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C h a p t e r 1 0 Escape from Sorrow In time the deep shades of mourning would disappear from Elise’s world, but now they surrounded her constantly. It was as if she were back in the Nacogdoches Wold struggling through the dark forest without her companions and capable guide. No new endeavor beckoned, no pioneer country lay ahead waiting to be conquered. Nothing could lighten her way. Her matter-of-fact attitude, so plain in her report on the Civil War, was gone. In its place came depressing memories of hard times. She reported that thirty of the cattle she and Wilhelm had raised so diligently died in the first year of the War. Forty-seven starved the following year, and then in the most recent winter twenty cows about to deliver calves were lost before birthing. There was a dearth of forage and half her sheep perished. People had no cash to pay their debts. She and Wilhelm had sold eightytwo wethers (castrated rams) for three dollars each during the summer before his death, but months later she still had not been able to collect a cent. For fifteen oxen she got a partial payment of twenty-five dollars. The going price was twenty dollars per head, so she was $ short.1 Property was worth one-third to half of what it had been worth before the war. For example, old Erick Bache, a neighbor, had died and left his widow “well provided for,” but low prices were keeping her from selling her land and returning to Norway. Elise’s situation was equally bad. She thought about moving away to some other place, but that was impossible. Old friends were moving to Bosque County, and no one could afford to buy her property in the chaos of Reconstruction. As with the old saying, she was land poor. Only God knows, she thought, what other deaths might come to her family; she worried about her own. When pregnant with Thorvald at age forty-four she had wondered how Wilhelm would fare if she died in childbirth . Back then she worried because it was “absolutely against the custom of this country for a white girl to keep house for a widower—and as for a stepmother, well, they are seldom good.” Her sons Otto and Niels, now aged sixteen and fourteen, were not old enough for legal or personal independence. In Norway she knew there would have been close friends and relatives who would gladly have taken care of her boys. In Texas she felt she was alone in a foreign land, without “assurance that anyone would assume the responsibility for providing a Christian training for my children or of safeguarding their inheritance.”2 Thomine Dannevig’s son Thorvald had sent her some photographs from Norway. He was just a boy when she left in . When he reached adulthood he obtained an officer’s post in the navy. Now he was prominent, a commodore, and she turned to him for solace. Writing to thank him for the photographs, she asked if he would send pictures of Lillesand harbor and of the Dybvaag parsonage where she was born. She said she had been only eight years old when her father moved away from Dybvaag, but she remembered “every detail” of the place better than their fine homes in Lillesand and Holt. Her request was hesitant: “Is it not possible . . . to get pictures of landscapes , or is the price prohibitive?” She closed her letter to him with dreadful news. An Indian band had raided the Bosque Colony and carried off a Norwegian boy. She did not mention the boy’s name, but he was Ole Nystel, a fourteen-year-old youngster who was helping his neighbor, Carl Quaestad, cut cedar poles at a copse several miles from home when the Indians attacked. Nystel was shot through the right thigh with an arrow and taken, but Quaestad, knowing full well that an Indian raiding party would immediately kill any full-grown male, made a run for it and got away. Elise’s own lost son was in her mind as she wrote to the commodore about Nystel’s capture: “It was hard to bury little Thorvald, but it would be much harder to know that he was among wild, heathen people who would torture him every day and bring him up as a pagan.”3 Unexpected natural hardships added to her grief. In the fall of  she wrote to her...

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