Norwegian Forerunners Among the Early Mormons
    by William Mulder (Volume 19: Page 46)

The earliest Scandinavian converts to Mormonism were won, not in Europe, but in the United States among the Norwegian immigrants in the early settlements at Fox River in Illinois, Sugar Creek in Iowa, and Koshkonong in Wisconsin Territory, all within missionary striking distance of Nauvoo, the rising Mormon capital of the 1840’s and head quarters of the magnetic Yankee prophet, Joseph Smith. One of Smith’s traveling elders, George P. Dykes, first found these converts during his tireless preaching up and down the country. In March, 1842, he visited the Fox River settlement in La Salle County and within a month secured a following of some distinction: a number of respected Haugean lay leaders like Ole Heier, “a winning personality and gifted speaker” who in Telemarken had been considered a pious reader; the schoolteacher Jørgen Pedersen; Endre Dahl, one of the famous “sloopfolk” of 1825 and a first settler at Fox River; and another slooper, Gudmund Haugaas from Stavanger, whom Dykes ordained an elder and described in a letter to Joseph Smith as “a man of strong mind, and well skilled in the scriptures; he can preach in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, having an understanding of their languages.” Dykes’s description indicated that among these men the Prophet hoped to recruit missionaries for Scandinavia who would induce their countrymen to settle in and around Nauvoo to strengthen Zion, as converts from the British Isles were already doing. {1} Eighteen-year-old Knud Peterson [47] of Hardanger, an immigrant of 1837, better known as Canute, was baptized soon afterward, along with his widowed mother and “two best friends and comrades, Swen and John Jacobs.” Canute remembered Dykes as a very able man: “Many of our most intelligent men, including the minister, came to his meetings and opposed him, but none were successful in argument against him, or the doctrine he was advocating.” Another convert-Aagaata Sondra Ystensdatter, eighteen, an immigrant of 1837 from Telemarken, was, as Ellen Sanders Kimball, wife of Brigham Young’s counselor Heber C. Kimball, to be one of three women included in the first company of Mormon pioneers to enter Salt Lake Valley in 1847. {2}

In May, 1843, Dykes wrote the Prophet Joseph Smith, reviewing the year’s work: the La Salle congregation numbered fifty-eight “in good standing,” with Ole Heier presiding. In January, 1843, Gudmund Haugaas and J. R. Anderson had spent three weeks among the Norwegians in Lee County, Iowa, and had baptized ten, notably Erik G. M. Hogan and his family, who had come from Telemarken on the same ship with the Petersons. Haugaas, after his return to Fox River, had set out again, this time accompanied by Ole Heier, to visit “a large body from Norway” in Wisconsin Territory, where, said Dykes, “they have laid the foundation of a great work to all appearance. There are now fifty-seven members of the church from Norway and the time is not far distant when the saying of Micah 4: 2 will be fulfilled.” {3} [48]

The Prophet shared this optimism. When the Norwegian Saints at Fox River sent Endre Dahl to Nauvoo with one hundred head of sheep and cattle and “a little money” as a contribution toward building the temple, Dahl met Joseph Smith on the street; the Prophet invited Dahl to come home with him, but Dahl protested that he was only en ganske like frem nordmann (a very simple Norwegian), unworthy to enter a prophet’s dwelling. Smith, who finally prevailed on Dahl to accompany him, was much impressed. He told Apostle George A. Smith soon afterward that the Scandinavians would in time come to play a significant role in the church. {4}

