to_a_hard

Coming to America

As Told by Ole Knutson Broste to Petra Lien Molmen

Nestled between the mountains of southern Norway lay the Romsdalen fjord. The inhabitants of this valley were a thrifty, God-fearing people who wrestled with the elements for a meager living. But each day in the lives of these people was given the strength for its tasks. The sense of something accomplished, something done, daily bread honestly earned, and very few burdensome debts gave the Norwegians a feeling of contentment.

However, the blood of youth stirs easily. Ticket agents and land promoters seized their opportunities in the 1860s and 70s to spread the "America fever" like wildfire in the Norwegian bygder. In the absence of our modern way of verifying information, very attractive tales of the broad stretches of productive soil that just lay waiting for people to guide the plows and erect homes were sent from mouth to mouth. It was something different than stones, stumps, steep mountainsides. It sounded good.

With bright hopes, then, the following families, poor as they were, embarked in a little sailboat that left the shores of Norway about the middle of March 1868:

From Lesjeskog and Lesje

Johannes Kjelsus and family

Hans Teigen and family

Hans Frydenlund and his wife Anne

From Romsdalen

Torsten Hovde and family

Knut Broste and family

Mathias Broste

Ole Brudeli

Lars Alnes

The wind often blew the wrong direction for the sailboat. Therefore, it was not until nine weeks afterwards that we arrived in Quebec, Canada. Five more weeks were needed to get to Linden Township, Brown County, Minnesota, making a total of 14 weeks for the trip.

The captain was a God-fearing man who conducted devotion with the passengers of the ship every evening. They surely felt the need of God's protecting care as twice storms came up which trounced their little ship around almost beyond survival. What a tearing and creaking there was in the wooden masts as the wind twisted and tore. What a hurrying to get all portholes closed.

But everything and everybody got a drenching anyway. Each family had their food along and their survival also depended upon preserving this food. So, all the flat-bread had to be taken out after each of these storms and dried, and the skriva bröd too.

Then there was the dried mutton and ham, the primost and gjatost and the butter. After being wet the food wanted to get moldy. This able captain also acted as doctor for me, who then, at the age of two years, was daily expected to die. Two or three people did die on the trip. These were wrapped in sails fastened to a board and lowered amid the waves of the Atlantic.

The railroad was at that time built as far as Owatonna. From Owatonna to Mankato this company had a ride in two wagons. Our family and the Tosten Hovde family rode in one wagon. The other wagon, with the Teigen and Kjelsus families, tipped. As the folks were only sitting on trunks, boxes or whatever was at hand, they had nothing to steady themselves with and Teigen's one daughter was fatally wounded. Thomas Kjelsus was badly hit, but recovered.

The driver of this wagon expected the men to walk behind and only women and children to ride. However, occasionally, due to extreme fatigue, the men would hang on the backs of the wagons. For this, the driver demanded $10 when they arrived in Mankato, and it was only by gathering all the coin from everybody that they managed to total $10.

Therefore, from Mankato, this group of families started out as penniless fant. This was July 4, 1868. It meant that men, women, and children started out on foot from Mankato to Linden. The smallest children and some provisions had to be carried. An encouragement to go farther west was the fact that Hans Frydenlund had a brother there named Engebregt Afdem, who had arrived in Riverdale a year or two earlier.

The first day, they walked as far as where Lake Crystal now is located. There they saw a little farm house. It was evening, and their strength sustained them no longer, so they had to dare to ask permission to stay over night. Their pleasure can hardly be described when they found there was a Norwegian family living there and that they would be welcome remaining.

For the evening meal this woman cooked gröt, a gruel of coarse flour and water. But, really, it was a holiday meal for the guests. They all said they hadn't eaten anything so good since they left Norway. And this did not end her hospitality. The next morning she went to her neighbors and borrowed enough food so she could feed them breakfast.

That day they came as far as Mikkel Mikkelson's place in Linden. They decided to stop and go no farther. The journey was at end. It was a time to marvel at God's leading hand. Just after their most despairing time, they found themsleves among Norwegian people who were friendly to them.

A son of Mikkel Mikkelson had put up a log house, and with him he sheltered the Hovde and Broste families for two years. My father, Knut Broste, took blue clay and weeds to plaster it. However, we had absolutely nothing to live from so two kind neighbors, namely Anfin Martin and Mikkel Mikkelson, took turns supplying milk until the menfolks could earn enough to buy a cow.

