THE EDITORIAL POLICY OF SKANDINA VEN, 1900-1903 By Agnes M. Larson Perhaps to few born in America does the distinctly American story of Rip Van Winkle come first in a foreign language . Old Rip was introduced to the younger children of our household when an older sister read Irving's story to us from Ved Amen, the literary supplement to the Norwegian newspaper, Decorah-Posten. The stories, riddles, and puzzles in this paper furnished much entertainment for us, and in the winter when evenings came early our mother must quite have blessed it for keeping us occupied and quiet. Our experience was not unlike that of hundreds of children whose grandparents or parents had trekked into the great prairies of the Northwest. Chicago had scarcely outgrown the Fort Dearborn stage when the first Norwegian immigrants arrived there. Many who came in the fifty years that followed stayed in Chicago and helped to make it the fourth largest Scandinavian city in the world, but more of them went on into the northwest country, where eighty-one per cent of the Norwegian immigrants of those years settled.1 They were land hungry, those people from Norway. It is difficult for us to understand how the broad, level prairies appealed to them. Here in America - particularly after the passage of the Homestead Act of 1862 - land could be had on the easiest terms, land that was neither swamp nor rock, but, as far as the eye could see, rich rolling prairies waiting for the plow. Here there were no farms hanging on 1Kendric C. Babcock, The Scandinavian Element in the United States , 75 (University of Illinois, Studies m the Social Sciences, vol. 3, no. 3 - Urbana, 1914). 112 SKANDINAVEN 1000-1903 113 the mountain sides, as in old Telemarkem,, and no husmcend working little strips, for which they paid dearly in labor. To the people in Norway the description of conditions in America seemed at first like a daydream; my own grandfather , writing to his brother in Norway, said that if he told how things were in America those at home would not believe him. Nowhere is the keen hunger for land better portrayed than in the character of Per Hansa in Giants in the Earth. Per, who had come from the bleakest, rockiest part of Norway , dreamed and worked, adding to his domain one quarter section after another.2 As has been mentioned, the Northwest, notably the states of Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, and the Dakotas, absorbed most of the Norwegian immigrants. In 1900 those states had, among a total population of 11,595,555 persons , 272,077 born in Norway and 237,029 who were of Norwegian-born parentage.8 These Norwegians settled in definite communities. In this new any-man's-land they seemed to think that security lay in numbers; numbers, that is, of their own people. So we find that Otter Tail County, Minnesota, had in 1900 a population of 5,738 Norwegianborn in a total of 45,375, and Fillmore County had 3,593 Norwegian-born among a population of 28,238.4 But these figures tell only a fraction of the story, for most of the Norwegians had large families; and those of the second generation were familiar with the culture of their parents and loyal to it. Even among the third generation, the children of the early twentieth century, it was not unusual to find Norwegian the mother tongue. The little village of Spring Grove in southeastern Minnesota has even today a population almost purely Norwegian in descent - a visitor in the 'Henrietta Larson, ed., "An Immigration Journey to America in 1854," in Studies and Records , 3: 64 (Northfield, Minnesota, 1928); O. E. Rölvaag, Giants in the Earth (New York, 1927) . 8 United States Census , 1900, Population, vol. 1, pt. 1, p. xviii, clxxiv, and 815. 4 Babcock, Scandinavian Element, 217. 114 STUDIES AND RECORDS village is said to have remarked that even the dogs there bark in Norwegian. Place names in the Northwest indicate the presence of the Norwegians and their descendants - one can hardly mistake the source of the names Norway, Arendahl , Sogn, and Thor, which are found close together in...