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Through Immigrant Eyes: Utah History at the Grass Roots
Utah Historical Quarterly
Vol. 22, 1954, Nos. 1-4
THROUGH IMMIGRANT EYES:UTAH HISTORY AT THE GRASS ROOTS
BY WILLIAM MULDER
MOSES SENT his twelve to spy out the land of promise, to see whether it was fat or lean; but the Old World has sent its millions to try the promise of America. There must have been excitement in the camp of Israel when two men came back from Canaan with a cluster of grapes so huge they bore it on a staff between them; but that Biblical tall tale dims beside the wonders reported from New Canaan, even when, in the words of a William Bradford, that report was set down "in a plaine stile; with singuler regard unto the simple trueth in all things." In the "good newes" from America the facts were always more marvelous than fiction, for the immigrant crossed more than an ocean and a continent— his traveling was
From earliest voyager to latest refugee, the personal record of that odyssey holds an unfailing fascination, however much each newcomer's experience seems a repetition of an old story. The constant renewing of this experience has in fact determined the course of United States history and given it a characteristic literature, a literature so commonplace it is easily overlooked. The record of the inner and outer weathers of his transplanting as the immigrant himself observed it in his letters and diaries and memoirs begins with the very "roote and rise" of the nation, with the first arrivals, for the founders of Jamestown and Massachusetts Bay were immigrants, as were the settlers of New Netherlands and New Sweden—and as were the unwilling cargoes of every slave ship that reached the mainland. What the experience was for the blacks can only be surmised; even had they been articulate they could not have written letters or kept journals—they came in chains.
But to move at once a long way from both Plymouth Rock and the Virginia slave mart, listen to an obscure farmer in Utah Territory who nearly a hundred years ago sat down to write his Danish kinsfolk a long letter. It was part of his resolve, God willing, to write them once or twice a year about his life in the New World. "To Fisherman Carl," he began, "Dear Brotherin-law," only to add, "and dear relatives, friends, old neighbors and acquaintances, and everyone interested in hearing from us." Christian Nielsen, miller by trade but now of necessity a Sanpete farmer, knew that in the Old Country the arrival of a letter from America would be a village event, all the more because he wrote from Mormonlandet, the rumor-ridden land of the Mormons. He remembered with what misgivings his friends had bade him and his family farewell, declaring it was et hundeliv, a dog's life, in Utah. They had even persuaded a son, Niels Emmanuel, to stay behind, a source of grief and great anxiety. And he remembered how a great crowd at the wharf in Copenhagen had cried shame on him and his fellow converts for disgracing their Scandinavian blood by following the Mormon delusion.
Now, after nearly three years in Zion, he could reassure them. "God be praised, we are among the quick, and we live well." And in a dozen closely written pages he proceeded to tell them a round unvarnished tale whose phrases must have run like rumor through the village, creating a legend even before the letter itself could pass from hand to hand: "The Nielsens have house and land—two town lots, twenty acres of plowland. They own the deeds! Christian says he built a mill for the town, Danish style. Three hundred Danish families live in their town, and everybody is independent. Daughter Sophie is married to young Jacob Knudsen. They live at the Mormon capital, the city by the Great Salt Lake. Son Fritz is conducting an English school for Danes. They say the children are already talking English and they can speak Indian as well. The Indians are friendly, but dirty, and they sell their children for slaves. One Indian wanted to trade his wife to Christian for an ox. Christian says they miss good Danish rye bread; but they eat all kinds of new things—have you ever heard of squash? It isn't true that the Mormons censor their letters; there is no wall around Utah. . . ."
So ran the exciting news, warm and personal, yet almost a proclamation, big with the solid facts of health and ownership and well-being in the new home, alive with adventure. It was not hard for the Jutland cottagers to follow their far-wandering neighbor, for he had an eye for memorable detail: The Atlantic crossing was pleasant, the vessel flying like a cloud from Liverpool to New Orleans in six weeks, only to go aground on a sandbar at the mouth of the Mississippi, and they had to lighten ship by throwing overboard a thousand sacks of salt. In steamboats they moved up the river in late March past orchards in fairest bloom, and saw slaves working in the fields, the Negro women riding the plow, and along the banks children waving wide handkerchiefs. The great encampment of English, Welsh, and Scandinavians at Keokuk above St. Louis, where they were outfitted for the plains and learned the mysteries of the yoke and whip in handling oxen, was a lively place, a bedlam, but Christian also remembered it as a flowered prairie grove in a setting of oak trees and wild grape.