Dahl must have returned to Fox River big with news of this meeting. Like so many converts, the Norwegians found the Prophet a magnetic personality; they often visited Nauvoo simply to lay eyes on him or hear him preach in a favorite grove. Young Goudy Hogan, one of the converts from Sugar Creek just across the Mississippi from Nauvoo, went frequently with his father, Erik. He sat one day on the boards of a temporary outdoor platform, from which Smith was speaking, close enough to touch him and remembered the light linen coat the Prophet wore with the small holes in the elbows. Goudy heard him declare that both North and South America would become Mount Zion, that the Constitution of the United States would hang “on a single untwisted thread,” and that the Latter-day Saints would save it. Goudy remembered that once some young men were sparking girls at the back of the congregation, disturbing the meeting with their loud talk; the Prophet rebuked them: they should wait, go home, and talk to their “young ladies” with the consent of their parents. He was a very human man for all his devoutness. Goudy wished that all those friends and relatives who had made such a [49] funeral of his family’s departure from Norway a few years back could only see the Prophet and his beautiful city. {5}

Goudy and those of his countrymen who were visiting Nauvoo in 1844 might well have encountered its two resident Scandinavians-the Dane Hans Christian Hansen and the Swede John Erik Forsgren, their nations’ lone representatives in the latter-day Zion. Forsgren and Hansen, both sailors, had embraced Mormonism in Boston in the early 1840’s, Hans Christian had written the news of his conversion to Copenhagen to his younger brother Peter Ole, who, finding no Mormons in Denmark, had set out for America at once; Hans Christian went to Boston to meet him, and invited him to come on to Nauvoo to see a real prophet. Peter Ole arrived in 1845 and set to work on a Danish translation of the Book of Mormon, while Hans Christian’s popular fiddle frequently entertained the Saints. {6}

With the British mission, opened in 1837, already a beginning of missionary work abroad, Joseph Smith saw in these young Nordics the chance for expanding Mormonism to the continent. His gospel, the seed, had to be carried to the nations, and here were the sowers. But his death by violence in June, 1844, cut short such plans. Peter 0. Hansen and John E. Forsgren were indeed to be the first to carry Mormonism to their homelands, but only after the Prophet’s dream had been brought west to the mountains and they had followed it. The expulsion of the Saints from Nauvoo saw Forsgren march to California with the Mormon battalion in 1846, Hans Christian Hansen with the vanguard detachment of pioneers who entered the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, and Peter Ole following soon after. Only a handful of the Norwegian converts from the Illinois and Iowa [50] settlements were to go west, a dearly bought remnant of Mormonism’s first adventure among the Scandinavians, but they were men like Erik Hogan and Canute Peterson and Endre Dahl, seed corn for the great growth to come. In their future labors, their recollection of Nauvoo and of the Prophet’s personal ministry was to provide a lasting and powerful motivation.

Lutheran leaders, meanwhile, were by no means happy at Mormonism’s inroads among settlers whose ties with the mother church were already lamentably loose. Pastor J. W. C. Dietrichson, bitter that sects and schisms were destroying Lutheran unity, wrote agitated letters to Norway deploring Mormon activity. He was distressed that by 1845 nearly a hundred and fifty Norwegians in the western settlements- some eighty in the Fox River colony alone-had accepted the Mormon delusion. When Gudmund Haugaas and Canute Peterson went to Koshkonong late in 1844, Dietrichson entertained them at his home but also took occasion publicly to oppose their millennial doctrine. At Fox River the next spring Dietrichson was bold enough to call a meeting of his own, attacking Mormon elders who had preached to his Norwegians from an ox-drawn wagon. Johan R. Reiersen, prime mover of the early emigration from Norway, called the Sugar Creek converts “our credulous and simple country men.” Ole Andrewson of the American Home Missionary Society, feeling himself caught between the two extremes of the state church and of American revivalism, wrote that Mormonism and fanaticism left the Fox River region like a prairie swept by fire. And at Pine Lake, Wisconsin, Bishop Gustaf Unonius was equally critical: he regretted Fredrika Bremer’s “sympathy for . . . Shakers, women’s-rights associations, yes, even Mormonism” which “judicious Americans regard as more or less noxious weeds sown by the enemy into good ground.” It was a judgment the Mormons were used to. {7} [51]

