The Children's Blizzard Read online

  But it wasn’t in Gro’s nature to write this in the memoir she titled “Recollections from the Old Days.” Nor did she mention how hard it was to leave behind this stunningly beautiful landscape at the beginning of spring—the mountains rising sharply from the shores of a twenty-five-mile-long lake known as the Tinnsjo, the farms clustered on a level shelf of land at the head of the lake, the waterfalls gleaming on the sides of the mountains and feeding streams that merged into the broad Mana River, the red and white farmhouses scattered around the stately white church. Beauty was abundant and free in the countryside of Tinn—but you couldn’t eat beauty, and the beautiful farms were yielding less and less while the population steadily grew. But they were comparatively lucky in Tinn. Elsewhere in Telemark the farm fields had become so small from repeated division that farmers had to harvest the hay that grew on the thatch of their roofs and grow vegetables by spreading dirt and manure on top of rocks. It was a sad, haunted country for all its beauty. Men in the prime of their lives built their coffins and stored them inside until they were needed. “It was not a very pleasant thing to look at before you got used to it,” recalled one Norwegian immigrant.

  Gro Rollag was no beauty, but she was a strong capable young woman with a long face, prominent cheekbones, high forehead, and a kindly intelligent look in her rather narrow eyes. According to family lore, she was not the most conscientious housekeeper because she preferred reading to housework. A love of books and reading ran in the family. Of all the possessions they were forced to sell or leave behind in Norway, what the Rollags remembered with deepest regret was the library they inherited from an eighteenth-century ancestor—lovely old books sold to pay for their passage to America.

  Gro and Ole were the first of the family to emigrate, leaving Oslo on April 24, 1873. “We traveled via England and with the Cunard Line from Liverpool,” Gro wrote in her recollections half a century later, furnishing precious few details. “We were thirteen days on the Atlantic and landed at Boston. From there we went west in a railroad boxcar. We took a little snack for the journey—a piece of sausage and a few crackers each.”

  Her brother, Osten Knutson Rollag, was a bit more expansive when he wrote down his own story. Osten explained that their mother, Kari Nilsdatter, had been left a widow in 1862 with three children to support—Soneva, the oldest, was thirteen; Gro, eleven; and Osten himself, eight. It was the custom in that part of Norway for children to work to support themselves right after confirmation—at fourteen or fifteen—so presumably Soneva got a job soon after her father’s death, probably as a maid for a neighboring farm family. Soneva seems to have been the family favorite. “She was a more than usually nice person,” wrote Osten, “and respected by all who knew her.”

  Soneva died in 1873 at the age of twenty-four. Her death severed the family’s ties to Norway. That same year, Kari sold the farm that her husband had purchased thirty-one years before, Gro married and left for America, and Osten and Kari followed them the next spring. “On the morning of the 15th of May, 1874, we left the home in the valley where my forefathers had lived for how long one does not know,” Osten recorded solemnly. “The morning of May 15 began with bright sunshine and the old ‘graend’ was very beautiful. In the sunshine we saw the new foliage on the birches and the many rushing waterfalls which flowed into the valley. It was very hard to say farewell forever to all of this.” He was nineteen years old.

  “Among the various arguments for going to America, the strongest was the poverty among the common people where we lived in Norway,” wrote a fisherman named Lars Stavig, who left his home in Romsdal on the west coast in 1876. “Also, the hopelessness of ever amounting to anything and the hard struggle awaiting my boys if they were to remain in Norway.”

  Two families to a wagon—they had agreed on this beforehand. The women would sit on top of the trunks and bags and bedrolls with the smaller children, while the men and older children walked alongside. Of the fifty-three families who loaded the wagons to overflowing that day, Anna and Johann Kaufmann were among the less encumbered. They only had the two children, a three-year-old named Johann like his father and Peter, a baby who would ride in his mother’s arms. Some of their neighbors had five, seven, ten children to look after, mountains of luggage, feeble elderly parents. Until that day, Anna Kaufmann had spent her entire life in the village of Waldheim amid the wide windswept fields of the Ukrainian province of Volhynia. She prayed with her family and neighbors every Sunday in the Mennonite church where her father, the Reverend Johann Schrag, served as the elder. The farthest Anna had ever traveled was to neighboring villages—Horodischtz, where her husband had grown up, Kotosufka, Sahorez, German-speaking Mennonite settlements whose names have long since fallen off the map.

