From: Wisconsin Political Comentary 1850 - 1900
The fact that my father, Peder N. Haugen, with his family came to Wisconsin in 1854 and became a pioneer settler in Pierce County the next year, has caused some friends to suggest that I write my recollections of our entry into the country and early experiences in the then unsettled section of the state. My active participation in the political life of the state from the seventies till recent times may have been an additional reason for the suggestion.
The causes that gave rise to emigration from Norway have been variously stated. The dissatisfaction with the dominance of the state church has often been given as one cause. In the case of my father,however, the main reason was the hope and expectation of bettering his economic condition. He had no quarrel with the church. He had taught parochial school during his youth for some ten years, thereby earning exemption from military service. His certificate of this exemption I have. Military service in Norway began at the age of twenty-two. I believe that is still the law. Father did have some objection to subjecting young men to this forced service each summer during the best years of their youth, which might be put to better advantage in some lucrative employment; and this may have been one motive in taking his three sons out of the country. On a visit to Norway in 1907 I suggested to some friends that it would seem [p.4] more in harmony with the rule of other countries to fix the military service at an earlier age than twenty-two. The answer was that maturity was not reached as early in the northern countries as in the more southern and in America. I called attention to the fact that Scandinavian boys served in the Civil War when eighteen years old, and even younger, and kept pace with the native Americans, and that in the industries generally, including lumbering in forest and mill, they had not failed to do their share fully with others of the same age.
It was not a general objection to military service that actuated my father, but he thought that the situation in Norway furnished no call for keeping up the show of an army that took the young men out of the economic service during their best years. He was not misled by exaggerated stories of "getting rich quick," but he was strong and healthy, and mother was intelligently industrious and economical. The lure of better opportunities for the children resulted in their selling the little farm of some acres and some of their personalty in the spring of 1854, and breaking away from friends and sold associations. Immigration into the United States from Norway reached the high point that year. Besides being a farmer, father was a blacksmith, having acquired this vocation early in his father's shop. He was a handy craftsman with tools, not only in iron but in wood as well.
But we had not reached our destination, which was Pierce County; and in the spring of 1855 the journey was continued. Halvor Hersgard, a neighbor, rigged out a "prairie schooner," into which all our belongings, as well as the members of the family by turns, when not afoot, were taken to Galena. We crossed the Sugar and Pecatonica rivers; one of them was forded, there being no bridge. Shullsburg Prairie was our first view of that kind of wide and level expanse of country, and was the occasion of comment by Mr. Hersgard and father. As we approached Galena we encountered teams hauling lead, or lead ore. Galena on the Fever River was then a Mississippi port, which later had to be abandoned because filled up with the mud of the river. In 1889 the then representative from the district, Mr. Hill, secured a small appropriation to dredge the harbor, but it is not now navigable. Galena was in the fifties quite a distributing center for the Northwest, especially the upper Mississippi and branches, like the St. Croix and the Chippewa. A story well known among the members of the St. Croix County bar ran about as follows: A merchant at Hudson had bought a shipment of groceries from a Galena house, the shipment necessarily including in the interest of his customers a barrel of whiskey. The whiskey did not meet the St. Croix standard, and he refused to pay for it. An action was brought and while the case was on trial in the circuit court the sitting judge ordered a sample of the goods brought into court, so that he and the jury might know whether the defense was justified in refusing payment of a standard article of trade. It is stated that after due examination of the article the judge disposed of the case summarily by saying: "No man can come into my court and collect pay for such damnable stuff as that is." The case was dismissed, no doubt with general approval of jury and bar.
Well, to continue, we took a steamer at Galena and [p.10] started up the Mississippi. The boat carried two barges and, although this was as early as May, if not April, the Mississippi was so low thatseason that the barges were abandoned on some sandbar, probably near the mouth of the Chippewa. It had been an open winter in Rock County, and probably also on the upper streams. We lost much of our household goods. There is no accounting for what an immigrant considered a part of his necessary outfit in going to America in those days, and father had included among his "necessaries" his old and beloved anvil. Being a hard-fisted and reasonably hard-headed man, he did not include the bellows' he preferred the anvil. But, alas, it was lost on the sandbars of the Mississippi. He made a trip later to St. Paul, but not knowing to whom to apply for information and advice the loss remained unsolved and unpaid for.
