The Norwegians

Our maternal grandparents, both born in Norway- he in the far North, she in the more civilized South- mostly spoke English to each other because their Norwegian dialects were so different they were easily misunderstood.   They were Lutheran although Grandma Anna Asulda Osmundson’s family had investigated and attended the Christadelphians but she decided that wasn’t right either- she had her own beliefs- later she was baptized Baptist- and later still, just before she died my sister reminisces,   “I don't know why I was with her in the bedroom south of the bathroom, (on S Strevell in Miles City) probably reading to her, which I did a lot of.   She eventually could not see enough to read and it was something she dearly loved.   She said she did not wish to die before she saw her loved ones once more.   She then slept, not waking for about three days. When she finally awoke, she had been to Norway and had seen everyone she loved. Her eyes were happy!”   Grandpa Ivar Froistad stayed loyal to his Lutheran upbringing. Our Grandparents kept the Sabbath Day holy by resting & reading the Bible together. Only necessary chores were allowed, tho we were free to play. Grandpa didn’t even herd his sheep on the Sabbath- he would have them within sight of the house and give hand signals to his dog, Ring (who we were not allowed to play with- Nita did anyway, she says) to keep them close.   No sewing, cooking of fancy meals or anything that could be called work. Or causing anyone else to work.   Ivar was such a man of faith he refused to buy any kind of insurance.   Even crop insurance.   Or fire insurance.   My sister remembers standing with him looking at an obviously failing crop (corn, wheat, oats??) tears running down his cheeks. Neither would he borrow money even tho our local banker urged him to, knowing he was such an honest man.

Ivar drank ‘cambric tea’-- sugar & cream in hot water.   He had a delicate stomach- he did keep brandy for medicinal purposes tho I think it took years to go thru a pint. Egg-nog made with pure cream (no milk) was a favorite drink.   We seldom actually attended Church   except on special occasions if the weather was clement or sometimes to the Lutheran Ladies Aid in Ludlow.   I never remember going to church in the winter while living at the ranch.   Uncle Irvin (our mother’s brother - 6 years older) owned the only car so when we did go to Church the car had to be swept out and bed spreads put on the seats to protect our clean clothes.   We usually did our visiting at this time, too since we were already dressed up.   Irvin used his car to haul lambs, ewes, trapped animals on the way to having their skins stretched & cured, dead skunks, his collection of traps etc. A true Scandinavian born at least 100 years too late.

Our mother was born on her father Ivar’s homestead in Hettinger County, North Dakota (south west part of the state).   Their closest town was Havelock.   They milked cows and sold the cream thru the Equity Union Creamery- they had a deep open well where they hung the cream in cans to keep it cool until they shipped it from Havelock to Aberdeen, South Dakota.   The skim milk was fed to the Bull, the chickens, turkeys, and the pig they bought each year to fatten for butchering.   Small caves were eaten into the haystack by the cows & these spaces were perfect for the turkey hens to hatch their eggs.   One particular Tom Turkey wanted a nest of his own so every time a hen would get up to eat or drink, he would roll one of her eggs off for himself.   Finally it was decided to let him have a few eggs for his own.   He took great good care of his little ones after they hatched.   Their cash crop was mink & whatever other fur bearing animals Irvin could trap (to this day our mother has no patience with the folks who object to other folks wearing fur). They had a wall telephone and their ring was one long, three short.   One spring a heavy hail storm killed or wounded that year’s flock of young turkeys so the dead ones were beheaded to eat & the wounded ones were successfully patched up with matches & tooth picks serving as splints.

May was the youngest child and her half-sisters told her she was not wanted- probably true as Anna was 43 yrs old (just figured this out- I had always thought she was 46).   They named her Anna May (another resentment- the youngest half sister who is buried in the Lutheran cemetery there in the Havelock Community, was named Anna Marie-   turns out it was common in the Scandinavian culture to give the dead child’s name to the next living child).   When May was about two her father shaved off his mustache and she was just terrified of him for days!   May began to bake bread when she was 5 years old.   She had to set the pan on a chair so she could reach it to knead the dough.