The California trail presented an amazing litter of strewn wagon parts, clothing, and equipment, the shambles left by the hurrying gold seekers stripping for the race to the coast. To greedy immigrants it seemed a chance to become rich in the wilderness, and Christian, now bearded and barefoot, grew sarcastic as he described the comedy of those who overloaded their wagons each day with brass kettles, pans, and wheel rims, only to be forced to abandon them all again before nightfall. In Iowa they were caught in a storm "the like of which is never heard in Denmark"; the thunder approached with ominous sound, the sky was aflame, and in a moment the tents flooded with water. It was "thunder weather."
In Salt Lake and all the way down to Sanpete people came out of their houses loaded with provisions for the immigrants. In Provo someone killed a fatted calf to feast them. By contrast, the poverty in Europe made Christian scornful. "What can a father there do for his children but carry them on his back, slaving for others for a few miserable half-pennies a day." His son Niels, who would soon be conscripted unless he left the wars of kings behind, was constantly in his thoughts. He should be persuaded to come to America with the next Mormon company. The trip would be a lark; he could be a teamster crossing the plains, earning his own way; and here in Sanpete he could become independent in a single season. A fond hope that all might come to the mountains where they could enjoy themselves together brought Christian's letter to a close. "I have still so much to tell you."
As his remarkable letter made its way from cottage to cottage to be read aloud to upturned faces, he must have seemed for the moment a Nordic scop reciting for the village clan his own saga. That the singer was their late familiar made the recital the more wondrous. And when he signed himself in great simplicity and in great pride, "C. Nelson, Emigrant of 1853," they must have felt how much one of theirs he was and how much no longer theirs. "Emigrant of 1853." It was his brevet in Zion. What was past, for him was merely prologue. And his literal rebaptism on arriving in the Valley was the solemn sign and symbol of every immigrant's rebirth.
II
Christian Nielsen's letter, in a foreign tongue and in the possession of a foreign library, nevertheless belongs to Utah. It represents a source of history still unexplored, not only in Utah but in the United States at large. It is a hidden literature, a hidden history, hidden in a double, perhaps a triple, sense. It is hidden first of all among grass roots; it is a literature of the unlettered, to use Theodore Blegen's term, a folk record, the simple utterance of plain people not likely to attract attention. Second, it is hidden in languages other than English; it is an American record in alien tongues, but it is inspired by the American scene, describing an American experience. And third, this record of the immigrant is hidden because it is not in readily available form, often physically inaccessible. Most of this writing can be found only in manuscript letters, journals, and memoirs still in private hands, subject to all the hazards of housecleanings, fires, removals, and indifferent treatment at the hands of a generation that knows not the grandfathers and consigns the yellowed pages to the rubbish heap. In America, it is slowly being gathered into local depositories, most importantly the state historical societies; and in Europe, in Scandinavia particularly, into archives devoted solely to emigrant materials, particularly collections of letters from America. Some immigrant writing has been published: an occasional autobiography privately printed or an aspiring amateur's collection of verse and sketches in the old tongue; but the principal published voice of the non-English immigrant has been the foreign-language press; reading its columns has been compared to unpacking the culture of immigrant chests, the intangibles as well as the tangibles of that culture, because here was expressed and preserved the life of the mind.
There is, to be sure, a growing literature about the immigrant —the sociological and historical and cultural accounts found in the monographs and textbooks; more and more the first generation's reminiscences are being warmed over by an idolizing third or fourth generation; and increasingly the immigrant theme appears in fiction: in Utah, for example, witness Ardyth Kennelly's lusty Scandinavians in The Peaceable Kingdom, Margaret Maw's Danish household in Nikoline's Choice, Virginia Sorensen's second-generation conflict in On This Star, and the comic sequence in Promised Valley, the centennial musical. But what is intended here by the immigrant record is something less and at the same time something more than all this. What is intended is what the ordinary immigrant saw with his own eyes and, without pretensions of any kind, recorded in his own tongue and in his own way the experiences of his uprooting from one culture and transplanting in another. It is first-generation reporting as found in simple journal entries and spontaneous letters and reminiscing memoirs. If not itself literature, it represents the beginnings of literature, the stuff out of which the My Antonia's are eventually made. This immigrant voice should be added to the varied carols Whitman heard nineteenth-century America singing because it is a voice as strong and melodious as the open-mouthed singing of his mechanics and masons, his woodcutters and carpenters, his mothers and young girls, and it is a voice, like the others, "singing what belongs to it and to none else."