Mormon activity among the Norwegians established a pattern that was to prevail again years later in Scandinavia itself: American elders initiated what became a movement with its own momentum, though always centrally directed. The proselytes themselves became the most effective missionaries and able leaders of local congregations, while the brethren on circuit from Nauvoo visited them frequently: Wilford Woodruff, who was one day to lead the whole church and to issue the famous manifesto discontinuing polygamy; George A. Smith, future church historian, who at one time spoke on “general [Joseph J Smith the smartest man in the U. S. and best calculated to fill the presidential chair,” which was applauded by the assembly; G. E. Deuel, who had made a preaching tour of New York, Canada, and Michigan- all spoke in the “Norwegian settlement,” as they described Fox River. {8}

But “general Smith” was in trouble, wanted by Missouri on old charges of treason and harassed by apostates and anti-Mormons in Illinois because of his demagoguery. In June, 1844, the Fox River Saints heard that he planned to escape to the West. He had crossed the Mississippi on the twenty-second and Orrin P. Rockwell, “Old Port,” was seeking horses. Canute Peterson responded gladly and rode swiftly toward Nauvoo, only to learn on the way that the Prophet had returned and given himself into the hands of his enemies. On the twenty-seventh the Prophet and his brother, Hyrum the Patriarch, were shot down by a mob. Goudy Hogan, fourteen, out picking wild strawberries, wept at the news; with his father he hurried across the river to the city to see the bodies returned from Carthage. {9}

In the ensuing contest within the church for the Prophet’s mantle, the strong man Brigham Young, president of the Council of Twelve, visited the outlying congregations of the [52] Saints in quick succession, for a time magnetizing the pieces of Joseph Smith’s kingdom and holding it together. Late in October of the martyr year (1844), he went north 144 miles to Fox River. Parley P. Pratt, “Archer of Paradise,” author of the persuasive Voice of Warning which gave so many converts their picture of the ideal Zion, had a farm within a day’s ride of the settlement and went with Brigham Young, as did Heber C. Kimball and Lorenzo D. Young-a good representation of the Twelve, betokening important business. After a conference at nearby Ottawa, Illinois, they visited the Norwegian branch at Fox River on the twenty-third, “taught the principles of the Gospel to them,” appointed George P. Dykes, their old familiar, to preside over them and the Saints in the vicinity, and ordained Reuben Miller bishop. Then, from Gudmund Haugaas and Jacob Anderson they bought a hundred acres of land about nine miles northeast of Ottawa, laid out a city dedicated to the Lord, and called it Norway. They set aside ten acres for a temple “upon a high and very beautiful spot,” selected sites for a “tithing house” and other public buildings, even driving the southeast corner stake for a meetinghouse or “tabernacle.” {10} Canute Peterson bought a lot near the temple site for forty dollars, which went to pay the county surveyor. Peterson heard Brigham Young say that the new settlement would be “a gathering place for the Scandinavian people, and that they would build the temple on the site selected . . . that in [53] this temple they would have the privilege of giving and receiving the Endowments in their own language.” {11} Despite Smith’s martyrdom, Zion’s tent, it seemed, was lengthening her cords and strengthening her stakes. High priest Gudmund Haugaas, it was planned, would soon be sent abroad to begin the gathering to a Scandinavian center in Zion.

But the Mormons were torn by dissension within and the mounting threat of violence without. By the spring of 1845 Brigham Young was assembling the Saints from the surrounding country at Nauvoo to prepare for no one knew exactly what. Canute Peterson at Fox River remembered “exciting rumors” that the Saints would leave the city and go to the Rocky Mountains. Anxious to receive his temple endowments before such an evacuation took place, Canute and a small company from Fox River made a wagon journey down to Nauvoo in mid-January, 1846, where he saw “preparations for the great exodus going on both night and day.” He offered his help for the trek, but the brethren advised him to remain with his invalid mother. {12}

