Part three of a series on Swede Bottom
They constructed small log barns for the oxen and covered the roofs with wild slough grass, cut with, “old-time scythes.” There was no “tame grass” for many years, according to Ben Benson, who in 1853, at age eight, was one of the first Swedes to settle in what became known as Swede Bottom, just east of present-day Houston in Houston County. It was even closer to the original site of Houston.
“My father had an acre of fine wheat that first year. We threshed the wheat with a flail on a split log floor in a lean-to on the house. We also had planted potatoes.”
These immigrants arrived in North America with only tool chests and clothes chests from the old country. They built their cabins and made their own furniture. There were no fireplaces, using instead stoves they purchased in Rock Island, Ill., on the Mississippi River just before boarding a steamboat for La Crosse. Stove pipes went up through the roof.
“I think the three families had one stove between them the first year,” recalled Ben, “a kind of poor concern for a stove, too. There were eleven of us in that one house.”
The first death came quickly. Abraham Anderson, who had crossed the ocean at age 73, the eldest of the immigrants, died a few days after arrival at Swede Bottom. The first birth, during the first two months of 1854 was Jennie Johnson, daughter of David and Johanna, but she lived only 10 or 12 years.
The first full summer (1854) in Swede Bottom was the first of several when the community was beset with ague, an old medical term for malaria. It was 43 years before it was known that this infectious disease was caused by infected mosquitoes. Ben informed the malady returned the following summer as well. “On Swede Bottom, only my father and I didn’t get it. We went around to give the sick ones water. They got cold and shivered first, and then the fever took them, and they sweated and got so weak they were unable to move from their beds. The ague came for many years until the ground got broken up and drier.”
That first debilitating encounter with ague followed soon after a deadly disaster. A year after surviving the perils of an ocean voyage, some did not survive the scourge of cholera. It was not yet understood in North America the connection between contaminated water and that dreaded disease. Starting in 1853, there were two decades of death as cholera periodically plagued Houston County, especially along the Mississippi River. Cholera was contracted by the ingestion of food or water contaminated by body waste – when its disposal was near the water supply and not followed by hand washing. In many cases, dehydrated victims died within 12 to 24 hours after the onset of diarrhea and vomiting.
In Swede Bottom, a small boy and four of the community’s six women died of cholera within a few days in July 1854. Ben’s mother Inga Christina Berndtson (age 35) was the first. When Brita (Mrs. Lars) Johnson learned of the illness, she hurried from her home, west of Houston, to help her afflicted friends. But she then contracted the disease and at age 39, four days after the first death, was the fourth to succumb. The last death claimed a young boy.
Thinking back to when he was age nine, Ben bemoaned, “There were only two women left. There were no doctors. It went so fast we couldn’t get any. My mother died in the night, though she was well the evening before.”
The victims were buried in a small plot on one of the farms. Later, Ben’s father would be buried there, too. The plot with nine graves, still on private property, has been fenced in and currently maintained by property owner Porteous Olson.
Women were essential contributors to pioneer existence. Local historian Mason Witt thought, “it would have been much easier to abandon everything and retreat to Rock Island (an earlier-established Swedish community).” But the community persevered. Of the four families losing a wife and mother to cholera, only John Anderson did not remarry. Abraham Anderson met his second wife while working in La Crosse. Within a year or two, Lars Johnson and Ben’s father remarried, each to whom Ben referred to as a “Miss,” who had immigrated with them but had remained back in Rock Island instead of continuing on to Minnesota. Ben’s stepmother was not unfamiliar with loss, her husband having perished during the voyage from Sweden.
An unnamed sister of David Johnson came to Swede Bottom in 1855 to live with her brother. Another source reported a 20-year-old sister of David Johnson, Agusta Johnson, was accidentally shot in her brother’s house sometime in the year 1854, the same year as the cholera deaths. Her grave is among those cholera victims.
While his father and older brother were working on the mill damn in Hokah, Ben was residing with David Johnson when the Sioux Indians were moved up the Territorial Road to their new reservation out west. Ben added, “Stray Chippewa Indians stayed around here and begged a good deal.”
Ben went back to live with his father when the family could live off the farm. But in 1859, the year he turned 14, Ben went to Red Wing and again lived with the David Johnson family that had moved two years previous due to flood damage in Swede Bottom. Ben reflected, “The river was dammed often by brush and logs and could only run off on the flat bottom lands. I guess if they had known of the floods, they wouldn’t have been so anxious to settle here.
“But it looked pretty nice when they came. There were no trees to grub on the river banks; there was only tall grass, so tall you could only see a man when he was on horseback. There was very little timber then on the side hills either.”
To be continued …
Source: “Ben Benson: An Immigrant’s Story,” as told to his grandson and later published in 1974 in the August 8, 15, 22 and 29 editions of the Houston County News.
Photo by Lee Epps
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