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traveling clothes and by noon they were sun-burned—the sun literally scoured the fair skin off their faces. They yearned for a bit of shade. Miles away they could see the pale green of cottonwoods shadowing the banks of some creek or stream, but otherwise there was not a tree or even so much as a decent shrub to break the flow of grass. The few dugouts and sod huts they passed only made the prairie look vaster and lonelier. The first night out, one man swore they must be approaching a thickly settled part for the horizon twinkled with lights: It turned out he had been gazing at fireflies playing in the breeze over the next rise. The one reassur-ing feature of this strange land was the presence of many small lakes and potholes dotted with waterfowl and thick with tall reeds. It was customary for Schweizers to settle by ponds or streams, so they took the bits of blue water in the midst of all the tawny grass as a good sign. And as farmers they understood instinctively the immense agricultural potential of the prairie. "Where there is such an abundance of grass,” one of the men remarked, “grain can also grow there, if the ground is worked up." By the time they returned to their families in Yankton, they were ready to stake their claims.
    The Indian trail through the grass seemed less alien the second time they walked it. About thirty-five miles north of Yankton, the men fanned out across the prairie. Wherever one of them sighted a small lake or stream, he would drop his hat or coat as a sign that this land was taken. This was how the Kaufmanns, Albrechts, Grabers, and their fellow Schweizers, eventually some sixty families in all, came to settle around Freeman and Marion and farther out around Turkey Creek and Swan Lake. The families that still had enough money left to buy a pair of oxen and a wagon and a few boards of lumber moved out to their claims at once, while those who were too poor stayed behind in Yankton and picked up any paying jobs they could get to earn the cash they needed to homestead. Fifty cents a day was the going wage. The ride out over the prairie behind the expensive but often barely broken oxen was what the women recalled with greatest horror. “Oh such a ride!” one woman wrote years later. “I was so afraid the oxen would run away (no lines). There we sat, flat on the lumber load—nothing to hang onto—the wagon and lumber swaying this way and that way and we poor things slipping and sliding every old way trying to hang onto our kids and our belongings. . . . No bridges on the creeks and so much water in those days.” Night fell before they reached the claims, so they made camp near a small lake, using the pieces of lumber for shelter. Some of the younger men who had brought along shotguns from the Ukraine brought down a few ducks as they flew up from the lake—their first taste of wild American game.

    Gro and Ole Rollag, the newlyweds, had chosen Decorah in Win-neshiek County in the northeast corner of Iowa on the basis of a sheaf of letters from Norwegian pioneers who had come before them. No mention of the long harsh winters, no word about the grasshoppers that devoured the crops or the prairie fires that consumed the grass in waves of flame. It was all free land, virgin soil, fertile loam, bumper harvests of wheat. So Gro and Ole boarded a train in Boston as soon as they arrived in America and traveled west to Iowa in a boxcar. When they got to Decorah they put up at the house of a relative from Norway named Abraham Jacobson. It was Jacobson who let them know that the “America letters” were not entirely accurate or up to date. The Iowa soil was indeed superb, but the free land was gone, all claimed and proved up by earlier arrivals. Gro and Ole stayed on with the Jacobsons, picking up what work they could in Decorah while they looked around for something better. From Abraham’s son Nils they heard about a nice un-claimed stretch of prairie with many creeks and small rivers clear