In the Iowa settlement across the river, Erik Hogan’s family had seen the troubles coming. Goudy Hogan remembered how in his neighborhood anything amiss was always laid to the Mormons. After robberies, warrants were always made out to search Mormon houses, and at school, where he was the only Mormon boy, he was often called “Joe Smith.” He said, “There was considerable talk in Nauvoo and all around privately that the Saints would have to move and go into the wilderness in order to have peace.” {13} In February Goudy Hogan saw the first of the evacués cross the frozen Mississippi and camp along Sugar Creek in the snow, not two miles from his father’s farm; he was to remember how the family gave what they could and how his father, enraged at the inhumane treatment suffered by the [54] Mormons, threw in his lot with the “Camp of Israel.” He traded his grubbed land with its fine Norwegian granary for a yoke of cattle and an old wagon, the best bargain he could get because so many in and around Nauvoo were selling out. In April, in a heavy rain that mired everyone down, the Hogans joined the exodus. Goudy wanted to enlist in the Mormon battalion being mustered at Mount Pisgah, but his father thought that at sixteen he was too young.

The family spent the winter of 1846-47 at Plum Hollow, Iowa, eight miles east of the Missouri River, on whose banks Brigham Young had established winter quarters. They cut wild hay and built a log house and a corral. Goudy hunted deer and collected wild honey. Father Erik went down to Missouri with a team and hauled back food that he had obtained in trade for his broadcloth suit; in the spring he let Heber Kimball and his Norwegian wife Ellen take the family’s work horse for the trek west while he remained behind to clear and fence fifteen acres and raise corn, which he was unable to sell even at ten cents a bushel. Goudy meanwhile went down to Fort Kearney and hired out as a teamster for four months at twenty dollars a month; he was the only Mormon, he remembered, among twenty-three hands. He earned enough to outfit the family for the journey west. In the spring of 1848 Erik traded his Plum Hollow holding with George P. Dykes, who was back from his battalion duty and said he had a house in “the fort” in the infant settlement at Salt Lake. But when the Hogans arrived there in September they found no house belonging to “said Dykes.” They went north a few miles instead, to Sessions’ Settlement; because of their labors it was soon rechristened Bountiful. In their log house, because it was the largest, they and their Yankee neighbors held meetings and thanked the Lord for their deliverance.

In the fall of 1849 Erik and Goudy beefed one of the family’s work oxen and made moccasins of the hide; and Goudy was able to sell his “fine boots,” for a bushel and a [55] half of wheat seed, to their old Nauvoo acquaintance John Forsgren, who was about to leave on a mission to Scandinavia. The grasshoppers cleaned out the hoped-for crop, and after Goudy and his sister Caroline had gleaned what was left, using the family butcher knife for a scythe, Goudy joined a company of “Mormon boys” headed for the gold fields with Brigham Young’s blessing. In a year he was back, in time to see his father off on a mission to Norway with Canute Peterson. And in a few years, when the Knut Nelsons arrived from Denmark and Goudy took the three daughters to wife, he began to see that, like the branches of Jacob’s vine, his father’s family was running over the wall and becoming fruitful in its new home-a vision his twenty-five children and his hardy pioneering in three Deseret communities would eventually confirm. It was a foretaste of experiences awaiting all the Scandinavians who followed the forerunners to Zion.

