Early Times

Here are the bare facts, as I've heard them.

Soren Madsen, my great great grandfather, brought his wife Karen and three youngest children from Denmark to Goldfield, where his brother-in-law Chris Warner lived, in the 1860s. The exact dates of this trip are unclear, but it was sometime between May, 1867, and June, 1869. They had to leave two daughters, Caroline and my great grandmother, Hannah, in Denmark, with the understanding that they would follow in a year. This was apparently due to lack of funds. In
Chicago, in spite of help from Chris Warner, they didn't have enough money for the whole family to make the rest of the trip, so they left another daughter,
Nelsine, with a kindly family. She was lost for a while, because the family decided to keep her and didn't keep in touch with Soren and Karen. Later, either government agents or detectives found her in North Dakota, where the family had moved, and mailed her to Goldfield. She traveled in the baggage car of the mail train, sitting on bags of letters, her name and destination sewn to her clothes. Another package for delivery.

I wonder what it was like.

The stories suggest breath-taking choices, but provide only the outlines, never the flesh.

I wonder how she felt, Karen Jorgine Madsen, as she left her daughters in Denmark, with only a husband's promise that there would be money in the New World to send passage for the child later. And how did she feel when they left the next oldest child in Chicago, with strangers who appeared to be kind?

It reminds me of an Agatha Christie mystery: the stage is complete in all details, including the body, but distress is curiously missing. The body is known, of course, it, was a person, a part of all the suspects' lives, and yet death only prompts a saddened face, a pall at tea. The murder is eventually solved, the handkerchiefs are laundered, the effect of the person is bloodlessly erased.

Soren, in an old sepia photograph, appears to be a small man with an adventurous air, "a buccaneer-type," my father says. Did he simply declare his plan one night at supper, a peasant farmer tired of the dreariness of long nights, plain food? "We shall go to America." Did Karen's heart turn to ice? Did she clasp Hannah, still a child, close to her so the child wouldn't see the tears, a mother's horror at leaving the girl an unthinkable distance away? And they travelled across Denmark, off the island of Langeland, across to a northern seaport. They stopped along the way in Skibstrup to have the baby, Mads, christened. Did Hannah see them off? Did she cry? Worse, did she run after them, sobbing for her mother; her sisters and baby brother? I wonder if Soren's confidence failed him then, just for a moment. And the voyage, in filthy quarters, below decks, calming the little ones, seasick herself, how could Karen have hope for an abstraction, a promise of a new life. Then they finally escaped the confines of the ship, stepped onto shore, into a train across America. And they discovered that, they had to leave yet another child, because they lacked money. Did a cold anger begin to build in Karen's heart? And was it shame or joy when strangers found Nelsine, made her a ward of the state, then sent her back in a baggage car?

More facts:

Hannah, when she arrived, walked from the end of the railway line in Iowa Falls, across the prairie to Goldfield, 40 miles as the crow flies. She was not afraid of the snakes and rats that inhabited the shelters along the way. She was afraid of prairie fires. The grasses were very high, up to 7 and 8 feet tall, and she, as an adult, was only 5 feet tall. At thirteen, she was probably less than that.

I've walked through cornfields in August, where the corn is tall, far taller than me. And even though the rows are neatly laid out, and one only needs to follow a row to its end to reach the fence and the road, the density of the corn can be a
disorienting prison of green rough stalks, leaves brushing and cutting your face and arms with their sharp edges. I remember once, as a child, running crazily, across the rows, lost, panicked, finally calmed by a voice - my sister? my father? - that called to me, talked me down. Then I saw the rows again and knew how to get out.

The prairie grasses are gone now, and a memory of cornfields is the closest I will ever get to Hannah's feeling of not being able to see, walking only on trust, following a narrow path. But from the little protected and signed strips I've seen along the railway tracks, and from pictures, I know the prairies weren't just covered with long green and brown grasses. There were flowers, great drifts of gold and crimson flowers: goldenrod, radiant yellow and up to five feet tall; queen of the prairie with its pink plumes up to six feet tall; red milkweed; sweet black-eyed Susan; Turk's-cap lilies; prairie blazing, star; Joe-Pye weed looming eight feet tall; big bluestem grass which early settlers couldn't see over without getting up on a horse. Some of these plants need extreme heat to germinate. The soil itself became more fertile after a fire.

Dad doesn't think Hannah walked the 40 miles alone. One account says she came with Caroline and her grandparents, Soren's mother and father. No wagon was sent to fetch them. "Everyone walked in those days," Dad says. "Wagons were superfluous."

But as she walked through the grasses and flowers that waved far above her head, she listened for the roar. That would be prairie fire, racing across the flatlands. She couldn't see, she wouldn't know which way to turn, where to run, and whether it was even possible to outrace a prairie fire. So she walked, every step in fear, probably watching the sky for the lightning which could start the fires.

And finally Hannah arrived, at Goldfield, on the Boone River, black walnut trees, white oaks, tall elms lining the banks. She found her family, people who spoke her language and who understood her. Her name was changed from Hannah Sorenson to Hannah Madsen, following the ways of the new world. I imagine her arriving in a long dress and apron made of flax, short leather shoes with wooden soles, different, Danish. And she would have looked around, trying to comprehend her family living in this strange new place, buildings sparse and quickly assembled against winter, a winter that would be far more harsh than winters they had known before.

Was it over then? Could Karen clasp her tightly in relief? No. She was already dead. She had died in childbirth.

