In the year 1876 swarms of grasshoppers appeared in the country. They were flying in the air so thick sometimes that you could not see the sun on a clear day. The fences were lined with them. They devoured the grass and crops of all descriptions.22 The machine companies had sold many implements to the settlers, but many of the settlers left their farms never to come back, for starvation stared them in the face. So I was ordered by the agents of the machine companies to gather up the seeders, mowers, reapers, etc., and haul them into Montevideo, the county seat. I had enough machinery to cover an acre or two for sale. I had a sale now and then, but there were no bidders except the agents themselves, who bid them in for the company. In a year or two the country straightened out again, crops were raised, and the people prospered again.

By this time I was looking around for a better half. I happened to have a summons to be served. On the trip, I happened to drop into a house on the prairie, where a beautiful girl was sitting on the sofa. I talked some with the old folks and took a glance at the girl now and then. The old man had just sold a farm in southern Minnesota and had arrived a few weeks before. He had taken a claim there several miles from any neighbors. The nearest railroad was seventy-five miles away. I went often afterwards to see the girl and she came to be my wife. We raised a big family of boys and girls. 23

I next traded off my prairie farm for a general store with several thousand dollars worth of stock. I ran along and did

22 Rocky Mountain locusts first appeared in Minnesota in large numbers in 1873. Swarms of these insects continued each summer to devour the crops, especially in the southwestern counties of the state, until 1877, when, during the months of June and July, they disappeared. Folwell, Minnesota, 290, 304-307.

23 Before her marriage, which took place in 1876, Mrs. Steenerson was Miss Maria Anderson, the daughter of Sivert Anderson. The family had previously lived in Goodhue County.

a big business, but later closed out the store. I ran a large peddling wagon along the new line that was being built from Montevideo to Aberdeen.24 One day I struck a camp west of where Milbank now stands. There I found my friend Wilson. He was peddling whiskey. It was Sunday and the crew was taking a rest and a spree. Wilson had two full whiskey barrels on his wagon. The boys had taken one wheel off the wagon and sunk it in the middle of the lake close by, and there Wilson was and could not get anywhere, and the railroad graders were having a big time with his stock of whiskey. The whiskey was passed around in dippers and cups. Wilson drank with them and seemed to enjoy it. South Dakota was then a trackless prairie without a farm or village in those parts.

Mr.

In 1871 a party set out in prairie schooners for the Red River Valley. There were nine covered wagons. Some of the members of the party had families. We aimed to take up land on the Red River with timber on it. The first two or three days went along all right. When we came to Elbow Lake late one evening, we unhitched the oxen close by the lake.25 Grazing was good. There had been a fence constructed and there were some chips lying by the road. We picked them together and made a little camp fire for cooking. As we were standing by the fire, along came a man that owned the fence.

24 The Hastings and Dakota division of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad reached Montevideo in 1878; it was extended to Ortonville in 1879; and it was completed to Aberdeen in July, 1881. Minnesota Railroad Commissioner, Annual Reports, 1878, p. 13; 1879, p. 9; George W. Kingsbury, History of Dakota Territory, 2: 1207 (Chicago, 1915).

25 This lake is several miles northwest of the town of the same name in Grant County. The town was not established until 1874. One of the trails regularly used by traders who traveled between Pembina and St. Paul, via St. Cloud, passed Elbow Lake. Warren Upham, Minnesota Geographic Names: Their Origin and Historic Significance, 214, 217 (Minnesota Historical Collections, vol. 17-St. Paul, 1920).

The man raised his hand up in the air with a big butcher knife in it, and was in the act of plunging it into me, but suddenly my companion, who was standing by me, hit him over the arm with the whipstock with the result that the knife fell out of his hand to the ground. The man then retreated and went to Fergus Falls, some thirty-five miles, and had all nine of us arrested the next day and taken into Fergus Falls. We were then fined seven dollars a piece, which was costs and all. Although we had done nothing, it was cheaper to pay than to monkey with a lawsuit. Fergus Falls was about a year old and without a railroad.26 The man that gave us the trouble was a one-eyed man by the name of Brown.