Meanwhile, the Norwegian congregation at Fox River, to which Canute returned after his Nauvoo visit in January, 1846, was thrown into confusion by the whirlwind visitations and strident claims of the quick-tongued James J. Strang. The Twelve, he said, were subject to the first presidency, and Strang was the president and true successor. He vigorously opposed the plan of Brigham Young and the Twelve to move the Saints west. Operating out of Voree, Wisconsin, Strang proselyted the Fox River region during December and January, 1845-46. He found Bishop Miller very much “bound up with the rule and authority of the Twelve” and ready to organize a company of one hundred families to rendezvous at Ottawa “and emigrate to unknown regions in the west under the direction of the Twelve to found there in connection with twenty-four other companies a New Empire to be governed by priestly authority.” {14} Miller had called “an extensive meeting” of the “brethren” at the [56] Norwegian settlement on the first day of January to set the company in order. Strang found they were “generally making great efforts” to start as soon as possible and were “very near unanimous in favor of going.” On the twentieth Strang countered by meeting with “about one hundred brethren and sisters, mostly Norwegians” who “seemed to receive his testimony.” He was heard with attention, opposed with warmth, but managed to unsettle most. Miller vacillated. Ole Heier and Gudmund Haugaas were won over. “Hougus himself and the brethren generally were so well persuaded of the strength of our positions that three loads of them went to Nauvoo to call on the Twelve to justify their position and show them the first Presidency.” Strang believed his winter’s forays had brought “some three hundred breathren [sic] and sisters back to the true order of the Church . . . saving them from that most hopeless undertaking the Emigration to the western wilds.” {15}

The roll call of the “Saints assembled in Conference at Norway, LaSalle Co. Ill.” the following April revealed the extent of Strang’s influence among the Norwegians: stalwarts like Gudmund Haugaas, Endre Dahl, Ole Heier, Shure Olson, and a score of “high priests and elders” pledged them selves to support Strang and “labor faithfully in the up-building of the Church and Kingdom of God as he hath revealed it.” Haugaas was ordained an apostle “to open the gospel to the nation of Norway,” together with five others. Had they gone, as Strangites, they would have anticipated Brigham Young’s emissaries to Scandinavia by four years. {16} [57]

There was no mission; loyalties to the cantankerous Strang were short-lived, and there was a falling away instead. In July, Louisa Sanger of nearby Ottawa, troubled over the disaffection of Reuben Miller, wrote Strang: “These are indeed trying times and I fear that but few will be able to endure. . . . The Norwegian brethren are down very low.

Goodman is entirely off. . . . Ole Las [sic] maintained his integrity until he saw Buzzard [Philip Busard] but now I hear he is clean down and if he falls what can we hope for the rest?” Haugaas at one time almost decided to go west but joined the reorganization directed by Joseph Smith III, the son of the Prophet, who in the 1850’s united many splinter groups and individuals adrift around Nauvoo following the Brighamite exodus. Smith remembered “Goodman Hougas, Christian Hayer, Hans Hayer, and Oliver Hayer, with their families,” as a “band of thrifty, industrious farmers . . . occupying in one of the richest localities in the state of Illinois” whose union with his church added considerable strength. The Norway branch remained captive to the reorganization; a son succeeded Gudmund Haugaas as its minister and, some fifty years after its planting by Brig ham Young, could be found preaching there to a congregation of about 140. Ole Heier, who for a few months served the Strangites as “presiding High Priest over the district of North, Eastern [sic] Illinois,” finally joined the close-communion Baptists. He had visited Nauvoo, a son recalled, during preparations for the evacuation, but “was one of the first to get his eyes open to the terrible work of the church he had espoused.” Shure Olson and Endre Dahl, the slooper-Dahl perhaps remembering his visit with the Prophet- recovered themselves and went west: Shure, a skilled cabinetmaker, to help build the organ in the great tabernacle; Endre, who was entered in Utah Territory’s first census in 1850 as “Andrew Dolle, 60, Farmer,” to sire a grandson who would sit in the state’s constitutional convention.” {17} [58]

Canute Peterson, like the Hogans at Sugar Creek, had made up his mind to go west when the chance came, and he remained unmoved by the contrary winds of doctrine at Fox River. While others blew hot and cold, he hired out in the spring and summer of 1846, breaking prairie and threshing grain. In 1847, with a good team which he later traded for forty acres of land, he freighted between Ottawa and Chicago. In 1848 he hauled lumber for an Ottawa sawmill. When his mother died, he recalled, “My desire to gather with the Saints in Utah became stronger and stronger and I gradually made the necessary preparations.” {18}