Karen died before she had chance to see the new life. She only had its rough beginnings. Maybe she had been weakened by the immense nature of the choices that they had made, each disconnecting her a little bit more from life, until finally she had nothing to give, no more warmth to sustain her spirit. So she died, unable to go through another birth.

But the children! They were born to these forces. Nelsine, who was mailed, Hannah and Caroline who were left, these things must have become part of their souls, their bodies, their perspectives. What could stop Hannah as an adult? They describe her as tactful, happy, pretty. But, they add, no one could walk over Hannah. Of course not. She had walked over the prairies, every step full of fear, never thinking of not doing it anyway.

Soren left Goldfield shortly after the family arrived, went to Sioux City to claim more land. But he didn't 'prove up', he didn't stay on the land long enough and make the improvements that were required, so that homestead was lost. He came back, joined the family he had left living with Chris Warner, because his wife was pregnant and failing.

Soren remarried in 1882, but soon afterwards his wife forced him from the house. The stories say that he had made an unfortunate choice. But I wonder if she, face to face with his image of himself as a swashbuckling adventurer, grew impatient with this male nonsense and wanted no more of it.

Facts:

Hannah married 'up', from a peasant family to that of a tradesman. Lewis, Hansen Nelson stood tall, 6'1". He was a good businessman, and he had a deep sense of fairness. He was the first of his family to leave Denmark, and we know he left to avoid conscription, so he was only 17 when he arrived to homestead in Iowa. It was probably 1868. His father, Nets Fredrickson, was a blacksmith, big, heavy and strong. He had arranged for his son to go ahead of the rest of the family and acquire land for them. When Nels arrived in Iowa, he carried his anvil with him, and it became, part of the stories.

Nels was described as "very tough", a man who refused to acknowledge the bite of Iowa winters, winters that reached to the bone with a deep chill, winters far colder than Svendborg winters. On winter days, the temperature far below zero, Nels would chop wood wearing only the lightest of wraps, no gloves. He could pick up the anvil by the horn using one hand, arm fully extended, and lift it above his head.

Lewis and Hannah had come over on the same ship from Denmark, although they said that they didn't know it until they both got to Goldfield. They married on Valentines Day, 1874, and they made a good life for themselves and for others. They had hired hands for the farm work and servants to help inside. These were Danes, working off their passage, indentured for a year to Lewis and Hannah, learning the language and customs of Iowa. I don't think they were exploited. Our family wouldn't have censored that information, it would have become part of the legend, and by all accounts, Lewis was a kind man.

The Nelson house became crowded. When Soren's wife drove him out of their house, he moved in with Lewis and Hannah. Nels lived there too, and had little time for Soren, the buccaneer peasant, a member of the underclass. So Hannah was the peacemaker, using all her diplomacy to mediate between the two patriarchs.

Nelsine, Hannah's sister, also lived with them for a while. She was called Aunt Sina
by Dad, although she was his Great Aunt. Aunt Sina helped care for the children who were born to Lewis and Hannah. There's a family story about one of these children, my great-uncle Edward, when he was a toddler. It was the middle of winter, when suddenly the barn caught fire. There are dark rumours in the family about this, but Dad said, "It's never been proved, don't put it in." So, we won't
l now why the barn went up, but it did, and maybe because of the wind, or just the layout of the farm, it threatened the house as well.

Fire. All those Danes, stoic backs turned on their homeland, leaving children on the thin hope of reclaiming them later, struggling, building. And now fire, ripping through their dreams, maliciously set, but it was never proved.

Aunt Sina had to help, everyone was needed. It was, the horse barn, full of the 'farm-chunks', as they were called in those days. They had to be saved. The other outbuildings could be lost, and most were. The family, the servants, everyone must have rushed to the rescue, some leading the horses out, holding them, as they stamped and reared, wide-eyed with terror, instinctively knowing the danger of flames. Others must have rushed to the pump, worked the frozen metal handle, filling and passing buckets to be tossed in hopeless little patches on flames that roared through dry straw and native oak timbers.

But Aunt Sina was caring for little Edward. She couldn't leave him in the house, possibly to be trapped in flames and smoke, she couldn't stand by and hold him and watch as the fire ate away this vital structure, she couldn't lay him in the snow to die. So she ran to the farrowing shed, set apart and safe, and looked for warmth, must have looked quickly and desperately, because she put him in the loft above the mother sows and baby piglets. Then she rushed out, another pair of adult hands and arms.

For one who was raised with pigs, the scene is unthinkable. We always knew the dangers of mother pigs - a single squeal from a baby and the huge clumsy mother would spin in rage, identify the culprit and attack. Sows sometimes even killed piglets without knowing it - flopping around awkwardly, rolling over, too dazed from the birth to know what they were doing. But to put a baby in the farrowing shed - even in the loft? What if he had fallen down? What if he had crawled to the ladder and, decided to investigate the babies below?

But it wasn't a choice I had to make. I've made choices, possibly choices that Hannah and Nelsine would have found unimagineable - we can only stretch our minds so far.

Of course the barn burned down. The fire was so hot that ashes landed a mile away, on Walter Jones' lot. And, of course, Nels and Soren and Lewis, and the Warners, and probably other neighbours as well, found shelter for the horses, found a way to keep the farm going, re-built the barn.

And Great Uncle Edward survived to tell us about Nelsine's hasty choice, another family story, one of the children risked for the land, for a future on the prairies, in early times.