  In a single summer day, all of these villages emptied.

  In the weeks before, the fields and farmhouses had been sold to neighboring farmers, the horses and wagons to peasants, the furniture and kitchen items to Jews. The women packed baskets with flat bread and sausage and dried fruit for the long journey. The men scraped together enough rubles for the expensive Russian passports. Then came the day of departure. Overnight, Horodischtz, Waldheim, Kotosufka ceased to be the homes of the Kaufmanns, Grabers, Albrechts, Schrags, Preheims, and Gerings. Fifty-three families, some 342 people in all, left together for America late in July 1874.

  “Schweizers,” these Swiss-German Mennonites called themselves, though their families had not lived in Switzerland for some two hundred years. Because they practiced a different kind of Protestantism from their neighbors, they had been expelled from their farms in Emmental in the Canton of Bern in the 1670s. Rather than baptize their infants a few days after birth, the Schweizers waited until they were old enough to choose baptism as a “confession of faith.” They advocated complete separation of church and state and refused to serve in armed forces or fight in wars. For these beliefs, particularly the last, they had been crammed into the prisons of Bern, sold as galley slaves to Venetian merchants, branded, flogged, burned at the stake, and hounded through Europe. From Emmental to the Rhineland of Germany, from Germany to Alsace and Galicia, and then to Poland and Central Ukraine near Zhitomir (west of Kiev), the Schweizers had fled and started over again every few generations—always moving together in groups of families, always settling together in enclaves of villages, always retaining their German language and Swiss customs, always clinging to their Mennonite faith.

  They had come to the Polish-Ukrainian border region at the end of the eighteenth century at the invitation of Polish noblemen. It was the same period when thousands of other German-speaking Mennonites, so-called Low Germans, settled farther south in the Crimea at the behest of Catherine the Great. Schweizers and Low Germans alike had been lured to this country by the promise of religious freedom, exemption from military service, the right to own land and to speak German in school and church. And for three or four generations, they had prospered on their small farms between Kiev and Lublin. Hardworking, thrifty, communal, ingenious, the Schweizers had almost uncanny success as farmers. Their flower and vegetable gardens were renowned, their cheese and butter were prized in Kiev and Odessa, silkworms fattened on their mulberry trees, and great swarms of bees pollinated their orchards. But the Schweizers’ golden age was short-lived. In 1870, Czar Alexander II withdrew the rights and protections granted by Catherine and inaugurated a policy of Slavicizing the German-speaking Mennonites. If they wanted to remain in the Crimea, they would have to submit to Russian military service and send their children to schools where only Russian was spoken.

  Four years later, in the summer of 1874, Anna and Johann Kaufmann and all the families in their congregation piled their remaining possessions into wagons they had borrowed back from the Ukrainian peasants they had sold them to—the first wave of a mass decade-long migration that would bring some eighteen thousand Mennonites from Russia and the Ukraine to America between 1873 and 1883. For Anna, the hardest part was that she would be leaving a child behind, her first
Peter, who died at the age of four the year before. It was not callous of Anna and Johann to use the name again when another son was born just months after Peter’s death. So many children died in those days that it was customary to keep the name alive with succeeding children. Before the day of departure, Anna’s father, Johann Schrag, led a daylong prayer service at the Mennonite church in Waldheim. That would have been Anna’s last visit to Peter’s grave. A small woman of twenty-four, five years younger than her husband, fair-haired and open-faced, Anna was gentle and tenderhearted and devout. In later years her grandchildren remembered that when she came to greet them Anna always had “a smile on her face and tears in her eyes, which were tears of joy. She laughed and cried at the same time.” “Die freundliche Grossmutter,” they called her—“the friendly grandmother.” Anna wept at Peter’s grave, knowing it would be the last time, thanking God that He had given her two more sons, praying that these boys would live longer than their brother.

