th myself
always as the chief ox driver, did all the breaking, and all the hauling
and carting of lumber, provisions, building-material and other goods,
for all the settlers in that neighborhood during the first season.

Soon others of our party from last year joined us. Some letters which I
wrote in _Hemlandet_ describing the country around us, attracted much
attention and brought settlers from different parts of the west, and
while the Swedes were pouring into our place, then known as "Mattson's
Settlement," (now well known under the name of Vasa), our friends, the
Norwegians, had started a prosperous settlement a few miles to the
south, many of them coming overland from Wisconsin, bringing cattle,
implements and other valuables of which the Swedes, being mostly poor
new-comers, were destitute. Many immigrants of both nationalities came
as deck passengers on the Mississippi steamers to Red Wing.

There was cholera at St. Louis that summer, and I remember how a steamer
landed a large party of Norwegian immigrants, nearly all down with
cholera. Mr. Willard and myself happened to be in Red Wing at the time,
and the American families, considering these Norwegian cholera patients
our countrymen, hastily turned them over to our care. We nursed them as
best we could, but many died in spite of all our efforts, and as we
closed their eyes, and laid them in the silent grave under the bluffs,
it never occurred to us that they were anything but our countrymen and
brothers.

From these small beginnings of the Swedish and Norwegian settlers in
Goodhue county, in the years of 1853 and 1854, have sprung results which
are not only grand but glorious to contemplate. Looking back to those
days I see the little cabin, often with a sod roof, single room used for
domestic purposes, sometimes crowded almost to suffocation by hospitable
entertainments to new-comers; or the poor immigrant on the levee at Red
Wing, just landed from a steamer, in his short jacket and other
outlandish costume, perhaps seated on a wooden box, with his wife and a
large group of children around him, and wondering how he shall be able
to raise enough means to get himself ten or twenty miles into the
country, or to redeem the bedding and other household goods which he has
perchance left in Milwaukee as a pledge for his railroad and steam-boat
ticket. And I see him trudging along over the trackless prairie,
searching for a piece of land containing if possible prairi