Ill
In Utah this voice has been but faintly heard. Like Lanier's "ole Jim," the immigrant here has been like "a word dat somebody spoke and den done been forgotten." The histories devote a chapter to bringing him to Zion and then, having settled him and accounted for him,in the statistics, abandon him, culturally speaking, to the anonymity of the melting pot. The reasons are not far to seek. They are to be found in part in the immigrant himself, in part in the philosophy and program of the latter-day gathering, and in part in an accident of history. To begin with, mother-tongue surveys—that is, census accounts of what people report their mother tongue to be—show that in Utah the old language died out more quickly than in any other state; in Minnesota, for example, it was not uncommon to find third- and fourthgeneration Scandinavians still giving the old speech as their mother tongue. This reflects the different character of Utah immigration. For the Mormon convert, the break with the Old World was a compound fracture: a break with the old church and with the old country, often with family and friends as expulsive forces of persecution and ostracism, made him glad to get out. Besides, Europe was Babylon; Utah was Zion. The new church was an American church; Mormonizing was Americanizing; the Kingdom was interested in unifying the brotherhood, not in perpetuating backward-glancing cultural differences. To be sure, the Mormon church was an hospitable foster mother who realized that the best way to care for the proselyte brought with so much labor from afar was to enable him to take care of himself —to allow him his native-language organizations auxiliary to ward association and to subsidize his newspapers—but these were concessions and strictly conceived as proselyting instruments. The old tongue was condoned only as an expedient mediator, a means of teaching the gospel and informing the immigrant of church affairs in a language he could understand until he learned English —the language, as one editor put it, in which it had pleased the Almighty to manifest His will in this last dispensation. Foreign language activity in Utah was always temporary, very much alive With the first generation, but dying with it; only new and steady immigration gave it continuity. By contrast, in communities of Scandinavian and German Lutherans elsewhere in the United States, the church, the old establishment, performed an exactly opposite function: it strengthened ties with the homeland; it was a flame keeping warm the old language, the old faith, the old customs through religious services and newspapers and denominational schools in the mother tongue.
A final reason the immigrant as such has not been spotlighted in Utah is that here the two great themes of American history, the frontier and immigration, happen to run together. Mormon pioneering in the valleys and Mormon proselyting abroad, where conversion was practically synonymous with emigration, founded the state and peopled it. The pioneer was more than likely an immigrant, and every immigrant a pioneer. The story of the immigrant as such has simply been absorbed in the pioneer story, lost in the dust of covered wagons. And perhaps because Yankee and Briton dominated the old-stock membership and provided the leadership which determined the pattern of settlement, Utah's history, actually recorded in several tongues, has been told exclusively from the English-language sources. For all these reasons, Utah's foreign-language record as a source of history and literature has suffered a singular obscurity.
Since the state is admittedly Anglo-Scandinavian in population, the Scandinavian record may serve to illustrate how rich is the source. This is not to slight other immigrant groups, who deserve their spokesmen. What is said of one might be said of all
"Dumb Swede" was long the synonym for foreigner in Utah, yet in his own tongue the "dumb Swede" was articulate enough. He felt a mortal need to express himself in the only way he could, to have a life of the spirit without which he would surely die, And there was considerably more life of the spirit than is commonly believed. The mother tongue was the natural basis of association and organization. Every settlement had its Scandinavian Meeting, auxiliary to regular ward affiliation, through which the local meetinghouse where the immigrants met with their English and American brethren and sisters for Sunday services became the center of their own choir rehearsals, socials and reunions, and amateur theatricals. Manti in 1871 had a brass band which played "lively melodies, in part Scandinavian," to quote one correspondent. Ephraim, to quote another, by 1876 had built a little theater where "a small company of Scandinavians produced the Norwegian comic operetta Til Sacters, with success." Though outsiders, he said, might wonder about "us poor creatures in Sanpete where it is supposed the pigs lick the milk pans and hens lay eggs in bed, almost all the settlements have their local dramatic company or at least a good choir." The Scandinavian Choir in Salt Lake was considered in 1878 "the best we have had in many years," suggesting a much earlier origin. In 1891 the city's Scandinavian Dramatic Club, which sometimes performed in the famous Salt Lake Theater, as did the Swedish society Thalia, gave fifteen performances in southern Utah, typical of its roadshow activity for the benefit of countrymen in the settlements. Danske Klub, another amateur group of actors, had done the same in the 1880's. There were, besides, English classes and study groups, literary societies, sport clubs, emigration fund societies, a Scandinavian mercantile association, and, in the 1890's, a political organization, the Scandinavian Democratic Society. Not to be forgotten were the great reunions on mission anniversaries, annual outings like Midsummer Day and Old World patriotic occasions, and special Christmas morning services, times when life was at high tide for the Scandinavians.