Anna traveled by train to visit her folks in Minnesota now and then so May took over her work.   Some- times the whole family traveled to Minnesota on the train. Once they even bought a sleeper!   Anna was often sick (her symptoms sound very like depression) and one time when Irvin was trying to rescue a broom stick stuck on top of the granary by throwing other objects at it- he threw a 12 inch steel rod which went completely over the top and hit May on the head- cutting quite a gash.   She was cautioned to not cry and wake her mother as iodine was being poured into her wound.   She didn’t cry.   When she was about 9, their neighbor invited her to Dinner one Sunday.   They came to fetch her in their buggy.   She got to eat at the “first table” because she was a guest.   The “second table” was next but the dishes & utensils were not washed in between & the young folks got to choose at whose place they preferred to eat & there was a lively competition for her place.   A remark was made by one of the boys that made May want to go home- she looked yearningly over to their home place two miles away but decided to not hurt her hosts feeling by walking home

May started wearing glasses when she was almost five for her crossed eyes.   She lost the sight in her left eye and, because of unbearable headaches, quit school before she finished the 8th grade.   Reading has been painful for her all her life.

May’s half-sister, “Ruth” (Johanna Asulda) Johnson Lister & her husband had adopted a daughter, Vera, who was the same age as May and when Mr. Lister died Vera came to live with them while Ruth went to St Paul and different places to work.   May and her niece grew up together like sisters.

May says in the spring the whole prairie as far as one could see was covered with wild flowers- larkspur, gumbo lilies, wild flags, roses, blue bells....   May was a great dancer, doing the schottische, polka and even the Charleston whenever she went to one of the country dances.   She sewed her own clothes on a treadle machine putting long sleeves on everything because she didn’t like her “hairy” arms.   She had a flapper dress.   And of course they made their own goose down pillows and comforters covered in standard blue and white striped ticking.   And braided rugs called rag rugs (because they were made from rags).   She loved to roller skate- until the men started mixing alcohol with it - a skating accident resulted in a brown spot on her front tooth which she was self conscious about ever after- smiling with her mouth closed for pictures.

May remembers the Russian women made the best dill pickles- they didn’t use vinegar, just salt & plenty of dill.   Mothers sewed their children into their long underwear in the fall & in the spring they ripped out the stitches.   She says the Russian children did not use hankies but wiped their noses on their sleeves, which stiffened more and more as the school year wore on.   She loved going to their houses- everyone lived happily in the house- chickens, pigs and all.   They were such great cooks. The men drank some which Anna did not approve of at all.   The Russians seemed to be a wild and uncivilized group compared to the reserved and more sober minded Norwegians.

When she was about 13 years old her mother, Anna decided she didn’t like the atmosphere in the Russian Community where they lived and wanted to move to South Dakota where Ivar’s nephew Nels had a homestead.

As the youngest grandchild, May was her grandfather Nels Osmundson’s pet.   He & her step-grandmother, Amalia had three other children- Emma, who’s real name was Ingaborg; Andrew & Arthur.   Amalia was the sister of Anna’s mother, Anne Serena. Anne Serena had died of TB while they still lived in Norway (where?) so Nels took his four children and emigrated to Boston where Anna, eager to be accepted as an American, talked her brothers into changing their name to Nelson whilst she learned perfect English with a Boston accent which she kept ever after. Grandfather Nels was a ship builder.   In   Boston he worked for Commodore Vanderbilt on his yacht at one time.   Anna still had some table linen off that boat, which our mother handed to me when she sold 1113 S Strevell.   From Boston Nels went back to Norway and courted Anne Serena’s sister, Amalia (Mala).   After returning to the States, the new couple lived in New Jersey, Virginia, and on Washington Island in Lake Michigan before Nels retired from ship building and turned to farming.

