Read Walking on Water: A Novel for Free Online Page B

through the port of Copenhagen on July 7, 1901. He was nineteen years old, and it was the last time he would ever see his homeland. Two weeks later he landed at Ellis Island. It is unknown whether the spelling change of Kristoffersen to Christoffersen was initiated by my great-grandfather, immigration inspectors, or mistakes in the ship’s manifest, but the immigrant logs show that Jon’s name was recorded as Jon Ch ristoffersen.
    Jon followed the example of many other immigrating Danes and made his way to the Midwest, where he found work in Minnesota as a farmhand for another Danish immigrant, Poul Johansen, who raised cattle and hogs. Jon earned double the amount he had in Denmark. His plan was to work the ten years necessary to earn the money for his own farm, but his plans changed when he fell in love with Johansen’s daughter, Lena, who was seventeen when Jon began working for her father. Just a year later theywere married. They lived on Johansen’s farm, where Lena gave birth to their first child, Finn, in 1903.
    Once again, Jon was swayed by promises of a new and better life farther west. He left farming behind for good when he and Lena decided they would travel nearly one thousand miles west to Butte, Montana, to start a new life. They had heard that several major mines had recently struck gold (true) and that all the miners were getting rich (not so true).
    In 1908 Butte was a bustling Western town of more than sixty-five thousand inhabitants, where, as Will Rogers wrote, men “still wore ten-gallon hats and red neckerchiefs.”
    While gold was what drew men to the area, copper was what kept them there. Jon got a job at the Anaconda Copper Mine and worked there for the rest of his life.
    Shortly after their arrival in Butte, Lena gave birth to two more children, another boy, Lars, who died from fever at the age of three, and a girl, Hanne, who was stillborn. After the loss of two children, Lena was so heavily grieved that some thought her “touched.” The family’s surviving child was sensitive to his mother’s pain, as observed by his father:
    Finn is a sensitive and melancholy child. He is much endeared to his mother and seeks to earn her love, which she withholds not out of spite, but because her broken heart has none to give.
    —Diary of Jon Christoffersen
    Finn was a hardworking and enterprising young man. At the age of twenty-one, he opened his own grocery store, which prospered. That same year he married Genevieve Crimmons, a young woman from a second-generation Butte Irish family. While he was looked down on by Genevieve’s parents, Finn was lauded by his own family for marrying into an established local family. Finn seemed to haverealized the American dream. A year after they married, Genevieve gave birth to their first child, a girl whom they named Paula. Genevieve was a demanding woman and wanted more than her husband could provide. She convinced Finn to abandon the business, although Jon counseled against it. Finn and Genevieve extended the family’s western migration to the larger city of Seattle, Washington, where her aunt and uncle lived. Here, they thought they could have greater income, and they opened a new store.
    I found it interesting that I was not the first Christoffersen to go to Seattle looking for greater opportunity.
    Less than a year after Finn’s family moved, Jon contracted yellow fever and passed away. He was followed only a week later by his wife, Lena. Finn was unable to return to Butte for his own parents’ funerals, as the store was highly demanding—almost as demanding as his wife. In spite of his best efforts, the store did not do well. In the meantime Genevieve gave birth to two more children, both boys: Peter and Thomas.
    In October 1929, just four years after their relocation to Seattle, the Great Depression hit. As was the case with thousands of enterprises, Finn’s store failed. Creditors demanded payment or took back their wares, sometimes both. Genevieve’s