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OLLIE OLSEN: We came in 1883. Yeah. Yeah, we left Norway on a coast steamer and went to a place called Hamburg in Germany. And then we crossed Germany by rail to Bremen. And when we got to Bremen, our boat was loaded. We couldn't get on there. So we had to stay in a hotel there one whole week, waiting for a different boat.

A lot of immigrants came by sailboat. We were fortunate we had a steamer. The sailboats would take several months sometimes to cross the ocean when they got bad winds. I remember especially one time everybody leans to one side of the boat, and we was afraid going to tip. we thought a man had gone overboard, but they were all excited over a school of porpoises that were playing around the boat.

It was crowded. We had a lot of immigrants. We had a very small space. And we had to eat in our rooms. In the earlier days before that, everybody had to bring their own food along, but we were fortunate to find this food on the boat.

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We'd been on the ocean for a couple of weeks, a whole month, coming here. And my brother was 2 and 1/2, and I was 4 and 1/2. And we hadn't had a drink of milk during the whole trip, so we each stood with a cup in our hand, waiting for Mother to strain the fresh milk into our cups. I can still taste that warm milk, how it would have tasted.

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SPEAKER: A Sense of Place, a documentary series which looks at regions and regionalism in the state of Minnesota, produced by Minnesota Educational Radio under a grant from the Minnesota Humanities Commission. This program is called Prairie People, River Folk, and Denizens of the Big Lake Region.

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How good it tasted, the milk, the freedom, the new world of opportunity, and how rugged they must have been, those pioneer people, that after 90 years, some are still alive to tell about it. Ollie Olsen at 94 lives alone in his home in Fargo, North Dakota. He shares with us his recollections about life on the Prairie from the 1880s on.

Dr. Hiram Drache of Baker, Minnesota, is a scholar, professor of history at Concordia College at Moorhead, and author whose research in the development of frontier farming and the agricultural economy offers special insights about the process by which the great treeless, fertile, stoneless Prairie was plowed, planted, and became a prized wheat-growing region whose golden grains are now nourishing millions here and also in countries across the ocean.

HIRAM DRACHE: Land. Land was the great opportunity. The farms were small in the European scenes. And many of these could not make a go of it there, and they wanted to stay in the countryside. I think we all know that there's a natural urge on the part of man to be close to nature.

OLLIE OLSEN: He was a sailor. And he was the second boy and the oldest boy. He had a right to the farm, and he had no way of making a living except sailing. So he didn't like sailing, and he didn't like to serve the king every year so many months drilling, and so forth. So he came here and then piled on a homestead.

HIRAM DRACHE: He saw that 160 acres of land promised by the United States government under the Homestead Act as the pot at the end of the rainbow. He wanted this. And he was prepared to come to the United States and come to the New Frontier and take the risk necessary to have a better opportunity.

OLLIE OLSEN: He came from a mountainous country where I was born. The water splashed up on the windows when the wind-- the salt water splashed on the windows when the wind was high. So we were right on the ocean, and the mountain's right up behind us in Timber. So it was a great change for them to come to a prairie. They had a song in Norway, Minnesota, Dakota, Nebraska. [LAUGHS] You had to either go to one of those three places, they thought.

HIRAM DRACHE: Many of these people were encouraged to come to America by immigration agents who were in the European scene at this time. The Northern Pacific Railroad, which covers this region from Duluth to the Pacific Coast along the northern part of the United States, had 1,500 agent alone in Europe. And these agents did a very good job as far as selling the area.

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SPEAKER: Minnesota poet Rose Muckley in "An Anthology of Minnesota" verse, published in 1934, inspired by "Largo" from Dvorak's New World Symphony.

A homeland loneliness descends on him, the midland pioneer.

In alien lands where sweat of autumn days are tears that dim an inner seeing,

Weary Hulk, he stands, backed up against the sky.

The sinking sun scoops out a dizzy path behind the furrow empire,

Where Mississippi waters run and badgers and coyotes leer and burrow.

His night brings homing needs,

The spell in things of woman's giving.

For him, a new world springs.