We landed at Prescott, where we remained three days, waiting for a conveyance to take us to the Rush River settlement some twenty-five miles to the east. Here we saw our first Indians, Sioux camping on the island opposite the village. Prescott was at the time the county seat of Pierce County. It was a rival of Hudson for the trade of the back country, the two being the shipping ports for many years of the principal product of the soil, wheat, which was hauled to the market from twenty-five to thirty miles, generally with oxen. I recollect that in the summer of 1862 I drove a yoke of oxen witha load of wheat to Prescott, and saw five boats following one another land at the wharf to take on wheat. Father was along, but he never took to driving oxen, leaving that to the boys. Oxen were not used as draft animals in our part of Norway.
For the last thirty years, or longer, there has been practically no river traffic on the upper Mississippi. Whether the new government undertaking in that respect will amount to any noticeable competition with railways may be questionable. [p.11] But railways were not built to St. Paul until about 1866, at any rate not till after the Civil War--or, to use the language adopted by congressional enactment, the War of the Rebellion, which term was severely criticized by southern representatives, aided by some of their Democratic friends from the North. But the term remains as authoritative of thecivil conflict.
After waiting three days in Prescott, a Norwegian farmer from Rush River appeared, and we spent a night and a day covering the twenty-five miles--with oxen, of course--to the settlement, where we found temporary lodgment with a former neighbor, Anders A. Bakke. I might as well say that "Bakke" means "hill." "Haugen" also means "The Hill"; it is definite, the suffix "en" being the definite article. The Bakke home was not an elaborate affair. It was a one-room log house, but had a loft, which was turned over to our family and which was reached by outside entrance by means of a ladder. The househad a slab roof, and as rains came on we had the full benefit of the first fresh water before it ran on through to the family below. But we had reached our destination, and the next thing was to lookover the adjoining wild territory for desirable land for a permanent home. Nearly all favorable prairie and more or less open land had been taken. The next day after our arrival father took his shotgun and started out on the quest, having received some general information from Mr. Bakke, who was a man of good judgment and had himself secured land well located. But father was interrupted this first day of his land-hunting. He had not gone eighty rods from the house when he encountered an animal he had often heard of, but had never seen before--a deer. He was right in his element and shot the deer in the head and brought it down with his shotgun. The two families had venison for several days. The country in and about the town of Martell consisted largely of spots of [p.12] prairie, openings, and poplar thickets with plum trees in abundance. The two southern rows of sections were nearly all hardwood of first quality: oak, ash, maple, basswood, and some butternut. There was no walnut and no shell-bark hickory; some smooth-bark hickory of small growth, and ironwood, but mostly poplar on the edges of the heavier timber. After some investigation father selected eighty acres of land of the "opening" class, and a forty of heavy timber, and went to Hudson, where the United States land office was then located, and got his patent from the government, either immediately or soon thereafter,paying the government price of $1.25 per acre. He sold the homestead in the Old Country for six hundred dollars, had paid the passage of eight persons and their maintenance for a year, of course adding some earnings in the meantime; but he paid for the land in cash. How he did it is a mystery, to at least one of his sons. When his estate was administered in 1896, the title to the land was short and simple, only a patent from the government to him. He was a strict observer of Benjamin Franklin's motto: "He who goes a borrowing goes a sorrowing," a motto not so strictly observed by his descendants. We did not get into our own home until the spring of 1857, when a fairly large log house had been constructed with a good "shake" roof, in which the family enjoyed life and a fair amount of prosperity for many years. The farm was gradually enlarged by a few additional acres of clearing each year.
