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In Westby, Norwegians take their love of tradition to extreme heights.
The high ridges and deep coulees south of La Crosse drew so many Norwegian immigrants in the 19th century that the area around Westby became known as "America's little Gudbrandsdal,'' after the valley in Norway.
The Norwegians had left their homes, but not their customs. Today, Norwegian flags fly from lampposts, and the visitors center is a stabbur, a top-heavy wood building used in Norway since the Middle Ages. In May, the trolls and folk costumes come out for the annual celebration of Syttende Mai, the Norwegian constitution day. Norwegian-Americans and even Norwegians from Norway seek out its imports store.
The Cornish have been good to Mineral Point.
In the 1830s, skilled tin miners from Cornwall, England, came to southwest Wisconsin, replacing the rough frontiersmen whose "badger'' digs gave the state a nickname but the town an unsavory atmosphere.
"They'd start fights just for entertainment,'' says Lisa Kreul, a tour guide at the historic site Pendarvis. "Not until the Cornish came in 1837 did the town start to settle down.''
On a single day in Winnipeg, a tourist can learn a few words of Cree, dine on curry and conch, and come face to face with Queen Victoria.
The empire on which the sun never sets has come to the Canadian prairie, and so have a whole lot of other countries.
The Cree and Assiniboine — Aboriginals, they’re called here — came first. Then a French explorer arrived at the juncture of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, and a Scottish lord brought in Scottish and Irish settlers. In the 1870s and 1880s, immigrants from Eastern Europe poured in, followed in the next century by Asians, East Indians and Caribs.
Of all the immigrant groups, Norwegians perhaps are most sentimental.
They settled in hills and valleys reminiscent of their homeland, bringing trunks full of handcrafted ale bowls and mangle boards. Generations later, they’re still painting bowls and stitching costumes in the old style and celebrating holidays with foods poor Norwegians ate in the 19th century.
The heart of this nostalgia is Decorah, a town of 8,500 tucked into the wooded ridges and limestone bluffs of northeast Iowa. It's the home of Luther College, established by Norwegians in 1861, and Vesterheim, founded in 1877 and now the nation's most comprehensive museum dedicated to a single ethnic group.
It took plenty of sisu to settle Embarrass.
It's the consistently coldest spot in the Lower 48; arctic blasts blow up against the Laurentian Divide and pool over the township, which set a record of 64 below in 1996. The soil is poor, allowing farmers to do little more than grow potatoes and raise a few cows.
The very word Embarrass is French for obstacle, and comes from French voyageurs' opinion of the local river: curvy as a corkscrew and usually too low to navigate.
In general, I like my heritage. It involves Vikings and trolls and populist politics. At festivals, tow-headed children dance
around in cute outfits.
But the food . . . not so much. When it comes to herring and lutefisk, I'd rather be Polish. Plump pierogi with sour cream and
sauteed onions — now, there's an ethnic food I can love.
Luckily, it's easy to piggyback on other cultures in the Upper Midwest. Yes, many of us came from Germany, Ireland and Norway. But we also came from Greece, Ghana, Switzerland, Iceland, Scotland, Ukraine — and there are festivals honoring those cultures and those of the Dakota, Ojibwe, Cree and Ho-Chunk, who already were here.
One Memorial Day weekend, my friend Grace and I went to tour "ethnic'' Chicago. But we'd only been there a few hours before we realized everything about Chicago is ethnic.
Chicago is a mosaic, a city of neighborhoods settled by waves of immigrants who arrived to dig its waterways, build its railroads and work in its slaughterhouses. One of its first neighborhoods was Bridgeport, settled by Irish canal workers in the 1840s and the stronghold of Mayor Richard J. Daley and his son Richard M. Daley, the current mayor.
It was followed by Little Italy, Germantown, the Swedish enclave of Andersonville, Polish Village, Ukrainian Village, Chinatown, Greek Town, Bronzeville, the East Indian zone on Devon Avenue and Pilsen, a Czech quarter that now is heavily Hispanic.
Even in a region rich in ethnicity, the Dutch stand out.
In a town square in Iowa, lacy white hats shaped like pyramids, horns and half-moons bob high atop women's heads. Men wear black caps, breeches or baggy trousers and narrow bands cross at their throats. Their wooden shoes click and clack as they dance.
"These are the weirdest people I've ever seen!'' shrieked a little boy watching from the sidelines.
First, an elf sashayed down the street.
Behind him marched adults in bunads, the traditional Norwegian folk costume, and two shaggy little boys wearing the long noses, beards and tails of trolls.
Baton twirlers, roller-limbo skaters, polka dancers, folk dancers, fiddlers, buglers and queens of all kinds followed, lobbing torrents of Tootsie Rolls and hard candy to the crowd along the route. My children thought it was the best parade they'd ever seen.