Anna’s first husband, Martin Johnson (Martinius Gundar Johansen), worked with her father, Nels.   Anna & Martin married when she was 18 & he was 24.   They must have lived well- she had a piano with a beautiful silk scarf over the top (which was the style at the time) & my sister now has that silk scarf.   In the summer of 1902, Martin & two of their children (Neil and Laura) died of typhoid fever in Norfolk, Virginia & the other children had fevers so high their hair fell out (did this effect their mental stability in their later years?) so the 33 year old widow took her four surviving children, Johnny, Agnes, Ruth and Anna Marie back to Minnesota to her father’s farm outside of Madelia.

Was this where the book-burning incident happened?   Anna was supposed to be cooking for the threshing crew but the book she was reading was too interesting to put down so she finally removed all temptation by shoving it into the cook stove.

Anyway, she was soon being courted by a drop-dead handsome pennyless farm worker, ten years her junior who had come from Norway via Halifax, Canada in 1900 at the age of 21.   Ivar Froistad was the youngest in a pretty large, poor family- they raised potatoes on the roof- Ivar would run out after firewood barefooted in the snow.   Ivar & Anna were married in 1906 in Madelia, MN by the Rev Johan Mattson, in spite of her family and her children’s objections- they wanted her to marry a quite well off distant cousin in Norway and didn’t treat Ivar well at first, altho he was kind to his step children and generous towards them with what ever money he accrued.

About 1926 Ivar, Anna, Irvin & May Froistad finally made the move to Nels’ homestead in Harding County, South Dakota where they went into the sheep business.  Vera stayed in North Dakota with their school teacher, Hazel, who was being courted by Charlie Rolfe after his wife (our Agnes) was taken to the State Mental Hospital, and Earl Roe was courting Vera.  Too many social activities & not enough study time was probably what caused her to flunk her 8th grade test.  Irvin drove Ivar up to get her and bring her back to SD- she didn’t like it but passed her test the next time.  When Vera turned 18, she and Earl married (he was 19).  Earl farmed & worked for the ND State Highway Department.  They had a son, Darwin and a few years later, two daughters, Karen & Sharon.  In later years we visited back and forth often- the girls were about our ages.  May went back to ND to finish school (SD required reading more books and she couldn’t) but her headaches forced her to quit.

   

A New Beginning

The men have trailed their cattle down in the rain, first selling the calves.    After driving back to get May and Anna, here they are in South Dakota–  living in Nels’ one room homestead shack by the ‘highway’ (US Highway 85-barely graveled with ‘scoria’ - our modest section later becomes famous as Froistad’s Corner for its severe right angle left turn at the top of the hill traveling south, disbursing confused passengers frequently cut, bleeding & in shock- a couple of times even dead- onto our cornfield when their vehicles overshoot the turn).  It is spring.  They raise about 100 turkeys and start in the sheep business. 

Ivar is soon doing well enough to afford a gasoline operated washing machine.  May is quite excited about this labor saving devise, it is way better then washing by hand on the scrub board even tho the water still has to be pumped by hand & carried from the well and heated on the coal stove.  When all the items are hung out to dry the machine and rinsing tubs are emptied and the water carried back out and used to either water plants/animals and/or scrub the outhouse.  Everything is clean. 

She has little “hired girl” jobs around the different ranches but when her mother writes, saying she needs her May comes home.  Betty, the ewe lamb she raised on a bottle, comes to the door when she wants a drink or when she misplaces her lambs & needs help locating them.  May’s pet enemy Fritz (also bottle raised?) likes to bump into whoever is carrying the feed bucket so some (oats? Corn?) will spill for him to eat- he gives 20 pounds of wool in the spring- the average is 9-10.  His ‘brother’, Hans learns to chew tobacco after he is sold to a neighbor. 