One time when mother went to get milk through the waist-high prairie grass a mad muskrat attacked her legs. She tried to defend herself with the milk pail, and before it was over had tipped the milk. Then she sat down to cry. She hated to think of the hungry children at home, and she hated to impose on her neighbors for more milk. But she had to summon courage to ask for more.

Tosten Hovde was a woodworker and found employment in Mankato making kegs and various articles. My father, Knut Broste, worked at various places, but mostly at Anfin Martin's.

The first house that was really our own was a sod hut. It was built in 1870, and we lived in it for several years. A double wall of sod was put up and loose dirt poured in between to make it solid. There were dirt walls, dirt ceiling, dirt floors with dry hay for rugs, and two small glass windows. The benches were of logs split in half and legs fastened on with wooden pegs. The table was made to fold against the wall when more space was needed. Then there were cupboards with shelves and an iron stove with a bake oven. This was the only article that was purchased outright.

The trundlebed had a compartment, like a drawer, underneath that could be pulled out for an extra bed. Flat beds were made on the floor until the last one could hardly find room to stand on while undressing.

When company came they were heartily welcomed, and anyone who came along was really an honored guest. At no time since then has the pleasure of going visiting or having company been any greater. Sitting around visiting was the only entertainment, but it was relished by everyone.

The worst of the sod hut was the spring thaw. A person would hear a little jar here and a little jar there in the earth. Pretty soon, it was tr-tr-tr-tr-, and the next thing a gopher came through. Then there was a merry chase around and around until it ended up worst for the gopher.

The fright given by an occasional snake was much harder on human beings. Snakes in Norway were poisonous, and people lived in deathly fear of the American ones too.

Neighborhood gatherings similar to prayer meetings were held. Everybody sang hymns and some member of the group read the hus postil, which was a book of sermons or devotions. Sometimes laymen traveling from community to community conducted these meeting and sometimes some member of the group did.

One thing these immigrants had from Norway, and that was their Christian religion, soundly and thoroughly taught. They had that much more thoroughly than those who grow up nowadays.

Dr. Cooly made the remark once concerning these pioneers: "Reverend Green took care of their souls and I of their bodies." Both men belong to the landscape of the day. Neither is the story quite complete without Rev. Green's faithful horse, Kab.

We went to services at the Linden church on the Sundays when there would be services there. In winter we had to contend with the cold in the open-air sled, and in summer we had to contend with our oxen wanting to run into any of the sloughs at that time so prevalent, or getting into other herds of cattle roaming on the prairie. These animals would start on a wild gallop when they had hopes of getting into water, swim so deep that just their backs would extend out of the water, swish with their tails, and water would come way up in the wagon box and the wagon and all its contents would be immersed in the lake. Well can I remember father before starting on one of these trips. He would yell to mother and us children, "Crawl in now before I untie them."

Modern roads with grades and ditches woud have been hazardous with those brutes. Without reins, as they were, they could not be made to follow any straight and narrow path. About the best a driver could do was to whip them on one side to avoid one slough and whip them on the other side to avoid another. One advantage that oxen had over horses was that they never got stuck. They floated in the mire. We used oxen until I was about 16 years old.

The grasshopper plague was one of the worst scourges for the early pioneers. Not much damage was done in 1873, but the three following years they ate everything that grew in their paths except peas, and left nothing for human beings. Rails on the railroad tracks were so greasy with hopper bodies that trains couldn't always run. Their means of combating them was to carry boxes of sand at the front of the engines and sprinkle sand on the rails. Hopper bodies would clog the wheels. Before the season when grasshoppers fly, hens would eat so many of them that their eggs could not be eaten, being too bloodshot.

The people tried many ways of eradicating them. In the spring of 1873 they seemed to come about last to the Lauritz Peterson farm. All neighbors got together because they figured if they could save his crops, food would reach around to quite a few. So they dug a ditch from one lake to the other, filled it with straw and burned it at night.

But the attempt did not succeed. In the morning the hoppers started on Peterson's field and just mowed it down. The men would watch the direction they went, but could do nothing to stop them. Another attempt was to haul big tin pans covered with tar through the fields, but that was likewise useless. Then they tried to pull long ropes through the fields to scare them. Again, it also failed. And people felt that some punishment from our Lord was upon the earth.

For three years they ate everything and men were forced to leave their families in search for work. Many went to Rapidan to chop wood. Father worked at Johan Oien's. The grasshoppers hadn't taken the fields there as the bend of the lake had headed the grasshoppers in another direction. He also worked at Ole Brudeli's.