In a verdant little glen in southwest Wisconsin, the 13th century makes a reprise appearance every year.
It comes with pageantry, bloodshed and a whole lot of noble sentiments, courtesy of the 18th-century dramatist Friedrich Schiller. It also comes in German that’s as meaty as the Landjaeger sausages sold to spectators. As I arrived during the first act of "Wilhelm Tell,’’ a rich Swiss patriot was discussing the horrors of war with his wife.
"Furchtbar schlect ist der Krieg!’’ he cries, to which Gertrud replies, "Den Brand warf ich hinein mit eigner Hand!" — "I’ll throw the first torch myself!’’
On a beautiful summer day in Milwaukee, history's underdogs were having a ball.
They were listening to pianists play Chopin. They were dancing an exuberant style of polka. They were tucking into pierogi and paczki.
Call it payback time for Poles.
Once, people went through hell to get to Stockholm, Wis.
It's different nowadays. It's only a joy ride away from the Twin Cities, and the streets of this pretty hamlet on Lake Pepin are lined with sports cars and motorcycles on weekends. There are shops, galleries, inns, a pub; it's the place to go for a room with a view or vroom with a brew.
In 1854, this bit of land at the foot of the Mississippi bluffs was the destination of more than 200 emigrants from the impoverished village of Bjurtjärn, Sweden. Promised "paradise on earth," they instead endured cholera, deprivation and betrayal.
There are few towns more conspicuously American than New Ulm, Minn.
Laid out by the town founders, its wide streets follow an orderly grid toward downtown, where cars park at an angle in front of boxy brick businesses and meat-and-potatoes cafes.
There are softball games and Friday-night fish fries and many friendly people. It's the epitome of small-town America — and yet this is a town famous for being German.
Walking around Lindström, it's not hard to guess where the area's first settlers came from.
If the multitude of umlauts don't give it away, the herds of Dala horses and straw goats will. Factor in the giant white coffee pot in the sky, and you can be pretty sure this is Swedish country.
In the 1850s, poor Swedes came pouring into the lakes country west of Taylors Falls. It wasn't the best farmland, but it was cheap, and it looked like Sweden — lots of water, lots of trees and, unfortunately, lots of rocks. Still, it seemed like heaven to the peasants, and the letters they sent home brought more Swedes.
In the Upper Midwest, the Swiss are insignificant — in numbers. Not many left the Old World. But the ones who did have had more success transplanting their traditions than nearly any other immigrant group.
In the southwest Wisconsin town of New Glarus, Germanic platitudes unfurl in Gothic script on the plaster of half-timbered chalets, over window boxes overflowing with geraniums. A little baker hangs over the doorway of the Bäckerei, where glass cases display almond-flavored brätzeli and anise springerle cookies. The sign over the town fire department reads "Feuerwehrhaus," and Railroad Street is Bahnhofstrasse.
In the 1840s, the Swiss canton of Glarus, southeast of Zurich, had been hit hard by the Industrial Revolution and recession, and it couldn't support all of its weavers and cloth printers. So it formed the Glarus Emigration Society and sent two trustees to buy land in the New World.
In the 17th century, when Europeans began to flee religious and economic oppression, the New World was not an untouched wilderness.
In the wooded forests beyond Lake Superior, the Dakota and Ojibwe tapped maple trees for sugar, harvested wild rice and hunted the abundant game. Many of them cultivated crops and lived in villages, like the Europeans. They were careful stewards of the land, reseeding rice beds and maintaining healthy soil through controlled burns, just as state agencies do today.
For the Dakota and Ojibwe, this already was the land of the free. (For differences between the tribes, see "Ojibwe or Chippewa,
Dakota or Sioux?'' below.)
In the 19th century, the rocky lands of Norway and Finland were a bad place to be poor.
Since the Middle Ages, Norway had been Denmark's doormat, a remote province whose own national identity, language and culture were suppressed during a time playwright Henrik Ibsen called the "400 years' night."
In 1814, Norway declared independence and adopted a democratic constitution, though it wasn't really independent until it shook off ties to Sweden in 1905. Meanwhile, its population was increasing, mostly squeezed onto the slivers of land that could be cultivated. Farm mechanization pushed out landless laborers, and a rigid social hierarchy gave them no chance to improve their lot.
It's hard to imagine life without the Germans.
When they crossed the ocean, they brought hot dogs, potato salad and beer gardens. Thanks to them, we have Christmas trees, kindergartens and fairy tales.
Their traditions now are woven into the fabric of Upper Midwest life. To paraphrase the words of John F. Kennedy, we are all Germans.