A remarkable change has come over the upper Rush River Valley. A week or so after our landing in the Bakke home (children of that family have all taken the name Anderson) Hans Bakke, a boy of some ten years, was sent on an errand to a sawmill, known as "McCartney's mill," located at the present little burg of New Centerville, on the southern edge of St. Croix County. The river was then a [p.13] good live stream furnishing sufficient power for the single muley sawmill, which ran for many years, as did other like sawmills and gristmills at the village of Martell and at other places down the stream. Now the river has almost entirely disappeared at New Centerville, except in floods, and the other mills have also been abandoned. Whether the name was given to the stream because of the "rush" growing along it, or because of its rapid current, is a question. About 1850 lumbermen from some point down the Mississippi had done some logging near what became the village of Martell, and had driven their logs down into the Mississippi. They may have found the current strong and have contributed to the naming. Some years ago the village of Ellsworth secured a site and built a generating plant on the river in the town of El Paso, some fifteen miles below New Centerville, and much farther by river, to supply the village with light and power. But it was found that better and more reliable service could be obtained from the Northern States Power Company, and the municipally-owned power has been abandoned.
I have heard much said about the dreariness, poverty, and homesickness of the early immigrants. My recollection does not bear that out. On the contrary, they were as a rule a happy, industrious, and cheerful lot. The hope of seeing their condition improve as time sped, naturally contributed to happiness. There may have been exceptions, of course, but so there no doubt were among the "Yankees" whocame West. The community lived largely within itself. They became Americanized in the best sense of self-reliance and self-help. The language was necessarily Norwegian among themselves, and the use of English came about gradually and naturally in the course of time. Many of the men sought employment in the pineries during the winter, and sometimes in the mills and in the river during the summer, but as [p.14] a rule the summer season was spent in improving and enlarging the farm. Father took to his former occupation and soon had a blacksmith shop established on the farm. He loved his anvil. But being a somewhat devoted sportsman, he did not omit hunting and fishing and the larder was well furnished from both sources. Deer were quite plentiful and fish abundant in the Rush. No limit on catch or bag. Partridges, ducks, and the beautiful wild pigeons came in flocks. A day spent in the woods generally brought at least one deer, and an afternoon on the river in the summer a respectable crate of beautiful speckled trout. The Kinnickinnick River rising in St. Croix County near Roberts on the Omaha Railroad and running southwesterly through the city of River Falls emptying into Lake St. Croix, has maintained its water flow much better than the Rush. Both rise in what was originally a fairly open country and were fed from springs, but in the case of the Rush River the springs themselves have gone dry. Not so with the Kinnickinnick, which is now one of the very best trout streams in the state. It also furnishes sufficient power for a municipally-owned electric plant successfully operated by the city of River Falls.
While the immediate community of which I write was principally Norwegian, it was not entirely so. The first settlers in the valley were three Frenchmen: Joe Martell, Roman Kay, and Jacques Dubois. The last always went by the more familiar name of "Jock," and that name will be found, I believe, on the plat of the village of Martell. They had been hunters and trappers, and it was commonly reported that Joe Martell had been wounded somewhere "out West" by the Indians, which left him with a stiff elbow. Jock kept up his hunting until the end. He once wounded a bear a few miles from his home and, pursuing it, came suddenly upon it in the tall grass. It showed fight. It was too late to retreat, and old Jock finally ended the struggle with [p.15] his bowie-knife. But he was severely injured and was laid up for some time. I went with father to see him a couple of days after the occurrence. Jock died in the winter of 1865. There were few young women of marriageable age in the community and Jock married a girl of thirteen of fourteen years, Mary Thompson. The following was told me by one of her early girl friends, then of River Falls: On calling on her one day, Mary Thompson surprised her by saying, "Say, Mary, I got married yesterday." "Married! Whom did you marry?" "Say, mother, what was his name? Jock Dubois, or Dubois Jock?" William Kay, son of Roman Kay, still lives on the old homestead on the banks of the river and has represented the county in the Assembly. Sons or grandsons of Joe Martell resided, when I last heard of them, at Somerset, St. Croix County.
