Karl Swanson Biography, Lincoln Co., SD This file contains excerpts and adaptations from book "Father's Pioneer Days" written by Mable, Emil, and Elmer Swanson and Phoebe Swanson Johnson in 1942 about their father Charley Swanson. Uploaded with the permission of Diane Johnson, , a descendent of Karl Swanson. Karl's descendants still live on the original farmsite and although the dugout is gone the location is noted and the log cabin they built next is still standing. KARL AUGUST SVENSON/SWANSON (b.19 Apr.1832 in Ljungs Parish Ostergotland, Sweden - d. 25 Aug. 1890 Lincoln Co., SD) and his wife CAROLINA GUSTAFSDOTTEN (b.2 Aug 1839 in Ostergotland, Sweden - d. 16 Mar 1932 in Rowena, SD) While in Sweden he built a bridge with sixty men working under him and paid them with cash. He also acted as clerk when some of the families sold their belongings and left for America. (His son Charley said Karl could figure quicker in his head than most men could with a pencil and paper.) They left Goteborg, Sweden in a sailboat and it took them three weeks to get to Chicago in the Spring of 1869. They; wife Carolina, Charley- 6, John- 3, and Annie- not quite 1 year old, lived in a little house in the outskirts of Chicago in a town by the name of Crete. Karl and a beeswarm of all nationalities of men dumped dirt with wheelbarrows on a new railroad bed. There was a creek nearby where Karl played with children who found goose and turkey eggs and floated them in the water. Carolina took Charley to school where he got acquainted with other children and quickly learned the English language. In the fall the family left for St. Paul, Minn. They, together with several other Swedes, rented a house by the Mississippi River. All the families cooked on the same stove. During the winter Karl got work clearing for the building of a railroad between St. Paul and Lake Superior. Large trees were chopped down and a road cleared wide enough so two-yoke ox teams could get through with skids holding four tons of provisions, which were piled up on high places along the way about ten to twelve miles apart. The sixty men were supposed to clear one mile each day. They got behind schedule and then they got double pay when they worked over-time. A cooking outfit followed the crew on skids pulled by oxen. The men were given tin plates which the cooks filled up for them. Their fare was mostly dried peas, beans, pork and meat. The men sat on the 4-5 ft. snowdrifts to eat, and sometimes it was so cold they had to keep their mittens on. After work at night they would smoke and talk. When they were ready for bed they would tramp down a place in a snow-drift large enough in which to prepare their bed. Then they would put some evergreen branches into this space and cover the branches with a blanket. This was their bed with another blanket as a cover and a little tent or tepee over it to hold out the snow. They would sleep with their clothes on. Their hair and whiskers would grow long at the camp, and in the morning some of the men were sometimes froze fast to the snow and had to be chopped loose with an ax. They would get so lousy they would have to boil their clothes. One of the men caught a cold and died. Karl was appointed to write and tell his family in the old country and send the money that this man had. It was thought that Karl conducted the funeral services. He was a gifted Christian man. While the way for the railroad was being cleared up toward Lake Superior, the Indians came around by the hundreds. They wanted to buy tobacco. The Indians had snow-shoes that some of the men bought from them. When the men got their pay and left, they had to look out for robbers. Two of the men were robbed. When a company that Karl was in left the camp, the robbers were after them later on a hand car on the track too, but they hid in the woods and outwitted the thieves. They found a man with his hands tied around a tree not as lucky. Karl wanted to homestead outside of St. Paul where Minneapolis is now located, but Carolina wanted to go to Lansing, IA where her brother, PETER NEWBERG, worked on a farm. When spring came and the ice on the Mississippi River was gone, the family boarded a steamboat and went to Lansing, IA. Karl's family moved in with another family at Lansing. Peter had a sweetheart, ANNA OLSON, and they would go to Karl's house for a courting meeting place in the evenings, then they would go out strolling. Anna and Peter soon married. Karl and Carolina, still young, and this newly married couple wanted to homestead. These folks started out westward in a covered wagon in search of a homestead, and each couple had one horse, one cow and two hens. They drove from Lansing across the prairie on through Storm Lake, Buena Vista county, to Sioux City, IA, and into Nebraska. When they had traveled two or three days into Nebraska, they stopped to camp near a creek. They ate and rested. Soon they noticed two covered wagons coming from the west. When the covered wagons came near, the people stopped and listened. They could hear that the camping party talked Swedish. A man climbed down from one of the covered wagons and went over to the camping party. They looked him over and stared. He was their old neighbor from Sweden! It was a joyous reunion. PETER NEWBERG knew him too. They talked and talked. They didn't