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OLLIE OLSEN: We had many bad years. My father was a carpenter, and he managed to work in town and help build buildings and earned little money that way, or else we'd have been gone like the rest of us that were moving out with covered wagons day after day.

HIRAM DRACHE: If they had known, they probably would not have been so eager to come here. We sensed this in the fact that by 1890, there were large migrations of people leaving the area, going back to the established areas or going to some other places where they thought would be better because, in a sense, the region had been oversold.

OLLIE OLSEN: I remember Father worked in town, and he'd walk home 8 miles every Saturday night. And Mother used to have a lamp standing in that deep window. He wouldn't get home until about 11 o'clock. I guess he worked till 6:00 and then had supper. 8 miles took him quite a long time. I was always asleep when he came home, but Mother always sat up with a lamp in the window because when they came home, they came across the Prairie. There wasn't any roads to follow. Just watch for the light and head for the light.

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SPEAKER: For some, particularly the women, that single lamp in the window did not shed enough light to ward off the threatening darkness of the Prairie. Ole Rolvaag's classic novel Giants in the Earth portrays Beret, the sensitive wife of Per Hansa, a woman who never wanted to come to the frontier and who sank deeper and deeper into depression as winter took hold of the region.

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"The days wore on, sunny days, bleak, gloomy days, with cold that congealed all life. There was one who heeded not the light of the day, whether it might be gray or golden. Beret stared at the earthen floor of the hut and saw only night around her. Yes, she faced only darkness. She tried hard, but she could not let in the sun. Ever since she had come out here, a grim conviction had been taking stronger and stronger hold of her. This was her retribution."

OLLIE OLSEN: It was awful hard for the women folks, hard to get the right kind of stuff to cook. Tried to raise a garden, and they'd dry out too. And the grasshoppers ate a lot of it. We had grasshoppers that would eat the carrots out of the garden and left a hole in the place where the carrots had stood. Mother never liked it there. She just dreamt of Norway. Every night that she slept, she says she dreamt of running up and down those mountains. [LAUGHS]

HIRAM DRACHE: I recorded the story of four women who went the way of mental sickness, died earlier in life than probably they should have if they had not had to go through the burdens. And I can think of some of these. These are names that are prominent in the Red River Valley area even to this day. As one of the sons of one of these ladies said, he said, as I was sitting holding my mother's hand when she died at the age of 55, that she was grist of the frontier's mill. The frontier then, to him, was a grinding sort of situation that took women down. Another individual pointed out that success here was only possible because of the unpaid labors of women and children.

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OLLIE OLSEN: We lived in a framed house with sod on the roof and sod all around the walls on the outside to protect it from the storms. And the Prairie fires would come along and burn the weeds off the roof. And we'd come out like the gophers and be all right. The house wouldn't burn with all that sod on it.

HIRAM DRACHE: What do you think it must have been like living in a one-window sod house?

OLLIE OLSEN: We had a very small house, about 12 by 14. And Dad made a bed for them, and they put a drawer under the bed. The brother and I pulled it out and sleep in that. And when they got a girl, they hung a box over the bed so it was a three-story bed.

HIRAM DRACHE: One woman in the area south of Fargo made a comment that every time it rained, Mother had to take the clothes and the bedding outside and hang it up to let it dry out because it wouldn't dry out inside. Another woman made the comment that in eight years of living in sod houses, the roof only leaked once, and that was during a terrific downpour. The sod house was probably more comfortable in both winter and summer than were the wooden houses.

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OLLIE OLSEN: They really were long winters. There wasn't any skating. There was no ice around where we lived, no hills, so we couldn't ski, just flat prairie, no trees. We just sat in the house, I guess, and listened to the wind blow.

HIRAM DRACHE: These people were dependent upon nature. And they were dependent upon the whims of nature. And no doubt, they did a lot of praying. They certainly did some mass praying in Minnesota for the grasshopper plague back in the '70s.

OLLIE OLSEN: That big blizzard in 1888, 12th day of January, that was a famous blizzard. About 60 people in South Dakota lost their way and died. I remember one of our neighbors went out after straw. We all burned straw in the wintertime.