Mr. Thompson had a sawmill on the river and supplied the neighborhood with the necessary lumber, mostly hardwood. It was said of his one-blade muley saw, that it went up one week and came down the next. The mill had been in the ownership or operation of the Pomeroy brothers, and when the time came to transfer the property a misunderstanding arose as to the ownership of some planks used in the construction of a bridge, which the Pomeroys proceeded to take away. Thompson objected, and tried to maintain his rights by appearing with a gun. But one of the Pomeroys knocked him down with a scantlingand took the gun away. It was western justice. No harm and no litigation followed. But I was reminded of the event many years later when I was called to Mr. Pomeroy's house to draw up some papers, and Mrs. Pomeroy said to her husband: "You are too easy; you never stand up for your rights." I chipped in with the remark: "You are mistaken, Mrs. Pomeroy; I saw Mr. Pomeroy stand up for his rights once when the other man [p.16] came at him with a gun." Mr. Pomeroy looked up surprised, but when I told him that I had as a boy witnessed his encounter with Thompson he admitted the facts about as stated. Both parties wer respected citizens. On the whole there was peace and good fellowship in the community.
Language made very naturally a distinction in social intercourse; but neighbors were friendly and helpful to each other, and a call for a barn-raising or logging bee always met with hearty response. The threshing became another social event, with its chicken dinner. The best the housewife could afford was none to good for these occasions.
There were no steamships with present-day luxuries sailing from Norway in 1854. We sailed from the city of Drammen. It must have been in the early part of April, for we reached Chicago on July 4 after spending nine weeks and two days on the ocean, besides more than a week in the [p.5] journey from Quebec to Chicago. Being stowed away under deck on a sailing vessel with little or no ventilation, in fair and stormy weather, some two hundred and fifty passengers in one room practically, with rows of double bunks (a la Pullman sleeper), and with seasickness prevalent, was not particularly conducive to happiness and joviality; but youthful passengers no doubt found some means of enjoyment. The general route of the vessel lay to the north of Scotland, but a storm on the North Sea took us through the English Channel, where we saw the white cliffs of Dover, the estuary of the Thames, and the first steam vessels. On the Banks of Newfoundland we encountered the usual icebergs. On the whole the passage was normal for the times. Two deaths occurred, a man and a child; both were buried at sea, the captain officiating. We had a view of the Falls of Montmorency and cast anchor in the port of Quebec, where farewells were taken with the genial captain and we were left on the shore to continue our journey by steamboat to Montreal. A little occurrence took place as the Norwegian immigrants entering the steerage of the boat. A couple of deck hands got into a scrap resulting in bloody noses, which made one of our fellow passengers, an old woman, remark: "Oh, the devil seems to be here too!" And it seemed to be the same old devil she thought she had left behind in Norway.
At Montreal change was again made and we had our first railroad experience. Another change seems to have been made before we reached Buffalo, for we saw Niagara Falls from the American side. Father told us they were "the largest waterfalls in the world." I do not claim to have the wonderful memory of Anatole France's "Petit Pierre," but unusual events like breaking up a childhood home and the trip on ocean and land would in all probability impress themselves on the memory of any normal five-year-old child. [p.6] Thirty-five years later I saw Niagara again, and knew at once that it was the American falls I had seen as a child, and not the "Horse Shoe."
We took boat at Buffalo for Detroit. And it was on Lake Erie that the saddest part of our journey commenced. Cholera broke out among the immigrants, and many deaths occurred before we landed at Detroit and at that city as well, among them being the only passenger who talked English, and who had served as interpreter for the party. He was a strong young man in the prime of life, who had spent sometime in America. We were packed into immigrant cars, and a considerable number of deaths occurred in our car before Chicago was reached. While the cholera thus took a heavy toll among the passengers,the Haugen family and a neighbor family from the Old Country, each numbering eight persons, seemed to be immune. Mother was sick, supposedly with the disease, but recovered. It may have been some other ailment not so fatal. The cholera did not originate with the immigrants. The first cases occurring in the country in 1854 seem to have been one at Buffalo and one at St. Louis. There were one or two case the previous year. Many deaths occurred in Chicago and adjacent country.