drive any farther that day. This neighbor came from the west in Nebraska, and he told them that it was so hot and dry with drought out there, that they were moving away. Then Karl decided not to go further west, as he had intended to go out where this old neighbor was. Lucky they met. Karl's party turned around and went back to Sioux City with this neighbor. Here the party separated. This neighbor went east and our party went north. Our relatives never heard what became of this neighbor. Karl bought in Sioux City, a preemption claim, 160 acres of land, nine miles north of now Canton, SD, in Lincoln County, then Dakota Territory in 1870. When he paid for it he had $1.00 left and half a sack of flour. He did not have much in earthly possession but he did have a pioneer's courage, faith in God and a good will. A one room sod house was built on the land and a hay stable for the cow and horses. His land adjoined the Big Sioux River from whose timbered slopes he received wood to burn and build with. Karl farmed, at first using a scythe for harvesting. Twins were born in the covered wagon before the sod house was built who were Sophie (Mrs. AUGUST WESTLING) and David (who died within a year). They walked and carried his little body about ten miles to burial in a Norwegian cemetary across the River. (Now near rural Inwood, IA). The first winter Karl went to work chopping wood thirty miles south of Sioux City and left his family with half a sack of flour and a little corn. They used corn soup to live on. The earth from the sod had sunk down from the roof and Indians would come peering down into the sod house. Carolina kept an ax beside her bed. The Indians never hurt them. As years went on Karl would find beads and Indians trinkets where badgers had dug up Indian bones, yet with gristle on. Near springs, the ground was covered with buffalo skeletons, and buffalos were shot by the Missouri River. In the spring Karl walked home about 80 miles from Sioux City. It would take a week to go to Sioux City, to get provisions. There were two homesteads on the way, the one sod house built over the line of two quarters of land, and each homesteader sleeping in his end of the sod house. To keep prairie fires away, they plowed a furrow around their dwelling place, then they left a space of grass and plowed another furrow. The space of grass between the plowed furrows was burned and became a protection against fierce prairie fires. Wood thieves would steal wood from the timbered river. They came from the west prairie with wagons. Grandfather got forty acres more land through a timber claim. Two boys were later born, but died without a doctor, when each was about one year old, (they died in the winter and their bodies were first put out in a snow bank by the wagon to help identify their placement during the winter until the spring thaw) and were buried in a burial plot on JOHN JUEL's father's virgin land, about three miles south. They built a log cabin in 1872 near a spring. Mary and August were also born and were the youngest living of 9 children. From the river as the years went on, they received quantities of plums for sauce, grapes, gooseberries and chokecheeries. They swam, dove, boated, skated, chopped wood, trapped, fished seined, hunted, picked fruit and picniced about the river. The children drove three miles to school. When hearding cattle across the river the children would catch hold of the cows' tails when swimming across the river and thus be towed across the river. In 1888 America experienced its "first" Great Blizzard. The day started, as most blizzard days do, with very mild, spring-like conditions. By the afternoon the skies were blackened by heavy clouds loaded with moisture. The storm struck the Dakotas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, all the way down to Texas. The winds howled and the snow came down heavily as the temperatures dropped. In this era before modern, high-tech weather forecasting, people were caught off guard and many got lost and froze to death. When the great blizzard of 1888 came, in which so many people lost their lives and so much livestock died, Karl, PHILLIP JACOBSON and AUGUST NEWBERG were in Sioux Falls. MRS. RINGDAHL had invited the men in for coffee when the blizzard struck, where they remained until the black blizzard broke of its fury. They afterwards drove slowly from Sioux Falls across the country over the snowdrifts which were over the fences, the horses lunging up to get up on the snow drifts, breaking through, and then sinking down to rest. Some men had taken refuge during the blizzard under a sled box turned upside down. In the spring, frozen cattle were standing on high pillars of snow and ice. During the flood of the spring of 1888 when the river was about a mile wide in places with waves, the Banning Mill near East Sioux Falls came floating down the river. Son's, Charley and John boated out to it and tied it by its lighting rods to poles they had driven down into the Iowa side river banks. There were seasons of hard times, grasshoppers and drought. Karl would gather his family together on Sunday afternoons and read the sermon for that Sunday. He would send for books, written by colportorer (early evangelists), leaders and forefathers of the church, and read. He was a deeply spiritual and Christian man.