Last Letter Home

Introduction to The Last Letter Home

Introduction to The Last Letter Home MOBERG ONCE estimated that he wrote three-quarters of the manuscript of the Emigrant Novels in California.l He wrote all of Sista brevet till Sverige in Europe, finishing it in Locarno, Switzerland, in 1959. The Swedish title means "The Last Letter to Sweden." In the 1961 American edition, the series was published as a trilogy, with The Settlers and The Last Letter Home presented as one volume. Lannestock explained: "Large parts of both books had been omitted; the publisher felt that they were ofgreater interest to European readers."2 Later editions of the series presented the tetralogy as a whole, however, as does this Borealis Books edition. Details of the difficulties between white setrlers and the Ojibway and Dakota people (also known as the Chippewa and Sioux, respectively) form an important subplot in The Last Letter Home. Numerous first-person accounts by both white and Dakota people document the shock and cruelty of the Dakota War of r862. Moberg had read sections of the journals ofSwedish immigrant Andrew Peterson, which tell how Peterson and other Swedes fled with their families to an island in Lake Waconia during the war.3 Moberg also read historical texts to learn about events and other aspects of those troubled times (see his bibliography, p. xxv). Historians now argue about the validity ofsome ofthose texts, and readers should not accept Moberg's use ofhistorical sources uncritically. Despite its relative briefness, the Dakota War of r862 was a complicate~ series ofevents marked by acts ofextreme brutality and exceptional humanity by different individuals on both sides of the conflict. This is information of I. Moberg, "Romanen om utvandrarromanen," 3I7. 2. Lannestock, Vilhelm Moberg i Amerika. 124. 3. Andrew Peterson and Family Papers, 1854-1931, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul. Minn. 4. Gary Clayton Anderson, Kinsmen ofAnother Kind: Dakota-White Relations in the Upper XX! xxii INTRODUCTION TO THE LAST LETTER HOME which Moberg was well aware; therefore, in describing the Dakota War in The LastLetter Home, he was faced with the difficult task ofjoining his narrative of actual historical events to a description ofhis fictional immigrants' immediate experiences and emotions. For example, he incorporated into his novel the grisly accounts ofmutilation ofthe bodies ofwhites by Dakota people. While some stories of this type may have a basis in fact, many others of questionable reliability were told by members ofthe military burial parties that reached the dead after several days. Exposure ofthe bodies to animals and August heat may have produced gruesome results that the whites were all too ready to blame on the Dakota. Regardless of whether such stories were true or false, they were believed by whites in Minnesota in 1862. Moberg used them in his novel to heighten the sense ofalarm felt by his fictional characters, whom he referred to as "the immigrated Europeans" (de inflyttade europeerna). With limited access to factual reports in their own language,5 such immigrant groups ofren saw the peoples and customs ofthe American frontier as strange and frightening. Their judgments were frequently based on rumors rather than on facts. This tendency may be seen as a case of one minority (the recent immigrants) being aroused against another (the Native Americans) by a lack of understanding that instilled suspicion and fear. While some readers in the late twentieth century may find certain details in The Last Letter Home to be less than complimentary to Native it is interesting to note that in the late I950S and early 1960s Moberg received numerous letters from American readers who protested that he had portrayed American Indians "as altogether too sympathetic and pleasant [a people]."6 This reaction reflects the changing sensibilities and the tangled emotions of Moberg's readers and ofhis fictional characters alike. In short, Moberg felt the necessity to depict in certain of his Swedish figures an apprehension about Mississippi VitlJey, [0511-[802 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. (984), 261-80. On the Dakota War of 1862, see also Kenneth Carley, The Sioux Uprising of1862 2d ed. (St. Paul: Minnesota Histotical Society, (976); Anderson, Littk CroW, Spokesman for the Sioux (Sr. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, (986); Anderson and Alan R Woolworth, eds., Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts ofthe Minnesota Indian Wtir of1862 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Ptess, (988). 5- In the early 1860s, the only Swedish-language newspaper available on a regular basis to Swedes in Minnesota was Hemlandet, published in Chicago. Hemlandet contained little news from Minnesota, and those few items...