to read, came the printed word with tales of xxvii xxviii INTRODUCTION a land far away, a land which emerged from the mists of the saga and took on the clearing, tempting aspects of reality. The new land had soil without tillers and called for tillers without soil. It opened invitingly for those who longed for a freedom denied them at home. The urge to emigrate stirred in the landless, in the debtbound , the suppressed and the discontented. Others again saw no mirage of special privilege or wealth in the new land, but wanted to escape entanglements and dilemmas in the old country. They emigrated, not to something but from something. Many, and widely different, were the answers to the question: Why? In every community there were some men and women who obeyed the call and undertook the uncertain move to another continent. The enterprising made the decision, the bold were the first to break away. The courageous were the first to undertake the forbidding voyage across the great ocean. The discontented, as well as the aggressive, not reconciling themselves to their lot at home, were emigrants from their home communities. Those who stayed-the tardy and the unimaginativecalled the emigrants daredevils. The first emigrants knew little of the country awaiting them, and they could not know that more than a million people would follow them from the homeland. They could not foresee that, a hundred years hence, one-fourth of their own people were to inhabit the new country; that their descendants were to cultivate a greater expanse of land than the whole arable part of Sweden at that time. They could not guess that a cultivated land greater than their whole country would be the result of this undertaking-a groping, daring undertaking, censured, ridiculed by the ones at home, begun under a cloud of uncertainty, with the appearance of foolhardiness. Those men and women, whose story this is, have long ago quitted life. A few of their names can still be read on crumbling tombstones, erected thousands of miles from the place of their birth. At home, their names are forgotten-their adventures will soon belong to the saga and the legend. THE COUNTRY WHICH THEY LEFT The Parish Ljuder Parish in Konga County is about twelve miles long and three...