While I was serving in the House of Representatives in Washington in 1892 or 1893, cholera raged in Germany, especially in Hamburg; and a matter came to my attention which seemed to solve the mysteryof our immunity in 1854. Literature sent to the members of Congress on the subject by medical associations, in connection with proposed quarantine legislation, conveyed the information that any acid is fatal to the cholera germ--the comma bacillus, so called. It is, or was, a custom among the country people of our section of Norway, in harvest time or in warm weather generally, to drink whey, or for want of whey, to put vinegar in the water to assuage the thirst. The comma bacillus is generally propagated [p.7] in water. So it was stated in the circulars referred to. Father somehow was on hisguard against bad water, and insisted on giving it to us only after mixing it with vinegar. The same was the case with the neighbor family. It also came to us from newspapers, or through circulars, that while thousands of deaths from cholera occurred in Hamburg, no one employed in the breweries in that city died from the disease. Evidently they did not drink the water of the Elbe; and what Germanworking in a brewery would? But, without being conscious of the fact, the two neighbors had evidently hit upon the proper remedy to stand off the fatal disease.
We came on to Beloit. Our final destination was Pierce County, the "Rush River Settlement," so called, where some neighbors had settled a year or two earlier. To get there we were to take steamboat from Galena to Prescott. But there was no railroad to Galena, and people were afraid of the immigrants and cholera. Ole Hei, a farmer living near what is now Orfordville, in Rock County, took us to hisplace, where we remained only a few days, until we secured lodgment elsewhere. But Ole Hei and two sons died from cholera the same summer. Other deaths occurred in the neighborhood. The Haugen familyremained well and healthy, and with the exception of my oldest sister, who died at the age of about forty-five, have all passed the biblical term of three score and ten years. Father died at eighty, and mother had passed ninety-five. She was born January 13, 1809, a month before Lincoln. Speaking of the family health not long ago I said to my sister, older than I, that I thought father had never paid a dollar as doctor's bill for any of the children, and she agreed.
Father soon found employment in the hay and harvest field. Wheat was the prevailing crop in Rock County in those days. A kind neighbor, Ole Gullikson, gave father [p.8] permission to build a small log cabin on his farm near his own double log house. In the small quarters thus prepared the family of eight were reasonably comfortable and happy during the winter. I visited Rock County in the fall of1881 during the state campaign, had dinner with Ole Gullikson and wife, still in their log house, the robust old fellow reciting with much interest and pleasure his own early pioneer experience and his pleasant recollections of the winter when he and father often spent the evenings togther. I did not see the old Viking again, but have a very clear recollection of his splendid physique and unique Norwegian dialect, which he had preserved in all its strength and purity. He died some years ago, a resident of Iowa County, a strong type of the immigrant of his day, when Norwegian emigration was almost exclusively from the small landholding class and very few came from the cities and towns. It is probably safe to say that among our fellow passengers across the ocean not half a dozen were from any but rural districts. They were all from the southern parts of Norway. They came landhungry, with a fixed determination to procure independent homes. Seeking employment was with them a secondary matter, to secure the maintenance of the family while the main enterprise was in necessary abeyance. They came to stay, to become citizens of the country, and with strong hands and willing hearts to do their share in the "Winning of the West." The census of 1920, according to press analysis, shows that the Norwegian immigrant and his immediate descendants hold a larger acreage of agricultural lands according to population than any other class. It is true that in later years the immigration has shifted, like that from other European countries, more to the urban population; but the rural type stillprevails throughout the Northwest, where the bulk of the nationality found its homes.[p.9]
Father raised a little wheat the first year of his farming, but not enough, he thought, to warrant his paying for a "setting," which was a minimum charge for the thresher's outfit. So he arranged a plank platform and threshed out his few bushels of wheat with a flail, as he had done in the Old Country. The winnowing was the same primitive type, throwing the chaff and wheat across the platform, the chaff naturally falling by the way, thus separating itself from the grain. The charge for a "setting" was about five dollars, and "fives" were not plentiful.