Well, after the rumpus that we had had, we proceeded along down the Red River on the Minnesota side. There were no settlers except now and then a stopping place for the stage which was running along the Red River.27 These were about thirty or forty miles apart. At Georgetown the stage road crossed the river over to the Dakota side, but we went right ahead down on the Minnesota side of the Red River without any road whatever. When we came to the Wild Rice River we felled some trees across the river and made a kind of a bridge, so as to get our teams and wagons across. We proceeded further down the river a few miles and then the cara

20 Fergus Falls was located and named in 1856, but the first permanent settlers did not arrive until ten years later. The platting of the town in 1870 was followed by a general influx of settlers. The first railroad reached Fergus Falls in 1879. John W. Mason, ed., History of Otter Tail County, Minnesota, 1: 281, 480-489 (Indianapolis, 1916).

27 The stage began running over this route some twelve years before Steenerson's journey. In 1859 the Minnesota Stage Company was organized by J. C. Burbank, Russel Blakeley, and their associates, for the purpose of instituting stage service between St. Cloud and Fort Abercrombie. The line was extended in the following year to Georgetown, and in 1871 to Winnipeg. History of the Red River Valley, Past and Present, 1: 570 (Chicago, 1909); Russell Blakeley, "Opening of the Red River of the North to Commerce and Civilization," in Minnesota Historical Collections, 8:50, 63, 64 (St. Paul, 1898).

van stopped, and we each located on a claim about a half a mile to a mile apart in the edge of the timber that skirted the river. Some of those parties are living on the same lands today. Some of them have passed away to the unknown land from which no one comes back to tell us anything.28

28 This group of settlers and another group which had arrived a week earlier combined to form the nucleus of the population of Polk County, for, although the county was established in 1858, no permanent settlers located there previous to June, 1871. All the settlers who arrived at this time were induced to seek homes in Polk County by Levi Steenerson, a brother of Knute. They located on lands south of the Sand Hill River, in what are now Hubbard and Vineland townships. The fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of this settlement was celebrated by the pioneers of the region on June 8, 1921. See post, p. 195.

Steenerson selected a homestead in Vineland township near the present village of Climax, but he soon abandoned it and returned to Chippewa County. His residence there was again interrupted in 1877 by a brief sojourn in Fargo, North Dakota, where he ran a hotel. After about two years he again went back to Chippewa County, but he was not satisfied to remain there for long. He was a wanderer by nature, constantly in search of new frontiers and new occupations. During the last forty years of his life Steenerson lived in several places in Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma. A period of nearly twenty years was spent on a farm near Upham, North Dakota. His vocation varied with his residence, and he was occupied at different times as a newspaper publisher, a merchant, a real estate dealer, and a farmer. In the fall of 1920 his habitual restlessness led him to go to San Diego, California, for the winter, and there he died on February 12, 1921. The information for the foregoing sketch was furnished by Mr. Elias Steenerson of Crookston.

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

A History of Minnesota. BY WILLIAM WATTS FOLWELL. Volume 1. (St. Paul, Minnesota Historical Society, 1921. xxii, 533 p.)

In discussing this notable contribution to historical scholarship, it may border on the trivial to speak of manner before matter, but the first comment of readers of the volume, so far as this reviewer has chanced to talk with them, is always a reference to the charm of its "literary style." That inadequate phrase is well meant. The book has charm. It is a triumph of style; but the style is not particularly literary. It is infinitely better — the easy self-expression of a delightful and cultured personality possessed of perfect mastery of his subject — self-expression not because the author was thinking about self or about expression, but because he wasn't. For all those readers acquainted with Dr. Folwell the book makes its appeal to consciousness less through the eye directly than through an inner ear. To those who have had that rich experience, each page of the five hundred carries vivid suggestions of a living and well-loved voice, with its familiar gracious inflections and modulations and happy turns of phrase, now of genial humor, now of sympathetic appreciation of human frailties, now of generous but never unbalanced enthusiasm for such nobility and heroism as mingle with our clay. Said one of the "old boys" the other day, one with a "literary style" of his own," Through the whole book I just hear 'Billy' talk. "

I am unwilling to turn finally from the matter of style without noting the restful sense of spacious leisure that pervades the book. And our debt should be acknowledged also to Dr. Folwell's unfailing eye for telling phrases by other men. Time and again, from the bushels of dusty and prosy correspondence that he has waded through, he dredges up for us a sentence red-hot with feeling or gleaming with significance. It adds to gaiety of heart to find one founder of the commonwealth writing to Frank