This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Had the famous Norwegian novelist and political orator, Bjornstjerne Bjornson, limited his American visit to the East coast as originally planned, the winter of 1881 would not have turned out to be the worst on record all along the Upper Mississippi Valley.
That winter, for the first time, the Mississippi River and lakes from Madison to Minneapolis froze before Thanksgiving and remained frozen into April. Unrelenting cold and snow isolated many small towns for weeks at a time.
Bjornson had come to America that fall to learn firsthand how a republic operated. Back home in Norway, he had spoken and written out against the monarchy and the Lutheran State church which he regarded as tools of the elite for keeping the poor in subjection. He envied America.
By December, however, he had decided to head west to Chicago and the Mississippi Valley in the role of teacher. He could not stand to see his poor countrymen who had emigrated to the Midwest still under the thumb of the Norwegian Lutheran church. They needed to be enlightened. He was also tempted by the hundred dollar speaking fees he was promised.
Early in January, Bjornson set up headquarters in Minneapolis, and planned a tour of most of the rural Norwegian settlements in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Then the blizzards began in earnest. He did reach a few towns, like Albert Lea, Minnesota, where complete ignorance reined, but for the most part, he was snowed in—in Fergus Falls, "a crude swinish hole," and for a week in Nora Springs, population fifty, and so on.
Winter only got worse. A few Midwesterners wondered what they had done to deserve such a curse. The Norwegian Lutheran pastors who had read their Bibles knew the reason. The free-thinker Bjornstjerne Bjornson, like the unfaithful prophet Jonah, had brought the storms. One of them suggested throwing Bjornson into the depths of the sea but allowed as how God would have a hard time finding a whale willing to swallow him.
I doubt that Bjornson caused the winter of 1881. On the other hand, after he left and returned to Norway that April, the snows soon thawed, and the ice on the Mississippi did thaw.
Rock Island Lines is supported by grants from the Illinois Humanities Council, the Illinois Arts Council—a state agency—and by Augustana College, Rock Island.
