_Beaver Creek. Ole Rynning._
The immigrants who came in the _Aegir_ seem to have intended to settle
in La Salle County, but in Chicago were advised by two Americans not to
go there. They were also partly influenced by Norwegian immigrants[72]
who were dissatisfied with that locality, and who recommended Iroquois
County as a more desirable location to settle. They were told that the
Fox River Valley was a very unhealthy place, the settlers were dying of
ague and fever, and it was a misfortune that they had ever been induced
to locate there. (Knut Langeland also records the fact that the fever
raged in the whole of the Fox River Valley from Muskego, in Wisconsin,
to the Mississippi River in Illinois, that summer, but that the
condition in La Salle was no worse than elsewhere). So the intending
settlers deputed three men to explore the country for a site for a new
colony.
[72] Björn Anderson seems to have in part been instrumental in
their not going to La Salle County, but there is no evidence
that he recommended Iroquois County as far as I am aware.
These, Ole Rynning, Ingebrigt Brudvig and Ole Nattestad,[73] walked
south along the line of the present Illinois Central Railroad,
selecting the location at Beaver Creek in Iroquois County. Of the
further history of this unfortunate and short lived colony, the
reader may find an account in Dietrichson's brief discussion of the
settlement, or in Langeland's or R. B. Anderson's book. The majority of
the settlers died during the spring in the low and unhealthy climate.
Ole Rynning himself died and lies buried there. The few survivors
left for La Salle County the following spring. Mons Aadland refused,
however, to go. He remained in Beaver Creek three years longer; selling
his land in 1840 for a herd of cattle and, moving north, he located in
Racine County, being therefore one of the earliest pioneers in this
part of Wisconsin.
[73] Niels Veste may also have been of the party.
Ole Rynning's name is most closely associated with the brief history of
the Beaver Creek Settlement. We have already seen above how his book,
_Sandfaerdig Beretning om Amerika_, came to have a very far-reaching
influence upon Norwegian emigration. This book Rynning wrote that
winter in the Beaver Creek Settlement. It was printed in Norway the
next year. It soon became widely distributed and continued for over a
decade to exert a powerful influence upon Norwegian emigration from
Voss, east to Hedemarken, and north to Gudbrandsdalen, in these latter
provinces, at the close of the decade, especially.
We have, on page 86 above, observed that Rynning formulated certain
questions which he set about answering for the information of intending
immigrants. It will be of interest to note here the nature of some
of his answers. The first question as to the nature of the country,
he answers by giving a very intelligent account of the topography and
climate of the country, the soil in the different parts, and of what
the produce of the different sections consists. In answer to the third
question, he says that the United States is more than twenty times as
large as Norway, that the greater part of the country is not yet even
under cultivation, and that there is room for a population more than
a hundred times as great as that of Norway. There need be no fear, he
says, that the country will be full in fifty years.
The fourth question as to where the Norwegian immigrants have located
especially, he answers by saying, that in New York, Rochester, Detroit,
Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans, there are said to be individual
settlers; but he mentions four places where several have settled,
namely: (1) Orleans County, New York, but where, he says, there are now
only two or three families left; (2) La Salle County, Illinois, where,
he says, there are about twenty families; (3) White County, Indiana, on
the Tippecanoe River. "Here," he says, live "only two Norwegians from
Drammen, who, together, own about eleven hundred acres of land"; (4)
Shelby County, Missouri, where a few Norwegians from Stavanger settled
in the spring of 1837; (5) Iroquois County, Illinois. "Here," he says,
"there are eleven or twelve families of those who came last summer."
The sixth question as to the land in these localities, he answers by
praising the beauty and the fertility of the prairie. And as to the
price of land, he says, that it has hitherto been $1.25 per acre, but
that he has heard that hereafter land is to be divided into three
classes and the price of land of the third class is to be half a dollar
an acre. He then offers explicit directions as to how to go about
securing land. He thereupon gives the prices of livestock at the time,
and of produce, etc. A horse, we learn, costs from fifty to a hundred
dollars, a yoke of oxen, sixty to eighty. A milk cow with calf, sixteen
to twenty, a sheep, two to three, hogs are six to ten dollars a head,
pork costs three to five shillings a "mark," butter six to twelve, a
barrel of (wheat) flour, eight to ten dollars; a barrel of cornmeal,
two and a half to three dollars; a barrel of potatoes, one dollar; a
pound of coffee, twenty shillings; a barrel of salt is five dollars
(Norwegian). But in Wisconsin Territory, the prices are two to three
times higher, while farther south, everything is cheaper.
Then he speaks of wages, of religious conditions, law and order, how
instruction for the young is provided, linguistic conditions, health
conditions. He discusses life in the new settlements, its trials and
attendant evils. As to the Indians, he says: "They have gone farther
west; one need never fear attack by Indians in Illinois." In answer to
the question as to who should emigrate, he warns against unreasonable
expectations; advises farmers, mechanics and tradesmen to come, he who
neither can nor will work must never expect, he says, that wealth or
luxury will stand ready to receive him. No, in America one gets nothing
without work, but by work, one can expect to attain to comfortable
circumstances. He thereupon discusses the question of the dangers in
crossing the oceans, which, he says, are less than usually imagined,
and the rumor of enslavement of the immigrant. The latter he brands
as false, adding, "yet it is true that many who have not been able
to pay their passage, have come upon such terms that they have sold
themselves, or their service, for a certain number of years to some
man here in the country. Many are thereby said to have come into bad
hands, and have not had it better than slaves. No Norwegian, as far as
I know, has fared in this way, nor is it to be feared, if one crosses
by a Norwegian ship, and with one's own countrymen." In conclusion, I
shall cite his opinion on the slave trade which is interesting in the
insight and judgment it gives evidence of, on the part of an immigrant
over twenty years before the war:
The northern states are trying in every congress to abolish slavery
in the southern states; but as these always oppose it and appeal
to their right to govern their own internal affairs, there will
probably soon take place a separation between the northern and the
southern states, or else there will be internal conflict.
Ole Rynning was born in Ringsaker, as the son of Reverend Jens Rynning
and wife, Severine Catherine Steen, in 1809. In 1825, the father moved
to Snaasen. Having finished his education in 1829, he taught school for
a time. Then he bought a small farm[74] which he had to give up again,
not being able to pay for it. His ultra democratic sympathies were
displeasing to his conservative father, and an unhappy love affair,
which his father disapproved of as being a mesalliance, seems, at
least, to have been, in part the cause of his leaving Norway. We have
recited, briefly, his short career in America.[75] Of his nobility of
character and the self-sacrificing spirit he showed in helping the
grief-stricken and suffering colonists in the unfortunate Beaver Creek
Settlement, in the spring and summer of 1838, his surviving associates
give ample testimony. His book, _Sandfaerdig Beretning_, was written
on the sick-bed.[76] When he died, there was only one man in the
settlement who was well enough to make a casket for him from an old oak
which he hewed down. Rynning was buried out on the prairie, but no one
knows now where the spot is.
[74] This he bought of the father of Rev. B. G. Muus, well-known in
Norwegian-American church history, and a long time pastor at
Norway, Goodhue County, Minnesota.
[75] See above p. 103.
[76] Ansten Nattestad, of whom below, took it with him to Norway
that year and got it printed in Christiania.