The settlements along the upper Mississippi naturally began on the land near the river, that being the outlet and general highway. It also contained more of the prairie and openings than the back country. But the soil was generally, if not universally, fertile. The land adjoining the Mississippi is more broken, being cut through by deep valleys of the little streams in which the country abounds. But there is little land that can be said to be worthless in the country between the Chippewa and the St. Croix, except in the northern and more sandy region. The settlements referred to are prosperous and progressive. Wheat raising practically disappeared as the principal crop about 1878, the chinchbug being [p.17] largely the cause. No doubt it was a blessing in disguise, for it turned the farmer's attention to other crops and to dairying, more profitable to himself and to the farm in the end. The immigrant's wife was more than a helpmate; she was as familiar with the hoe and the rake as shewas with the towel and the broom.
During our first winter in Rock County my sisters had attended school, and I had for a few days, being six years old the following spring. But we had all, including myself, learned to read Norwegian quite readily, and when I went to the English school I had the alphabet by rote and could rattle it off from A to Z. In Martell a primitive schoolhouse had been built. It had a slab roof, some plank seats, no desks, a large box stove with a drum. But no fuel had been provided, and the winter proved to be very cold. The older boys were supposed to cut up slabs and scantlings from the near-by sawmill to keep the teacher and the children from freezing. Our lunches were thawed out in the drum in the stove, and the few children huddled about the red-hot stove in order to be comfortable. This, however, was only for a year or two. A better house was provided, although it, too, during my entire attendance in district school would be condemned by present-day requirements. But we enjoyed things in their simple state. Only one desk was provided, and those who practiced penmanship had to change about. The teacher furnished her own schedule. While this naturally took some time for a new teacher, itnecessarily made her study the children as to progress and general capacity and helped to develop her own ability as a governing force. The teachers were young and inexperienced, but the scholars were [p.18] in the primary classes, and on the whole the situation was fairly well met. Reading and spelling were the main studies, and some of us at least became very good spellers. Spelling schools, where children and grown-ups from several districts met, spurred on to rivalry, until Sanders' Spelling Book was perfectly familiar. Arithmetic and geography were studied to some extent, but grammar wasa hidden science to teacher as well as pupil.

The River Falls Journal last July published among its "Fifty Years Ago" items the following
his house burned 1000 loss December 5, 1883.
HAUGEN, HON. NILS P., congressman of the Eighth district, P. O. River Falls, was born in Modum, Norway, March 9, 1849. His ancestors were farmers and mechanics. His grandfather, Nils Haugen, was a blacksmith. His parents, Peder and Karen Haugen (the latter born in Stensrud), came to America in 1854, and after residing one year in Rock county, Wis., removed in the spring of 1855 to Pierce county, and bought 120 acres of government land, of which Peder Haugen still holds the original patent. The aged parents of our subject are yet living on the farm. As a boy Nils Haugen attended the common schools at Martel, Wis., and afterward the Decorah Lutheran Norwegian seminary, for more than two years. Later he taught school, which occupat
Haugen, Nils Pederson (1849-1931) — also known as Nils P. Haugen — of River Falls, Pierce County, Wis. Born in Norway, March 9, 1849. Republican. Member of Wisconsin state assembly, 1879-80; Wisconsin railroad commissioner, 1882-87; U.S. Representative from Wisconsin, 1887-95 (8th District 1887-93, 10th District 1893-95). Died April 23, 1931 (age 82 years, 45 days). Interment at Forest Hill Cemetery, Madison, Wis.