When May is 18-19 years old during harvest season while burning pitch pine from the Cave Hills in the cook stove, the flames escape from a crack in the chimney and the shack burns down.  May single handedly carries the washing machine out of the house and saves it (she can barely move the next day).  Mr Juberg, who is homesteading just north of the Froistad place, and his hired hand, Olof Berge, see the smoke & show up (on horse back?  Model T?) & several items are saved including the bottom three drawers of a fancy carved black walnut dresser which I now have in my living room.  Another dresser is built to hold the drawers but not out of black walnut.  Some lovely sentimental items are scorched but the piano scarf is saved. 

Irvin & Ivar sleep in the granary while waiting for their house which is being built by the neighborhood carpenter, Ole Tungsvik who also built the Church in Ludlow and several other buildings around.  (May hangs a square over the door and tells the carpenter the house was not square and he says, “No, but it is plumb”).  Anna and May stay with Jake & Hazel Stenseth.  May is cooking for the carpenters outside on the same stove that burned down the house.    Olof is back from visiting Linnea & Oscar Swenson in Lemon, SD.  They  have cousins in common back in Sweden but are not related to each other and  he has been having problems living with Mr Juberg so moves in with May’s folks when the house is finished  Olof is charming, witty and obviously intelligent.  Also religious.  Plus, he doesn’t smoke or drink!  She has her standards and he seems to meet them all.  He leaves to work somewhere else (the story of his life!) and an old fashioned courtship by hand written correspondence follows. 

May returns home from her 6 month Practical Nursing Course in St Paul where she is considered (by some) a hick from way out West in Indian Country.  Her Father encouraged her in her decision- even mailing her spending money, and her class mates are impressed by that. Daddy told us he had seen our Mother driving her brother’s car (Irvin always had a car) and noticed her especially with her long blond hair blowing back (he is so romantic- May never had long hair tho she was blonde)........

They are married in Buffalo the 16th of August, 1935 by Judge Charley Brady.  May is not able to arrange a real wedding as her mother Anna is in bed again.  See how beautiful her wedding dress is (she ordered it special from the Sears catalogue)?  See how he gazes at her so adoringly?  She is 23 years old.  He is 30.  The newlyweds live with her parents because they are indeed needed there.  Olof takes on extra jobs at some of the ranches around.  The following spring, May discovers she is pregnant.  She also knows she is going to have a daughter and will name her Linnea.  It is a dry season, the haying is done, the turkeys are dressed and shipped to Boston in barrels from Bowman, the closest railroad station. 

By careful purchasing & husbanding, Ivar & Anna end up with 880 acres (to which our mother still owns the mineral rights) and from 300-500 sheep.

There is a dance in Bowman the night the baby is born. It is early November, 1936 in the middle of a snow storm.  Irvin goes to Buffalo that day to fetch the doctor but he is out of town.  The County nurse, Etta Haan is on her way back to Buffalo from the dance and is waved down by Irvin to come in- she is needed.  The baby is born in the bed in the corner of the living room.    The Nurse’s car gets stuck in the snow & Irvin pulls it out for her.  The baby has colic and cries all night- every night.  Olof carries her around trying to give comfort. 

This (new) house has three rooms- kitchen, living room and the upstairs is a loft with curtains hung on wires to pull for privacy.  There is frost on the beds every morning- no insulation.  Actually not even a ceiling-- the shingle nails are in plain view! 

In 1937 Ivar decides to send his sheep to Minnesota by train to Anna’s relatives in the Madelia area because of a critical lack of moisture and a quite extreme invasion of grass hoppers.  Ivar herds his turkeys (around 100) as he does his sheep.  The turkeys get fat eating the grasshoppers and he ends up actually making some money that season, though May worries about the turkeys just bedding down where ever they are when the sun sets instead of coming in to roost (why should they- there is food everywhere!).  She’s thinking the coyotes will get them- so she entices them in with a little grain.  Later a letter comes from Boston asking for more turkeys as they are the best they have ever seen. 