Brigham Young meanwhile had not forgotten the Fox River Saints. In December, 1847, he sent George W. Bratten from Council Bluffs to visit the Norwegian settlement. “I arrived at Norway Jan. 10, 1848 and on the 12th had a large and very attentive congregation in a school house.” The “great Erick Janson Prophet of Sweden” happened to be there at the same time and in a morning service in the same schoolhouse declared “the Mormons were most particularly damned.” Bratten disposed of Janson by calling on Gudmund Haugaas, still in the fold, to answer him in his own language and challenge him to public debate. He said, “The house was crowded we had a most excellent meeting but no Prophet of Sweden.” Bratten reorganized the branch; he received “eight dollars and some cents” and a pledge from twenty members-Canute Peterson and Gudmund Haugaas among them-that they “would support the Twelve and go to the west.” {19} [59]

A year later, on April 18, 1849, twenty-two Norwegians left Fox River in six wagons, most of them the ones who had pledged Bratten their support, with the notable exception of Gudmund Haugaas. A valuable addition, from Canute Peterson’s point of view, was “Sister Sarah Ann Nelson,” daughter of the slooper Cornelius Nelson Hersdal, and the second Norwegian child born in America. She had been teaching English in the settlement school to students twenty to forty years old. Canute married her July 2 in camp a few miles east of Kanesville. {20}

After passing through Burlington, Iowa-which they found deserted except for the ferrymen and a few guards, and with the streets and porches strewn with new lime in the wake of a cholera epidemic-the company joined Apostle Ezra Taft Benson’s camp at Kanesville on the east bank of the Missouri River and became known in Mormon history as the Norwegian Company. In Apostle George A. Smith’s camp, also on the grounds, was a group of Welsh Saints under Captain Dan Jones. From Kanesville the companies traveled together, producing a mingling of tongues typical of Mormon migration. “We are composed of Yankees, English, Welsh, Norwegian, etc.,” wrote Smith, “yet we are one, although of different dialects and nations.” At Elkhorn River young Canute Peterson and his friend Ira Sabe won every one’s admiration when they volunteered to swim a rope to the ferry on the other side; the stream was dangerously swollen by heavy rains. “After this,” said Canute, “when there was any swimming to be done, I was generally asked to do it, and became quite popular.” And modestly he admitted that he was also “a lucky hunter.” At Independence Rock the party was met by brethren from the Salt Lake Valley who brought assistance in the form of cattle and wagons. Brother Thomas E. Ricks was assigned to help the Norwegians. He won their love and confidence, which, Canute remarked fifty years later, “he has to this day.” It forecast [60] a characteristic relationship that existed among the Mormons between Yankee settlers and Scandinavian immigrants.” {21}

On October 25, after battling waist-deep snows in the mountains, the company reached the valley. Canute Peterson, Shure Olson, Christian Heier, and the Jacobs brothers were so eager to see “the great Mormon city” that they “went up about the Temple Block and other places. We found the city to be more than we had expected and so were agreeably surprised.” {22} Three or four of the young men in the company joined some gold seekers who were on their way to California, only to return in two years with a fortune “rather small” compared with their expectations. Canute found the land around Salt Lake City already taken up. “The water was very scarce and to get five acres of water right was an imposibility.” Apostle Benson, who treated Canute as “a favorite,” told him about some land “rich as a cream pot” on the other side of the Jordan River. Canute worked the claim for about two weeks, trying to bring water to it, but became discouraged and went thirty miles south to settle what became known by the Book of Mormon name of Lehi. “Now my occupation was plowing, sowing, making water ditches, and fences.” But not for long, for in 1852 Brigham Young was to call Canute and his friend from Sugar Creek, Erik Hogan, now of Bountiful, on a mission to Norway, where Mormon activity had already begun.