  Before they left Waldheim, the Schweizer families raised their voices in a song of farewell. “Jetzt ist die Zeit und Stunde da, dass wir zieh’n nach Amerika” (Now the time and hour are here that we should move to America). Then all bowed their heads and folded their hands in prayer. Supposedly, the peasants from surrounding farms gathered in large numbers and cried as the caravan of swaying wagons rolled by, although one boy remembered an old Ukrainian peasant telling his parents solemnly that their ship was sure to sink, or if it didn’t, then they would certainly be killed and eaten by Indians.

  It was the logistics of the journeys that the immigrants wrote about in greatest detail. The emotions they either took for granted or were too shy to record, especially the Norwegians, who were famous for their reserve. (There is a Norwegian joke about an old farmer who, in the grip of powerful emotion, once confessed to his best friend, “I love my wife so much I almost told her.”) So there is a great deal in the Norwegian memoirs about their heavy trunks and chests, often painted blue, and the difficulty of transporting them from their villages to the train stations or harbors from which they embarked. Osten wrote that he and his mother began their journey to America on board a small steamship called the Rjukan, which took them down the long narrow Tinnsjo to the village of Tinnoset at the southern end of the lake, where they spent the first night. From there it was sixty-five miles to Kongsberg, the nearest train station—a long way to haul the chests. After some searching and negotiating, Osten finally found a farmer named Anderson Moen who was willing to take their chests in his wagon. A few yards out of town it became apparent that Moen’s horse was so wretched that he could not possibly haul both the chests and the passengers, so the two men walked while Kari rode. They must have been a striking sight in the middle of the road—Osten a muscular young man of medium height, not yet twenty, with reddish blond hair, a mustache just coming in, and blue eyes that “sparkled with intelligence and humor,” as a relative wrote; the dignified and artistic Kari, a handsome widow of fifty-two, outspoken, well read, opinionated, a fierce advocate of female suffrage; and the bumbling Anderson, whose nickname was “Bi Litt” (Wait a Little)—his favorite expression. “Anderson was a strong and sturdy fellow,” wrote Osten. “I believe that he pushed more than that little horse pulled. It was some fine procession that struggled through the parishes on its way to Kongsberg.”

  An immigrant named John B. Reese remembered setting out from the mountain town of Opdal in central Norway with a group of families in April 1880. It was a “strange and significant scene,” he wrote years later. “Here comes a procession of twenty or more sleds, each drawn by a single small horse. The sleds were heavily loaded with large, blue-tinted chests, as also trunks, satchels and numerous smaller articles of household and family use. Riding on top of these loads are mothers with little children as also a number of grandmothers, the latter upwards of seventy years of age.” Reese recalled turning around for a final view of the snowcapped mountains and evergreen forests before a bend in the road swept the familiar landscape from view. Another Norwegian child remembered boarding a ship at 4 A.M. and standing on deck to watch hundreds of people standing at the edge of cliffs waving pale handkerchiefs in the midsummer twilight.

  Osten and Kari Rollag had a week in Oslo (then called Christiania after the Danish king Christian IV, who conquered it in 1624) before embarking on the ill-fated steamship Kong Sverre. This 310-foot-long two-masted iron-hulled ship was the pride of the Norwegian-owned Norsk Line, with elegant cabins for 75 first-and second-class passengers and accommodations belowdecks for 650 steerage passengers. But the Kong Sverre, named for an especially brutal twelfth-century king, lasted only two years—from her maiden voyage out of Bergen on June 29, 1873, until she was wrecked near the entrance to Dunkirk harbor on October 16, 1875. The wreck of the Kong Sverre bankrupted the Norsk Line, forcing Norwegian emigrants to embark for America thereafter from foreign ports. For Osten and Kari, the voyage on board this grand vessel was the experience of a lifetime. Osten wrote of the great crowd that gathered at the wharves in Christiania to see the steamship off: “When the ship pulled away from the dock there was waving of handkerchiefs as long as we could see land, and then all stood and sang the national anthem, ‘Ja, vi elsker dette landet.’” The ship stopped at Bergen, where she took on more passengers, so that by the time she left for America on June 4, 1874, she carried emigrants from every corner of the country, “from Vestland, from Nordland, from Trondheim, in all 800 people,” according to Osten, “all Norwegians.”