May tells of pumping water, heating it on the stove to boiling and then carrying it outside to splash on the walls which are covered with grass hoppers.  They are everywhere.  There is no grass left at all.  Or crops of any kind-  not even their garden.  They eat on the curtains, the fence posts and even take a big bloody bite out of the baby!    (Their faces look just like Joe E Brown, actor and comedian) May tells of a horse coming to their place one evening, starved- they have nothing for it.  The next morning it is dead.  The radiators of the cars are quickly covered with grass hoppers and the drivers have to stop and clean them off frequently or the motors over-heat  Hard years.  In the spring only three chicks are successfully  hatched - one and a half year old me gently carries them to the shallow, only there for a couple of weeks, little snow-melt pond towards the back of the house and teaches all three of them to swim........ ” Wop-a di  che,che  ”      After this unfortunate incident, a board is placed in the doorway of the chicken house to keep me out & I get hung up by a nail in the seat of my striped coveralls while trying to crawl over & howling for help, am finally rescued.................

A few months before my baby sister was born in 1940, our Dad’s baby sister arrived from Cuba to live with us in the house by the highway where I was born (Elvira’s story: It was against the law for women to wear trousers in Cuba so she decided to go to America where the women were already wearing trousers & looking quite stylish.  Her mother had died when she was about 14 [she blamed herself - if she had not come along her mother would surely have been able to live longer but this last baby was just too much, etc, etc] but Eric did not want her to go, she was the cherished youngest child and he hated to lose her.  She got herself engaged to be married to the least desirable single male in their community so Papa sent her to America).  We thought she was beautiful!  She took care of me while my mother was in Buffalo giving birth to my sister, who, like a spring lamb arrived  in March.  Elvira, newly arrived and perfecting her English, instructed  me to say ‘hand-ker-chief’ (she was enthusiastic about speaking correctly and wanted me to also!) instead of ‘hankerchiff’ so I took umbrage and started a little fire under the corner plant table & and later scratched her eyes out of her wedding picture with a pin. 

Our mother was prepared to welcome a boy or a girl so the names she had ready were: Juanita for a girl and Wayne for a boy.  Mom brought home a little sister!  This baby hardly cried at all but when she did I complained bitterly but to no avail- they did not take her back.  She turned out to be the best tom-boy in the world and a great swimming-in-the-mud-hole, picking-off-the-blood-suckers companion  While visiting Uncle John (our mother’s half brother- born at sea during one of Anna’s trips back to Norway) and Aunt Wally (Volborg) Johnson when they still lived in North Dakota, my little sister traipsed off on her own (she always was adventurous!) and our mother finally found her over the railroad tracks and brought her back (sobbing with relief)- the rest of us were crying tears of joy, too.  Nita was called ‘Punkin’ or ‘Punky’ which fitted her well but she determined put a stop to the nickname business while she was still quite little, succeeding by just refusing to answer to it.  One day Daddy asked her if she wanted to see a monkey?  Of course- he held up the mirror for her to look into.  Oh, so disappointing!  Irvin always gave Nita the cubs, or kits of whatever animal he had trapped (mink, muskrat, weasel) as pets- he knew she would take good care of them until they were big enough to skin- she would hold the hind feet of the animal he was skinning in order to keep the musk off the pelts which were then put on their wooden stretchers to dry - and salted, too I think (?)

It was when Irvin got married (to Ella Runestad, a beauty/telephone operator from Gascoyn, just east of Bowman and they had three sons [our only ‘brothers’] Gary, Larry and Jim). that we moved a second house onto the place by the creek.  (this was the house we were living in when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor- we heard it on the radio and everyone recalls precisely where they were and what they were doing when they heard about it).  Our uncle & Dad & a hired man (Ed?  Irvin tended to bring home men on the road looking for work) pouring the basement walls and smoothing the steps that went down into the basement from the back entry way preparing for the house to be hauled in.  They built a little wooden porch outside the entry way door where we stood to brush our teeth- salt or soda in the palm of one hand the tooth brush in the other, spitting off the side of the porch. 