The Norwegian company had encountered Apostle Erastus [61] Snow and their recent Nauvoo neighbors, John Forsgren and Peter O. Hansen, in the mountains eastward bound for Scandinavia. The October general conference of the church just past had renewed Mormonism’s old determination to carry the gospel to the continent of Europe. In the half century 1850-1900 Scandinavia was to send thirty thousand proselytes to the Far West’s latter-day Zion, a rich harvest from the early planting in Illinois.” {23}

Notes

<1> George P. Dykes to Joseph Smith, May 18, 1843, in “Journal History,” filed in Historian’s Office, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City. This record is a loose-leaf chronological compilation, 1830 to the present, of letters, diary excerpts, church minutes, and clippings relating to Mormon history. See also Rasmus B. Anderson, First Chapter of Norwegian Immigration, 399-408 (Madison, Wisconsin, 1895); Theodore C. Blegen, Norwegian Migration to America, 1825-1860, 248 (Northfield, 1931), and Norwegian Migration to America: The American Transition, 112-114 (Northfield, 1940); Carl M. Hagberg, Den norske misjonshistorie, 55 (Oslo, 198); and Andrew Jenson, “De første norske hellige,” in Skandinaviens stjerne (Copenhagen), 50: 235-238 (August 1, 1902). A copy of Hagberg’s work is in the John A. Widtsoe Collection, University of Utah Library, Salt Lake City; a complete file of Skandinaviens stjerne is to be found in the Historian’s Office.
<2> Carrie Peterson Tanner, “A Story of the Life of Canute Peterson as Given by Himself and Some Members of His Family,” 3. A copy of this manuscript narrative is in the Historian’s Office. See also “Ellen Sanders Kimball,” in Orson F. Whitney, History of Utah, 4:67-69 (Salt Lake City, 1902).
<3> Dykes to Smith, May 18, 1843, in “Journal History.” Micah 4: was a favorite Mormon quotation: “And many nations shall come, and say, Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for the law shall go forth of Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.”
<4> Hagberg, Den norske misjonskistorie, 56.
<5> Goody Hogan, Diary, 5, 6. A copy of this manuscript journal is in the library of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.
<6> “Historical Sketch of J. E. Forsgren,” in Box Elder Neu’s (Brigham City. Utah), August 1, 1916; “Hans Christian Hansen,” in Andrew Jenson, Latter-day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia, 2: 766, 4:706 (Salt Lake City, 1914, 1926); Peter O. Hansen, “Autobiografi,” in Morgenstjernen (Salt Lake City), 3:330-336 (1884). A file of Morgenstjernen is in the Historian’s Office.
<7> J. W. C. Dietrichson, Reise blandt de norske emigranter i “De forenede nord amerikanske fristater,” 102-108 (Stavanger, 1846, Madison, Wisconsin, 1896); Anderson, First Chapter, 400; Blegen, Norwegian Migration, 1:156, 181, 254, 2: 113; Gustaf Unonius, A Pioneer in Northwest America, 1841-1858, 1:313 (Minneapolis, 1950).
<8> “Journal History,” May 13. December 31, 1844.
<9> Hogan Diary, 4.
<10> “Journal History,” October 23, 1844. James J. Strang, who was contending with Brigham Young for the leadership of the Mormons, was sarcastic about this enterprise. Reviewing Reuben Miller’s James J. Strang Weighed in the Balance of Truth, and Found Wanting (Burlington, Wisconsin, 1846), Strang wrote in Zion’s Reveille (Voree, Wisconsin) of January 14, 1847:
“In five lines writing he gets a stake of Zion organized, at Norway, Ills, and himself Bishop, and all that without the intervention or authority of the First Presidency.
“It is probably something new to most of the church that a Stake of Zion was ever organized in the vicinity of Ottawa, Ills. It is nevertheless true that at a time when writs and sheriffs were quite too thick for the convenience of B. Young, H. C. Kimball, and P. P. Pratt, that they went up to the Norwegian settlement, a few miles from Ottawa, to live on the fat of the land, and paid the brethren for all their attentions in the promise of a stake, from which, how ever, they ordered the bishop to Nauvoo before any gathering was ever commenced at their new stake.”