Not only were they articulate in this fashion. They wrote. Scandinavian literacy, the product, says Sigrid Undset, of much reading on long winter nights, made Mormon immigrants a select group, however much a United States Secretary of State in 1879 might consider Utah's "accessions from Europe drawn mainly from the ignorant classes, who are easily influenced by the double appeal to their passions and their poverty," and however much the editor of the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican might describe them as "simple, ignorant people, beyond any class known in American society, and so easy victims to the shrewd and sharp and fanatical Yankee leaders in the Mormon Church." "Poverty" and "ignorance," stock condemnations of the immigrant generally, were evils for which America itself was sure remedy; the fact was one of Utah's enthusiasms.
The only publishing outlet for Scandinavians during their first twenty years in Utah was Skandinaviens Stjerne, hailed in 1851 by the Millennial Star, its sister publication in England, as "another star in the moral firmament of celestial lights." Issued every other week by the L.D.S. Church in Copenhagen, it had many subscribers among Utah Scandinavians, whose contributions by way of verse and letters to the editor describing life in the settlements appeared regularly in its columns. In 1873 appeared the Danish-Norwegian Utah Posten, first foreign-language publication in Utah, only to die within a year, the victim, of. hard times in the panic of '73. But it was succeeded two years later by the hardier Bikuben, "The Beehive," also in Danish-Norwegian, which for sixty years became a weekly looked-for event in the lives of its readers. Papers in Swedish soon followed, two of them existing side by side and carrying on lively competition for fifteen years. Andrew Jenson's biweekly Danish magazine, Morgenstjernen, published in Salt Lake from 1882 to 1886, became the chief repository of early immigrant memoirs. It was considered valuable enough to be continued in English as The Historical Record, which ran to volume nine, a rich source of Mormon church history and biography. For two years, 1910-1911, the Norwegians kept alive a literary monthly called Varden. "The Beacon." But it was the weekly newspaper that was the voice of the ordinary immigrant, in which he spoke his mind and read with pleasure in the old familiar tongue verse, stories, correspondence and editorials written by his own countrymen. One editor complained he received many more letters than he could use, and they were all too long, as was the poetry. How many mute inglorious Miltons died unheard, who can say? But the immigrants did write, sometimes to friends and family in the Old Country, sometimes to Bikuben or Svenska Harolden or Skandinaviens Stjerne, and often for their own edification in their daybooks. Not to be overlooked is the oral tradition, their storytelling, their recitations at reunions, their earthy humor, a tradition rich and realistic, far deeper than the superficial comic role accorded them, the butt of the joke, which has caricatured the Scandinavians in so much of Utah's thinking.
IV
The immigrant wrote and reminisced because, of all people, he had something to write about. Although he was an ordinary person, his was not an ordinary experience. He saw new scenes and felt the emotions these scenes awakened. Every decision became momentous, every act of greater consequence. It was experience heightened by constant comparison: all life became a double scene, having a vital and immediate interest in the new, a lingering attachment to the old. It was all anticipation, all recollection, with the experience of the particular moment constantly weighed in the balance. Perhaps when this literature is finally translated, it will tell us no more than we already have been told of human joy and suffering in the pioneer journals; yet in a special way everything for the immigrant had a peculiar poignance because in all his experiencing he was cut off, a stranger in a strange world, in the way most acute to human beings—inlanguage. Often unable to communicate what needed saying, he turned with special relief to his journal or his letters home. These became his confessional, his compensation. For the Mormon convert, which is in effect to say the Utah immigrant, his was a religious migration, a response to a call, an appointed gathering. History was an unfolding of God's will in which he played a part, and he recorded God's wonder-working providences with the soul-searching of the Puritan diarists. He saw the handof the Lord in everything. It was a kind of spiritual bookkeeping, a tidy accounting for the day of judgment. This frame of mind explains the pious and didactic spirit of so much of the journalizing and letter-writing. Yet the dominant impression, despite the introspection, is that the wounds of trouble and doubt healed quickly—the flesh was sound, the faith triumphant. It is as if the strong-faced portraits that used to hang on parlor walls should speak. The originals come to life and, if anything, seem less forbidding. The portraiture is warmly human.