  In the endless days of June there was little sleeping and, for the first-and second-class passengers, much dancing on the decks—at least at first. Then the ship hit the deep swells of the open ocean, and sea sicknesses put an end to the dancing. “The fine ladies who had danced so joyfully during the last days in Bergen lay around on the deck and vomited,” wrote Osten with a touch of malice. Of his own quarters belowdecks, Osten mentioned only that he and his mother were shocked to find “nothing more than hard boards—and…plenty of lice,” but one can imagine the squalor of the unventilated bunk rooms packed with 650 immigrants. On Sunday the faithful gathered for prayers in the morning and again in the afternoon. Somewhere in the mid-Atlantic a powerful storm hit the Kong Sverre and “giant waves rolled over the great ship and the water flooded some areas.” Part of the rudder broke in the storm and the ship stood idle for two days while the crew repaired it. Fearful passengers begged the captain to turn around and head for England, but he refused. In the event, the weather quieted and they steamed into New York harbor on June 20, 1874, eighteen days after embarking from Christiania.

  “We enjoyed ourselves very much on the ship,” Osten concluded the saga of his voyage. “The trip was outstanding but there were a few cranks who complained about everything on board and went around with a list in order to send complaints to the company. No one signed it.”

  The Tislands, also from the Telemark region, were not as fortunate in their crossing as the Rollags. Of the nine children born to Ole and Karen Tisland, five had died of diphtheria and were buried in Norway. Though their son Andreas survived the disease, he was left deaf and weakened. Andreas was six and a half when Ole and Karen emigrated to America with their three other children. Their crossing was rough. In the course of the voyage, twenty-two children and one adult died. Ole and Karen watched helplessly as Andreas shivered with fever in the unheated steerage quarters. When he died his body was sewn into a canvas shroud with weights attached to either end. The ship’s captain read the last rites, and then the bundle was tipped off the side of the ship and into the sea. Some mothers on board immigrant ships kept the deaths of their children secret so they could bury them properly on land. Even burying a child in the strange land of a country they had never seen was better than losing a child’s body to the ocean. About one in ten steerage passengers died on board immigrant ships.

  The Norwegians journeyed to America on the strength of rumors, railroad company propaganda, hearsay, and letters from friends and relatives, “the A
merica letters,” singing the praises of the New World. But the Swiss-German Mennonites, characteristically, wanted to see the country for themselves before making up their minds to emigrate. In the summer of 1873, three years after the Czar revoked their protections, two Schweizer leaders left on a scouting party to America with ten other Ukrainian Mennonites. Shortly after their arrival, the somber black-clad elders managed to secure an audience with President Ulysses S. Grant in Washington, D.C., to request the same privileges and exemptions they had enjoyed under Catherine the Great. Strangely, General George Armstrong Custer attended the meeting and conversed with the Mennonites in German (he had picked it up from his German family). Grant promised nothing—no military exemption, no tax incentive, no guarantee of German schools—but the scouts decided to have a look around the country anyway. They spent the spring and summer touring the republic, traveling by train out to Chicago, Saint Paul, and Duluth, then westward by horse and wagon through the still largely unsettled expanses of Dakota Territory, north into Manitoba, and then south to Nebraska. They liked what they saw, especially the great empty prairies of Dakota. It was July and the unbroken grass looked rich and beautiful and full of promise. No trees to clear, no neighbors to disturb them, abundant sun. In the few homesteads scattered on the river bottoms, they examined the potato patches with approval. By the time the delegation returned to the Ukraine, the Schweizers among them had decided that Dakota was the place.