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across the other side of the state, just north of the Iowa state line where Minnesota and South Dakota come together. Sioux Falls, situated a few miles west of this country at a promising spot on the Big Sioux River, looked like it would become the principal “city”: It already boasted a population of 593, and new buildings were going up at a clip. Come spring, Nils was going to move out there and other young Norwegians from Decorah planned to go with him. In May of 1874, almost exactly a year after they arrived in America, Gro and Ole threw in their lot with this small band of Norwegians and headed west to Rock County, Minnesota.
    After borrowing seventy-five dollars from Ole’s sister, the Rollags had enough money, just, for the essential outfit of the pioneer—a yoke of oxen, a wagon, and a couple of cows. “Everyone warned us against going west because the grasshoppers were so bad,” Gro wrote years later. “But we went anyway.” It took the party three weeks to cover the 260 miles of prairie land between Decorah and Rock County. They had almost arrived when they saw the first signs of grasshopper devastation around Jackson on the Minnesota side of the Des Moines River. “They sat thick in the trees by the river,” wrote Gro. “Many farmplaces along the way were abandoned, and we came to one hut where the people said, ‘Next year you’ll go back.’ That was hardly encouraging, but we went on toward the goal of our journey, Rock County, and arrived there in June." Most of the land in Rock County was taken as well, but the Rollags managed to secure a homestead in section 13. “So we had to begin to become farmers,” wrote Gro. “It didn’t look very good.
    Only prairie all around and nothing to begin with.” They dug a cellar and laid some boards over one corner to shelter their bed. For cooking they had a small stove that they had purchased in the nearby town of Worthington—“so small that we could bake only three loaves of bread in it,” recalled Gro, “and when we had to use hay for fuel it looked dismal enough.” Ole spent the first summer breaking sod. In the fall Nils helped them build a sod house; they roofed it with some four-by-fours on which they piled more sod to serve as shingles. That first year they lived on a dirt floor.
    Osten and Kari came out to join them the following March. Like Gro and Ole, Osten and Kari had spent their first years in America with relatives and then moved farther west when they found out how expensive the land was in the settled parts of the Midwest. Osten wrote in his memoirs that he and his mother journeyed out to Rock County by train, arriving at Worthington on March 2, 1875: “Worthington was then a very lively place, with new houses being built everywhere and the sound of hammering was heard from many places. . . . You could see a forest of ox-carts everywhere.” Ole came to meet the newcomers in town with his team of oxen, Spot and Dick, and an empty wagon that they could fill with their purchases—lumber, stove, beds, kitchen utensils. It was at the lumberyard that the brothers-in-law ran into a spot of trouble. Ole brought the oxen to a halt on a patch of gravel that had been scraped clean of snow, and the men loaded the wagon. But once it was loaded, “the oxen could not get off the spot and remained stuck,” wrote Osten. “And then the train came. It came from the east. You can believe that the oxen became lively because they certainly had not seen a train before. They made a big hop and got out of the gravel and went at a run through the streets and we ran after them as best we could. It was fun for the townsfolk who saw and enjoyed the foot-race. We had to go back to the hotel to get Mother but the oxen were not willing to turn around so we had a hard time in getting them to do so." Things went a bit more smoothly once they got the oxen out of town. Gro and Ole’s homestead was almost fifty miles from Worthington, and it was a long trudge in