I'm thinking there had to be a whole lot you didn't know. I'm sure some homesteaders read up on what they could, listened to the tales of whoever came back from the frontier to say hello or, sorrowfully, to admit that being the first white folks to live anywhere west of here required a whole lot more than they'd bargained for. But they couldn't know it all.
Isolation drove some of them around the bend, as it did Beret, Per Hansa's long-suffering wife, from Ole Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth. Not long after arriving out here Beret falls into a grand funk and determines not to wish homesteading on anyone. She'd come along a dream fueled by her husband's visions. But what did they know, really--those crusading homesteaders? They were pioneers all right, sometimes prisoners of their own naivete.
And while many thousands left when they faced odds they knew darn well they couldn't win, some stayed; some held on despite the learning curve, some rolled with the punches and came up smiling. Mrs. LeRoy Sampson, for one, who came to Minnesota in 1854 with six other families from Rhode Island, ended up that first night in a flimsy cabin shared by all those people. She says she didn't sleep a wink that night, in part because the man who'd driven them out there hadn't either. He kept himself awake in a manner that they others simply couldn't miss.
Some woeful noise out in the wilderness all around kept them awake, some baying they all believed the hungry wails of some prowling beasts--probably wolves, they thought, because they'd heard about wolves, packs of 'em, hungry, ravenous wolves, jaws dripping blood. "We none of us slept that night in the windowless cabin," she wrote, on account of all that incessant horror.
It took some daylight hours before they realized all that noise came up off the lake they'd parked beside, from a bird, a duck-like thing whose cry was more mournful in the first light of morning than it was threatening. Minnesota didn't become a state until 1858, and it would take another whole century before some bird-er declared the loon to be the state bird. But Mrs. Sampson and all those Rhode Islanders woke up to the fact that, "In the morning noise of the loons on the lake that had kept us awake."
Mrs. Anderson came to Minnesota that same year, 1854, never, ever having met or even seen what she might well have called "an injun'" until one of the neighborhood natives walked into her cabin and, in silence, took a seat at her table. He was, she said, "hideously painted" and likely half naked. What's more, what hung from his belt was a knife so menacing it seemed destined for terror.
She froze. Literally. "I was overpowered in fright, and for a few minutes," she says, "I couldn't do anything. Her husband was somewhere in the field, and her two little children were asleep behind a curtain hung in the one-room cabin. She said she determined that she needed her husband. She walked out as if the man's presence was terrifying, and then ran about a quarter mile down the path to the field, when "her mother's heart," she says, let her know she absolutely could not leave her precious children alone with that man."
Here's the way she describes what she found: "Entering, I saw my little two-year old boy standing by the Indian's side playing with the things in his belt, while the Indian carefully held the baby in his arms."
The first thing she did was bring out some bread and milk, and thus, with food, began a long friendship.
It happened, in the wild wilderness, out on the frontier. You can't help but think that some stories don't get told often enough.
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