Then, all of a sudden, one fine day in the fifth year of the grasshopper plague, a person could see little dark whirlwinds here and there, which after a while turned into dark clouds. And, lo and behold, it was the grasshoppers leaving in the same manner as they had come several years before. The air grew so thick that the sun could not be seen, and the grasshoppers were gone..

And hopes again ran high for a crowning year in 1877. Everything looked good, so good in fact that farmers courageously paid $3 a day for harvest help. Their disappointment was sore, indeed, when arriving at market to find their crop termed "rejected wheat" due to some shrinking that had occurred, and therefore bringing only 7 to 15 cents a bushel.

Father paid Ole Kvam for his work in the harvest field and then had enough money to buy a pair of shoes. So that was the result of this "crowning year."

A thing that lived day and night in the minds of the pioneers was the fear of prairie fires. Throughout the late summer and fall, they were a common occurrence.

They assumed such terrible proportions because the grass was so abundant and because it was waist high on ordinary land and was man-high in sloughs, and also because there were no natural obstructions such as roads in the landscape of the day. Thus, the dried grass would feed the fires in stretches of miles.

The worst one is commonly referred to as "The Great Fire." It began in Madelia Township and swept past the Miller and Kjolstad places all the way to the Little Cottonwood River, a distance of 12 or 15 miles. Many are the tales in the community of how each family saved their own lives. One family tells how, when seeing the fire in the distance, they carried all their furniture and other possessions in the middle of the plowing.

Casper Larson, Nels and Gustaf Bekken were threshing northwest of Hanska. They realized that the sped of the fire was going to make it impossible for them to flee even on horseback so the thing they did was to hitch two teams to their rig, face the fire and drive through the fire at all possible speed.

They succeeded. When they arrived on the other side, they had to rub the fire off the horses' hair and dig out the straw that was on fire in the machines. Many others also tell of how they had to quench fires in people's houses, in clothing, etc. Indeed, the burning of all the hay stacks and all the grain stacks was a real tragedy to these people.

No wonder the memory of the terrible sparkling and crackling, the terrible rumble and roaring and the appalling sight left such fear in the people that every evening they would go outdoors to see if there was a red reflection on the heavens before they could lie down in peace to sleep.

No wonder they kept firebreaks around their homes. This was a strip of land burned black to stop the fire. But sometimes during strong fires burning fagots would fly in the air across the firebreaks and do their damage anyway.

Snowstorms struck the unobstructed prairies with gusto in early days.

One of these was in the fall of 1872. My father, Tosten, and Knut Gravseth were at Liberg's and wanted to run home when the storm began about supper time. Mr. Liberg persuaded them to stay until morning, but then they were determined to face the weather. Tosten's ears froze off, but they managed to locate the hut and dug a hole through the snow to the top of the door. Fortunately, the door had been built to turn in so mother could open it, and the men slid as through a chute into the house. The children were then all wrapped up and put in bed to keep warm, while the men shoveled enough snow into the house so that they had room to shovel themselves out.

Perhaps the worst storm was in the winter of 1873. It began on the seventh of January and lasted for three days. Everybody was unprepared for it because there had been a thaw and unusually mild weather for several days. Consequently, people were in town and here and there all over. The cloud came like a dark quilt twisted and torn in all directions. Father was out on the slough watering the cows through a hole chopped in the ice, but he managed to get them all home. Mother also saw the cloud coming and hurried to carry in all possible wood and water. Ax, saw and shovel were always kept in the house.

The first day of the storm they managed to keep warm with the wood mother had carried in. The second day, they chopped up all their furniture, but the evening of the third day father had to venture out. He had some dry rails raised in wigwam fashion about two rods from the house. He opened the door many times, but the air was so thick he couldn't see a thing. So the plan was made that mother should stand by the door and keep yelling so he would know where the house was and he should go to get the rails. He got out there and took as many as he could carry and started back, but the wind raged so he could hear mother no more.

He went a ways and listened, then went a ways again and listened again. By this time he was frightened. He dropped a piece of wood he had in his hand, then stooped to pick it up and found he was on the turf roof of the house. He crawled along the ridge of the roof and when he came to the end of the roof there stood mother yelling.

The fourth day the weather cleared and father's thoughts were for our stock. Looking out, he saw nothing but one big snowdrift where he knew the stable was and the haystacks that had been put up for wind protection and fodder. Locating himself, he dug in the snow until he found the roof of the stable and cut a hole in it. The steam from the animals came out like smoke from a stovepipe. He fed hay through this hole in the roof and put snow in the cribs for drinks.