He's only 40 rods from the house, and he loaded his straw and then the snowstorm struck and he unhitched his horses and let them loose. And he headed for the house and they headed for the barn. And he never found his way. And the next morning, the horses were standing by the barn, so if he'd got on their back he'd have come home. He laid in the field near the house. And the woman had to burn up all the furniture in the house to try to keep from freezing to death.

HIRAM DRACHE: There are many stories of fires that went for days on end. Took haystacks, took buildings, everything in their way. In areas where there were scattered homesteaders, they had to plow rings around their homestead place. And here is another one of these, I don't know, do we call it apathy, or one of these things that people overlook so much. They knew the danger of the fire, they knew it could get them at any time, and yet they left their fire rings, and their firebreaks deteriorate and get grown over again so that the fire would jump.

OLLIE OLSEN: We used to have such hot nights there. We'd take a sheet and go out on the lawn and lay down in the lawn and sleep at night outside. It was terrible hot.

HIRAM DRACHE: They could not have made it without something spiritual to turn to. And it was the spiritual strength that was necessary to pull them through.

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SPEAKER: Faith in God sustained the prairie dweller, and the knowledge that a gentler world lay not too far to the East. After all, French explorers had begun charting the Minnesota waterways as early as 1618. Trade settlements along the shore of Lake Superior had been ports of call ever since. Minneapolis and Saint Paul were burgeoning metropolises, and to the South, cities like Winona on the Mississippi were already centers of commerce and culture.

What of these other people, those whose journeys ended on the shores of Minnesota's water highways? Whose economic and psychic resources would be forever influenced by the body of water dominating their landscape. In Winona, three academic humanists came together to explore the matter. Paul Grau, assistant professor of English at Winona State College, and brother Raphael Erler, Professor of English at Saint Mary's College, talk about the historical relationship between rivers and plains.

PAUL GRAU: I think that when you go back in history you have to realize that there were a lot of things uniting the prairie and the river in this area. We made that border distinction. But I think that the biggest distinction that the people say in the 1850s or 1870s felt was that the river area was settled already, was the older civilization almost. Whereas the prairie was this vast big expanse that nobody was in. So in Ole Rolvaag you find them coming from Fillmore County, which is just down the river here about what 20 miles.

And Barrett looks back on Fillmore and Houston counties as civilization, and she's so upset by this vast expanse of prairie where she doesn't know what anything is. On the other hand, her husband sees the prairie as this great big open kingdom for him to settle, and thought of Houston and Fillmore counties as too populated. You couldn't make a go of it there, prices were already too high there.

RAPHAEL ERLER: The connection as Paul is saying between the river and the prairies, I think, is very close there, because even when the railroads came, they were up this far and they debated a long time on whether to run the railroad out on Highway 43 now or out the way the territorial road went, and eventually went up through Minnesota city and across that way.

And the idea was the most economical way to get out to the prairie, because what they wanted was the wheat grain shipments. And even as he's saying here with Ole Rolvaag, the parallel in Hamlin Garland's father, thought of the prairies they look across the river at the big bluffs, and know the prairies were beyond and that's what he wanted. And the mother wanted to stay where she was largely because of his family.

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PAUL GRAU: The river was very often settled in this region by Yankees. I think that was really the first group. Whereas when you read somebody like Ole Rolvaag, you had a feeling that the plane was mainly inhabited originally by early first generation immigrant, often from Northern European countries.

RAPHAEL ERLER: Something like my Antonia too.

PAUL GRAU: Right. It just happened that the river towns got to be very rich. And I think civilization in the terms that we normally think about it is a matter of having a certain extra to put into it. Now Winona here was a great lumber town, has a great many millionaires who brought in these people. And we drew our wealth in part from the prairie. If we were the fourth largest grain exporting city in the world, where did we get it?

Nobody got rich, I don't think, in Winona simply by working with Winonans. They got rich by taking lumber as far up the Black River as you could get it and floating it down here, and similar things. Lacrosse, of course, has the same old aristocracy that we do. And similarly this wheat trade was taken from straight West of here all the way out to Mankato.

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One thing that I've heard, and this may or may not have any truth to it, is that right down along the river anyway, one thing that spoiled the woods were the steamboats, which needed fuel, and anything that was near the river was being cleared for that almost continually. And so there's still a lot of places that should have good woodlands that don't.

