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C h a p t e r 1 3 Final Victory Business started into a severe decline in the early s, and by  the entire country had fallen into a profound depression . Elise’s acute financial problems were now past, but she wrote to friends in Norway about the economic havoc. Prices for beef stock had become impossibly weak, and cotton fell from an already low six cents per pound down to four cents. Now in her late seventies, she was obliged to write to her friends that her two sons and their families were struggling. Niels escaped total failure only because unlike other growers, he did not need to hire cotton pickers—five of his seven children were picking bolls for him. All the same, he had to work without letup even though sick with one of the local endemic diseases (probably dysentery). In Hamilton, Otto’s wife Ophelia was weaving rugs for people to “earn a little bit.”1 For her own part, Elise kept her small business transactions going, dealing with attendant complications as they came along. On one occasion she was in Hamilton visiting Otto and had bought an assortment of needles to send to Marie Staack over in Clifton forty-five miles away. She had to arrange to have their mutual friend Hansen take the needles over, and then she had to write Marie a letter explaining how to handle the payment: Marie was to give thirty cents to Gunild Andersen, and then tell Gunild to take twenty-five cents and pass it on to Hansen’s mother. Elise’s dealings with the book supplier Vickery were less complicated but more aggravating—“I got absolutely nothing for my work,” she wrote to Marie, “not even reimbursement for the money orders I had bought and several little things I had ordered .” She dropped Vickery from her list of suppliers. Major changes, too, were taking place in Elise’s community. With the land exhausted, rural decline hit Four Mile Prairie, and her friends, both American and Norwegian, were leaving. Houses were empty, fields untended , and everything was becoming dismal. Her hopes for starting another reading club fell apart when the last two knowledgeable Norwegianspeaking men moved away. Political movements such as the Populist Party were spreading from farms in the North to the ranches of Texas. Otto, long active in the Democratic Party in Hamilton because of his job as a deputy sheriff, had many friends in the bellicose Populist Party.2 Although Elise reported on Otto’s political participation, she had only a passing interest in political matters. Her general attitude first showed in a letter written to Thomine Dannevig back in , when she commented on the end of the Franco-Prussian War. She expressed relief that the conflict was over and then remarked: “But I do not like either of them.” Without pause she ended the paragraph with a seeming non sequitur—“We have read about the balloon and bazaar in Christiania”—a sudden change of subject that showed how little interest she actually had in the war. She abandoned her usual disinterest in politics to say that she read “everything ” about the debate between the Norwegian parliament and the Swedish king over which was to control appointment of ministers in charge of the government departments (education, defense, and so forth). She was taken by surprise, though, when the parliament won, and she could only express hope that things would settle down. That was not to be the case; from then on the parliament constantly agitated for and eventually won Norway’s independence from Sweden. In regard to America, Elise once mentioned the Whiskey Ring during President Grant’s administration, and she described the s star route frauds involving government contracts with private mail route operators, but she had little interest in national affairs. “I skip everything about elections in the Northern states and the religious controversies in the Lutheran Church in America,” she declared.3 At times she used a sharp journalist’s eye to favor her friends with sensational news that leaped over the wearisome distractions of economic and political events. In one such instance she wrote to Thomine Dannevig about the destruction of the Spring Palace in Fort Worth. The building, she wrote, was “very large and exceptionally beautiful,” the whole of it, inside and out, “artistically decorated with things that grow in Texas.” Because the construction materials and displays were highly inflammable , smoking was prohibited inside, but “someone...

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