Another time during a storm, father came walking home from Madelia. North of the Williams Woods he saw Rev. Hattrem's wagon. He sighted and walked in the direction he thought he should go, only to find himself back at the same spot. Then he sighted again, walked again, and found again that he had walked around in a circle. On his third attempt, however, the air had begun to clear and he found his way home.

In the fall of 1880 we made plans for moving out to where Mathias Broste later lived, and father and I were there plowing with our oxen. A rain began on Oct. 13, and by the 14th a terrible snowstorm was in progress. This was too early in the season to be well prepared for winter, so our stable at home was minus walls because the cattle had eaten them up and nothing but the straw roof remained. In order to save their lives mother, with the help of Nickolas Stuguflaten, took all the cows into the shanty of the house. They had to alternate heads so as to get room for more of them. They crowded them in so tight that they themselves had to go in and out of the house through the window, and then one cow was left outside. This one they wrapped up as best they could in the woven blankets from Norway and thus they stood until father and I came home and found the shanty full of cows.

Well, this is but a few of the early experiences of these settlers who came here so full of hopes. Possibly during these times they developed the sinews that made possible some of the finest farms of the community today. Tosten Hovde settled south of Lake Hanska and developed the farm later managed by his son, Thomas Hovde, his grandsons, Fred and Elmer Hovde, and his great-grandson, Amos Hovde.

Johannes Kjelsus settled north of the lake at the place which was later the home of Olaf Kjelsus and then Julius Kjelsus.

Hans Teigen and Lars Ahlness settled close together in Linden Township. Hans Frydenlund settled in Riverdale, Watonwan County, the present home of Emil Frydenlund. Ole Brudeli also settled north of the lake, not far from Kjelsus.

Mathias Broste and my father, Knut Broste, took land a little farther north, where the present Broste farms are located.

Would that these families who started out in the little sailboat in 1868 could take a tour around and see these homes now. Their struggles were not in vain.

Editor's Note: Torsten Torstenssen Hovde was 32 years old when he set out on this trans-Atlantic adventure with his wife, Marit, and sons Thommas, 8, and Karl, 6. They had farmed in Grytten parish in Romsdalen.

Teigen and Kjelsus were brothers. The Teigen family came from Lesjaskogen, just east of Romsdalen, where Lake Lesjaskogen acts as a continental divide, feeding the river Gudbrandsdalen to the east and the river Rauma to the west. The Kjelshus and Frydenlund families had farmed in the Lesja main parish nearby.

The narrator of this story, Ole K. Brøste, was just 2 years old when he made the journey with his parents, Knut and Anne, and sister Sarah in 1868. By the time the 1880 census was taken in Minnesota, three more children had been born to the family, Paul, Benjamin and Karl.

They were farming near Madelia.

Arnfinn Kjelland, the Norwegian author of a local history on Lesja parish, told me that Ole K. Brøste wrote the story down for the first time in 1940, or 72 years after the journey. One of Ole's sons gave the manuscript to a resident of Gudbrandsdalen in 1978, and in 1983 it was published in the Gudbrandsdalen Arbok.

While Ole's journey from Norway may have been perilous, as this story suggests, it was only a stormy prelude to a very long and productive life. He was with us until Jan. 2, 1955, when he died peacefully at age 88.

Sina and Bertha Shellum, who married into the Hovde family, are descendants of Anders Anderssen Sandboie and Kari Pedersdatter Sandbusgarden, natives of Vågå, Norway, who had lived on the Sjellum farm a few miles south of Lesja parish. The family, including seven children, emigrated by the more conventional route through Oslo in 1869, settling in Nelson Twp., Watonwan County, MN.

One of the seven children was Hans, five months old at the time of emigration, who became the father of Arnold Shellum and the grandfather of Amos, Luvern, James, Ruby and Bernie Shellum. The Hovde farm was on the south shore of Lake Hanska just west of the Arnold Shellum farm.

My brothers and sister and I walked past it on our way to and from our country school, unaware that those fields had first been cultivated by adventurous men, women and children who had risked everything, even their lives, for a better chance.

Postscript: Hans Frydenlund earned another footnote in history on Sept. 21, 1876, when he played a small role in the capture of the Younger Brothers, wanted for robbery of the First National Bank in Northfield two weeks earlier, near the Watonwan River just south of LaSalle, MN. He held the horses while a sheriff's posse killed one gangster, Charlie Pitts, and captured Cole, Bob and Jim Younger after a gun battle..

For this he was paid $5.

Bernie Shellum