RAPHAEL ERLER: Of course, that's ironical too because Winona grew up because I think the fellow's name was Orin Smith, was a captain of one of the riverboats. And he left off two fellows, one of his name was Johnson, we have Johnson Street here. He left them off here on the shore to stack up wood, so that when they come back again downriver, they have more fuel.

But as you're saying here, they were in rating the shorelines for lumber. I suppose you could stretch it a bit and say, well, if they didn't do that, we wouldn't have Winona, I bet you they're going to sat that.

PAUL GRAU: I think that's almost a metaphor for the whole region. In many sense people exploited the region. But without this exploitation on both the massive scale and an individual scale, we wouldn't be here. It was just a huge, untamed, very dangerous place to be. And people didn't come out here who weren't desperate one way or another.

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SPEAKER: William Gaudreau, chairman of the English Department at the College of Saint Teresa, is a poet whose childhood was spent in New England. He's lived in Winona for 15 years, and only recently has he been able to grapple in his writing with the influence of the river, on himself and on the community. The following are some excerpts from his verse play, Reverie for a River Town.

WILLIAM GAUDREAU: Here's a lady from an old family, obviously from Winona. My father was born in this town and died in this town, and I'm not going to let just anybody come in here and dictate what goes up and what goes down. I'll probably die in this town too. But I've been around, I've lived, let me tell you that.

These are not Jerry built homes. Just look at them. Go inside. Look at the size of the rooms. The woodwork, the moldings. Look at the high windows, the fine glass, the tiles, the wide stairs, life. Then a girl comes along and says, I have no intention of staying here. I am leaving, mother. I am leaving for New York City to pursue a career in the dance. And then I have characters coming in and saying they're going to leave the town.

Then there's an old man he says, I'm not sad when the river speaks to the old schools and the tumbledown churches. I am not sad when the river steals clean slabs of lumber and sends them to the sandbars and the herons. Or when it remembers how it was when it first thought to carve a valley, and then a deep valley exposing the limestone ribs of the world to the flicker in the sun. I dream of less than that, and I care for less than that.

A man in shirtsleeves says at one point, I wonder if it would be possible on any other evening to look out over the river from my front porch in any other season and see the pearl light spread so evenly on the wide expanse of the Mississippi, and think the sun on the river a heart driving blood through human veins.

My old man says another little speech. He says a river moves in our blood ferrying bits and pieces of what we will become. It transports the companions of our past, their faces, their shaken voices. It brings us forests of sleep and shells of moonlight. It carries us over the wrinkled skin of the state. It carries us under Isles of Elms from the river towns into the heart of the world where storms and seasons are the passions of love.

And then, well, you have these characters. These are types, of course. The banker, you see if we lower the interest rates on loans for the riverfront property we are certain to realize a sizable profit in no time at all. And you hear a voice, male voice, coming and saying, well, just pour it into the river. And then a clergyman, we have gathered here today to pay homage to the river without which we could not claim our comfort and prosperity. And another voice says, well, just dump it into the river.

And the Congressman, it is with great humility that I cut this ribbon which will open an efficient bridge linking us to our sister state one more point along our common river border. And another male voice says, well, just flush it in the river. And a female voice says, no, not here dear. Do it in the river. And this ends with a choral prayer to the river.

River moving without us, take us home. Bouy us outward into the cool still surface of your flood. Let us read the silver green dawnings of your mist. Let us number the matte red barns gazing on your changing body. Carry us into growth as you carry crops of apples and corn to gold maturings. Fill us with refreshment as you water cattle and bees. Turn us into your widenings to think beyond our gardens and our streets. Let our minds stretch to touch at once each of your shores.

River, let your spring floods drench us with a sense of our first needs. River, teach us to stand up and speak in your lightning voice. In your herds of tumbling clouds, in your merciless summer rains. River of reason, lift us so your moonlight throws meaning on our dreams, feed us, house us, clothe us, with your longing to move beyond our levees, dams, our stone and iron bridges, to reach an April field.

