This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
After walking fifteen hundred miles through woods and forests, up hills and across streams, out over endless prairies, a man is entitled to take a rest under a tree and dream.
That’s exactly what Cleng Peerson did in the summer of 1833 on a hill overlooking the Fox River valley west of Chicago. Twelve years earlier, Cleng had become the first official Norwegian immigrant to America. Then, in 1825, he had returned to Norway to lead the first Norwegian settlers to a new home in western New York. Although the colony prospered, Cleng felt there was even better land to the west. He had walked to the Fox River valley from that colony in New York after the Black Hawk Treaty of 1833 opened up all of northern Illinois to new settlement.
In his dream, Cleng Peerson saw the untouched prairie sprinkled to the horizon with Norwegian houses and barns, amid fields of corn and herds of cattle. He interpreted his dream as a vision from God, and even compared himself to Moses on Mt. Pisgah looking across at the Promised Land. He named the place Norway, and a year later, led a group of the New York Norwegians here to found the first Norwegian settlement in Illinois.
Cleng Peerson, however, was more pathfinder than settler, and continued west, to the Mississippi River and beyond, always looking for more good land for Norwegians. To Wisconsin, to Iowa, to Minnesota and Missouri he went. In the end, he founded thirty-six separate Norwegian settlements along the Mississippi River and its tributaries. He traveled among his settlements, telling stories in return for room and board. Settlers would tell you that "work was not to his liking."
Cleng Peerson died in Texas at the age of 68, still looking for land for Norwegians. If he was part Moses and part Pied Piper, his blood also contained more than its share of that restless Norse folk hero, Peer Gynt, who wandered the earth. He had found thousands of acres for his fellow Norwegians, but for himself, in the end, only a piece of land six feet by three.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
