We have now built up a school house in our Parish. Johan and Marta go to school and learn various subjects from Books, English also. We pay for a pastor in our Parish with 65 dollar a year and free fire wood. Sometimes he travels to other Settlements and Preaches. Here is much disagreement in Religion. But the Pastor can not exclude anyone from the Parish or from the Sacrament, but two thirds of the parishioners can fire the pastor from his job.
We shall this winter select a Swedish justice of the Peace among us. But there is not much Authority here and I like that well. Here in America the Officials are appointed as servants to attend to their duties. When they do not attend to their job other Officials are put in their place. It is not like in Sweden. They have a perverted Government at home. Sweden has too many lazy dogs to feed who do not wish to work.
I think it is sad for you to sit alone. Is it cold in your room in winter? Have you enough wood for fires — I wish I could send you some of the wood we have here in abundance.
I got apple seeds from Duvemåla which I planted and a sapling has grown up but it will take time I reckon before the tree has fruit. Around the new house Kristina made a flower bed and I have planted 5 Cherrys and 12 Goosberrys and wine berries and some places for strawberries which will bear next summer.
It is Christmas Day today and I have taken the whole day off to write to Sweden. I remember the Christmas games at home, but the joyful and happy mind of a youth is no longer mine; it is hard to claim wild land and I feel it in the Body although not yet Old. I do not hop about on my feet as lightly as in my youth.
It would be a Joy to come home to you once more in Life and sit down at the old table and cut slices of the Christmas Pig, like in my childhood days.
Many days have now passed since I offered you my hand in farewell and left a dear Childhood home. I apologize if I have been slow in writing and write so seldom. I am thinking every day I must write but always delay.
Immeasurable Seas separate us but Daily I have my dear Parents in my thoughts, and my letters to Sweden shall not cease.
You are greeted heartily from your relations in a far-off land. Greetings also to my dear sister Lydia and ask her to write to her brother in North America, if Fathers Hands do tremble.
Your devoted Son
Karl Oskar Nilsson.
Part Two. Gold and Water
XII. THE MARCH OF THE HUNDRED THOUSAND
If it be romance, if it be contrast,
if it be heroism that we require,
what was Troy town to this?
— Robert Louis Stevenson
Across the Plains
About the middle of the nineteenth century, an immense river of human beings pushed its way across North America, from the east toward the west. It was formed in the springtime, from smaller streams and rivulets, at the frontier outposts in Missouri and Kansas and from there streamed over wild and unknown country, across great deserts and salt marshes, over the prairies’ grass and the Rocky Mountains’ snow, over flat land and high mesas, uphill, downhill. Its path — two thousand miles long — was called the California Trail — but the name was all that existed; it had been given to a trail that was yet to be defined and mapped.
Over a path that was everywhere and nowhere, the March of the Hundred Thousand pushed on, from spring to autumn. Its goal was the furthermost western country, washed by an ocean greater than the one crossed by the millions of immigrants.
This train was made up of the strangest conglomeration of people that had ever traveled two thousand unknown, uncleared miles together. It was a caravan never before seen, and never to be seen again.
Men and women, married and unmarried; babes in cradles strung inside the covered ox wagons; old people with trembling limbs. There were proud, honorable women in homespun wadmal, harlots in silk and frills. There were religious people, and atheists. Pious and upright men and women, noble and high-minded people, murderers and robbers, degraded criminals of both sexes. Puritans and libertines, celibates and rapists, the young girl with her virginity intact and the whore who opened her arms to a thousand men. There were thieves and card sharks, counterfeiters and practitioners of every vice known to the world. There were farm hands and maids who had fled from service, soldiers from their regiments, prisoners from their jails, seamen from their ships, mental patients from their asylums, men who had run away from their wives and wives from their husbands, children from their parents, and officials from their posts and positions. There were truthful people and liars, bright people and simpletons, people with normal minds and people a little off. The healthy people and the sick, giants and dwarfs, well-shaped and deformed; one-legged, one-armed, one-eyed, limping ones, seeing and half-blind; all these God-created creatures could be found in this train, in the train of the hundred thousand.
They came from every land on earth, and spoke all the dialects and languages of the earth. This caravan was humanity’s parade in white, black, brown, and yellow; whites and Negroes, Hindus and Chinese, fullbloods, half-bloods, quadroons, the bluest noble blood and the rawest plebeian dregs.
Workers in all trades took off and joined this strange caravan: the carpenter threw away his plane, the timberman his ax, the smith his sledge hammer, the cobbler his last, the baker his spatula, the cook his spoon, the scrivener his pen. They streamed in from all nations: there rode in his ox wagon the English merchant, the Irish lawyer, there rode on his mule the American preacher and surgeon; the Jewish peddler kept whipping his ox. In the train were the Spanish captain, the Italian monk, the Norwegian forester, the German craftsman, and the Swedish farm hand.
In the caravan traveled, side by side the nobleman and the servant, the high officer and the low soldier, the editor and the actor, the singer and the player, the magician and the circus-performer, the ventriloquist and the snake charmer, the fire eater and the tight-rope dancer, the master marksman with the revolver and the man who had never touched a firearm. In their rucksacks, in their wagons or saddlebags, they hid what they held dearest in this world, objects they least wished to part with: the most diversified objects a human heart can cling to: Bibles and decks of cards, holy pictures and dirty pictures, canary birds in cages, whelps in baskets, gifts from parents and dear ones, knives, sewing baskets, crochet hooks, swingletrees, psalmbooks, songbooks, musical instruments, belts, clocks, rings, and amulets.
And an immense animal caravan accompanied the train intended as sacrifice for the people: in the train of the hundred thousand were 60,000 oxen, pulling 15,000 wagons, 25,000 horses and 10,000 mules who carried people on their backs. Four-legged creatures in the train supplied the two-legged with food and drink: 10,000 cows gave them milk twice a day, and a herd of 5,000 sheep gave them mutton and chops which sizzled with delicious odor over the evening campfires.
The train over the plains and deserts was accompanied by song and music — the musical instruments for religious services as well as those for idle play were brought along. Solemn tunes were heard from mouthorgans and psalmodikons, and dance tunes vibrated from fiddles and banjos. Hallowed psalms were sung to the guitar, and lewd songs to the harmonica, strings were strummed for prayer and reverence, while sin was lauded and debauchery acclaimed. Ministers and blasphemers held their services, and their voices and words rose to the same heaven, that lofty, indifferent heaven above the California Trail.