<11> Tanner, “Canute Peterson,” 8.
<12> Tanner, “Canute Peterson,” 15.
<13> Hogan Diary, 7. The account of the Hogan family’s activities is drawn from various passages throughout the diary.
<14> See the “Chronicles of Voree,” January 31, 1846. This is a manuscript record that contains the minutes of Strangite affairs that occurred before the appearance of the Voree Herald in 1846; the latter became the most important printed source for the history of the Strangites. The present writer is indebted to Mr. Dale L. Morgan for calling the Strangite material to his attention and for making available his microfilm copies of the manuscript “Chronides of Voree” and the periodicals Voree Herald, its successor Zion’s Reveille, and the latter’s successor Gospel Herald, all of which were published in Voree, Wisconsin. Mr. Morgan’s microfilm copies are filed in the Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City. The most complete files of the originals of these Strangite periodicals may be found in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin at Madison, and at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Strangite), Burlington, Wisconsin. The Strangites use the form “Latter Day Saints” without the hyphen.
<15> “Chronicles of Voree,” January 31, 1846.
<16> “Conference at the Norwegian Settlement,” in Voree Herald, 1:8 (May, 1846); “Chronicles of Voree,” April 17, 18, 1846.
<17> Louisa Sanger to James J. Strang, July 15, 1846, in Strang Papers, Coe Collection, Yale University; Bertha S. Anderson, Joseph Smith III. 180 (Independence, Missouri, 1952); Anderson, First Chapter, 899; an interview with Joseph Peterson of Salt Lake City, whose father had worked in the same shop with Shure Olson; United States Census, Population, 1850, p. 21. Manuscript census schedules for Utah are preserved in the National Archives at Washington, D.C.; microfilm copies of these schedules are filed in the Utah State Historical Society.
<18> Tanner, “Canute Peterson,” 18.
<19> George W. Bratten to Brigham Young, February 26, 1848, in “Journal History” of the same date. “The following names were given in as those who would support the Twelve and go to the West: Henry Saba, Magaen [?J Saba, Ira Saba, Peter Saba, Wilbur Saba, Canute Petersen, Andrew Doll [Dahl], Hannah Doll, Andrew Doll, jun. Swen Jacobs, Sophia Jacobs, Iden Jacobs, Levi Lightfoot, Maddy Madison, Goodman Hougas, Sandria Sanders, Jacob Anderson, Z Baxter, Samuel Bell.”
<20> Tanner. “Canute Peterson,” 21. Incidents in the journey are drawn from Peterson’s reminiscences in this account.
<21> Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star (Liverpool). 11:864 (1850); a file of this periodical is in the Historian’s Office. See also “Journal History,” 1849, which records the following recognizably Scandinavian names-with ages-in Benson’s camp: Hannah Doll [Dahl], 57; Andrew Doll, 16; Swen Jacobs, 25; John Jacobs, 23; Ellen Jacobs, 18; Shure Oleson, 30; Elizabeth Oleson, 24; Ola Oleson, inf.; Canute Petersen, 24; Sarah A. Petersen, 22; Rasmus Rasmussen, 28; Henry Saby, 57; Magla Saby, 51; Ira Saby, 17; J. Saby, 22; Walber Saby, 16; Peter Saby, 14; Betsy Saby, 8; Christian flyer, 32. It is not difficult to recognize the “Saba” of Bratten’s letter as the “Saby” of “Journal History,” which notes that the “Saby” family had “3 wagons, 3 horses, 10 oxen; C. Petersen 1 wagon. 6 oxen; Swen Jacobs 2 wagons, 6 oxen; Hyer 1 wagon, 4 oxen.”
<22> Tanner, “Canute Peterson,” 27.
<23> See the present writer’s “Mormons from Scandinavia, 1850-1900: A Shepherded Migration,” in Pacific Historical Review (University of California). 23:227-246 (August 1954).