If, as Stephen Vincent Benet tells us in Western Star, history is falsified by generalization and we can understand it only when we become aware of the "daily living and dying beneath the sun," then in these unpretentious pages we come close to understanding history—Utah history and human history. In them we find something of the daily living and dying of men and women both weak and valiant. Their story is not epic except as life and many days together give it sweep—it is the sweep of daily existence, the great movement that is the result of countless little movements, each life a tiny capillary, a vein, an artery contributing to the strong heartbeat of their collective existence.
This grass roots record is the history of Jens Hansen of Spanish Fork, whose blessings outran those of Father Jacob; with fourteen wives, his family numbered thirty-seven, but his house was a house of order. At dinner time a friend in 1877 found him sitting at the head of the table, his wives at his left hand in the order of marriage, his sons at his right in order of descending age, the daughters waiting on table. Congress, thought the visitor, ought to encourage others to follow the patriarch's example by giving a man forty acres of land for every woman he married and ten acres for every child he begot.
This record is the history of the sensitive Norwegian spinster who at the end of the long journey in 1862 was taken in by a kindly Dane and his wife, and who, homesick and exhausted, could not restrain the tears when she saw a clean tablecloth and a china tea service from the Old Country in their adobe cottage, fragile refinement resisting the desert.
This record is the history of the Danish weaver who found no shelter, no waiting brethren, none of the pure in heart to bid him welcome in Zion, but who, dumped out in the Tithing Yard in Salt Lake City, with some green corn tossed him from a basket for his meal, still felt that though he stood with empty hands, God had given him the call to come here and would not let him starve.
This history, this literature, is the story of the widow who knew that though scriptures promised a desert blossoming like the rose, the newcomer had to help a little, and sent to her sister in Norway for "two myrtles with strong roots, several bulbs of Mrs. Rien's white lilies, as many bulbs as you can secure of Jacob's lilies."
This literature is the story of the Swedish tailor who, as Hyrum's bishop and mayor, with pick and shovel led a band of men and boys up Blacksmith's Fork Canyon to build a road to the timber and grassland in the mountains, and when the going was rough and nearly all deserted him, came down from the canyon declaring he was strong as a lion, determined to bring the drones from the hive.
This literature is the story of the Dane who entertained the idea of polygamy, broached the subject to his wife, and came home one day to find instead of dinner on the table, two geranium plants, one old that had been about the house a long time, the other young and full of buds. "Which of these plants will you keep?" asked the wife. "Study them; take your time. Then tell me what you decide." The husband, wise Dane, understood, and no second wife ever crossed the threshold.
It is a literature through which run glad refrains like "Children are no burden in Zion," "We have the deeds to this ground," "There is freedom here," "The land cries out to be used."
It is a literature filled with a thousand memorable scenes, the sound of unforgettable voices. It is the sight of four hundred emigrants marching from their lodging to the dock in Copenhagen lugging their world's goods and to the clanging of tinware singing,
It is the sight of a mother giving her three small girls a last embrace before entrusting them to a young woman to be taken to Utah, and the words, "Few ever get through with them all," echoing in her ears. It is the sight of six hundred Scandinavians spilling out of a train stopped by an obliging conductor to see the sacred Hill Cumorah and the fabled grove and to pluck a flower as a memento. It is the sight of an immigrant entering Salt Lake in 1857 with the Danish flag flying from his handcart, his trousers flapping in tatters round his legs. It is the sight of Indian women on the plains wailing for a Danish woman's loss of her husband, of a boy backtrailing 150 miles to find the family cow, of winter dances in the settlements to keep warm and folk singing to an Old World tune:
It is the literature of things remembered: a red strongbox filled with silver coins received from the sale of the home in Norway for passage to Zion; of a Danish frockcoat bartered for a windowless cabin in Bear River; a broadcloth suit for a hundred pounds of flour to sustain a family while the father returned to the homeland on a mission. It is the remembrance of an uncomfortable Scandinavian audience when the visiting brethren bore down on the Word of Wisdom. It is the literature of last views of home, first views of the Valley, the first feel of the plow, the first sight of the prophet. It is a literature of longing as in Christian Madsen's letter: "Everywhere among the Saints the next year's emigration is almost their every thought. This circumscribes their prayers, their anxieties, and their exertions." An unconscious eloquence clothes it; the pulse of history beats in it still strong after these many years.
Utah's immigrant record, to paraphrase Willa Cather, "shines with bright incidents, slight, perhaps, but precious, as in life itself, where the great matters are often as worthless as astronomical distances, and the trifles dear as the heart's blood." The history of Utah, as seen through immigrant eyes, is full of significant trifles. To the extent the Christian Nielsens, with whose letter we began, are not translated and made known, Utah's literary and historical heritage is by that much impoverished and diminished.
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