It was a fun house- four rooms; big kitchen with a built in storage bench under the double windows. The front door of the house looked out at the barn and Grandma often wished she had chosen to face the front door another direction- the best way would have been toward the creek where the kitchen windows looked out at the tops of the three or four trees growing down in the draw. The kitchen had a sink with a drain that ran under-ground out behind the “biffy” into the draw-  and a cistern with a hand pump by the sink- but there had to be water in the cistern for this to work and we only got water from rain or snow run-off so most of our water was still carried in from the pump at the well which also had a wind-mill for pumping water for the stock.  The cook stove shared the chimney in the middle of the house with the pot bellied stove (with little mica see-thru windows in the door) in the living room The space behind the cook stove was perfect in winter for warming frozen feet just enough to enable us to run back outside. 

The oven was perfect for warming up half frozen lambs & when they were recovered enough, we would slip on one of Grandma’s lamb blankets made of previously used flannel and held on by two elastic bands under the lambs bellies- then they were taken back out to their mothers, who stood bleating anxiously.  The trick was to skin the dead lamb, fasten the skin on an orphan so the ewe who’s lamb had died would think it was her’s and allow it to feed.  It was interesting to see how fast the orphan outgrew its new ‘skin’ but by then it had acquired the right scent for the ewe to keep it.  Some times the new mothers (2 year olds) needed help bonding with their babies so they were put into a sheep tent, just big enough for the two of them so mom couldn’t run off and let her baby starve.  A sheep tent also served quite nicely as a playhouse for little girls when not being occupied by the reluctant mom and her hungry baby. It was made of canvas with a three (?) buckled door and shaped by four inside arched steel posts crossed at the top, the ends of which were stuck into the ground to keep it upright.

Linnea Grandma’s Life Story (intro page)

Word processed by herself with serious assists from Grandma Nita, who has a way better memory
College Park, Maryland
Spring, 2003

We moved around a lot when my sister and I were growing up.  It was because our Dad heard a voice telling him he needed to quit whatever job he had and get something else (about every two years). He was a very hard worker (Mother was so annoyed when one of his jobs paid by the hour and he worked just as hard & fast as he could, anyway!) and probably his jobs were not all that challenging for him as he was well read & spoke at least three languages (Swedish, Spanish and English- also some German &  Italian, I think, - he sneered at French).  Whenever he left a job, we always went home to our Mom's parents who had a sheep ranch in north-western South Dakota in quite dry prairie/ virtually desert country nearly surrounded by flat topped buttes and .......... Of course we LOVED it, so our Mother's embarrassment at having a husband who couldn't support his family meant nothing to us as children.

In the summer we bottle raised the orphaned lambs, cared for the orphaned chicks & turkeys --caught snakes, including baby rattlers which had to be returned immediately to their own playground-  frogs, toads & turtles- gathered the eggs, fed the chickens, ate breakfast (peas, carrots) in the garden early in the mornings scooting down the rows on our butts in our pajamas with salt shaker in hand, helped our mother pull the wool off sheep only dead about three days (to send to the woolen factory to have blankets made.  We each still have a couple of those blankets), jumped off haystacks and out of barns, watched five juvenile age kittens play with a coiled rattle snake by fending off its strikes (one of the men chopped off the snake’s head and buried it so the kittens wouldn’t eat it), used the rotten eggs left over after the chicks were hatched for target practice (we threw them hard & fast, far from the house and the resulting sulphurous explosions were totally satisfying), investigated the maggot population writhing on the dead animals dumped into a large round dip in the earth some distance from the house, which had previously been a well but its sides had fallen in, ‘helping’ with the autumn pig butchering (we had to wait until cold weather as we had no refrigeration),  ‘helping’ Grandma make Head Cheese & Pickled Pig’s Feet, etc, etc. The hams and sides of bacon were sugar cured in large jars, weighted down with a rock on a dinner plate.    Our Grandfather wouldn’t have a hog on the place so he bought one each year from a neighbor.  Paradise for kids!