Feed us, house us, clothe us, with your longing to move among the wings of hawk and teal, to mingle with the highest winds and deepest clouds. River feed us, house us, clothe us, with your longing for the never seen, for the ever changing, for mystery. River, feed us, house us, clothe us, with your longing. And then the girl sings in the background, silently, silently we let it slide by, taking from ourselves the mirror of the sky.

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SPEAKER: Another sky mirror, emotion mirror for Minnesotans, is the big lake, Lake Superior. Fierce, icy, raging, or calm, inviting, and waiting. How it is is how it was. Oh, the type of power used by a Lake Superior boat is frequently a little more sophisticated now than it was in the old days. But essentially, the people who set out in them are pretty much the same.

SPEAKER: Well, I can remember one thing I had to do quite a bit of and that is, when some of the larger boats came in and couldn't get into the dock I'd always have to take the boat out and take the supplies off, and roll those into shore. Sometimes I'd have to take fish out of the boat. More often I seem that I got the job of taking the supplies in.

This may seem odd but some of the things I really look forward to is the tugs and scows used to come in and load gravel. And there was the beaches just belonged to everybody. I mean, the owners weren't there to check on it, and so these gravel scows would come in and they might have a piece of pie or something for you or something. That was exciting for a kid.

SPEAKER: When I was a kid, I had to go out in an open skiff with my father. In those days he used to use great big rocks for anchor stones, and many a time I was petrified out there. And I think it more or less left a fear of the lake for me. And now the only time that I really care to go in the lake is when it's nice and calm and not too far out.

SPEAKER: I went sailing when I was 15 years old. So it was a job then, and I liked it. So I stayed with it. I started on the Great Lakes and then I went to deepwater ocean in World War II. And in 1946, when the war was over with, I came back on the lakes, and then I subsequently became a master.

And in 1959, when the seaway opened up, having had the experience of being out in deep water and having worked with pilots out in, well, all ports of the world that I entered and left, I liked it.

SPEAKER: I'll tell you, the longer you've lived by that lake, the more sensitive you are about any changes that take place, anything that's going to hurt the lake. You have a much greater sensitivity than somebody just coming in here and they didn't know what the lake was like before, and they don't even know what the lake is like now.

SPEAKER: He turned out to be a great help to my father. We were more like boys than girls because we had to go out in the lake and help him set nets, and take them in, and reel them up, and split fish. And when I went to high school, we used to sit up until 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning and fillet fish for him.

SPEAKER: That's very familiar to me. And I look at it as my friend. And I always look at it as a challenge too. And once in a while, if you get complacent, the lake will rise up and kick you in the tail too. Keeps you on the ball. You got to watch your weather. You got to watch the existing conditions. You've got to constantly be aware that the lake is not totally yours and you share it with other ships. And other ships have a tendency of meeting each other once in a while.

SPEAKER: There's always been a certain aura of mystery, because as much as Americans and Canadians have encircled the lake, there are segments of it, which are very sparsely settled today or segments which have been bypassed. Also, of course, American civilization has used areas and then passed on, leaving these areas to revert. And there is a certain thrill of discovering vestiges of a former civilization.

SPEAKER: Maybe I should quote a tourist that came here for many years. And he said, something about he said that lake, he said there's just nothing like it in the world he said it has, mood and grandeur, he said, and it's always changing.

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SPEAKER: You become attached to clusters of images, to objects, to things. And they've become more than what they objectively are. And a region, a place, becomes an inner landscape, it becomes an inner world. That is as soon as, if you can't relate it into your own interiority, your own interior life, then it is only local color. But when it becomes part of a moral landscape, or a visionary landscape, then it is what it is, but it transcends itself.

SPEAKER: Rose Macaulay's poem from An Anthology of Minnesota Verse, The Times publishing company of Saint Cloud. Giants in the Earth published by Harper Brothers, modern classics edition. Music from Dvorak's New World Symphony, the ABC Music Guild series. A Sense of Place was written and produced by Claudia Daly for Minnesota Educational Radio, under a grant from the Minnesota Humanities Commission. Engineering by David Phelan.

[DVORAK, "NEW WORLD SYMPHONY"]