[107] "and a large proportion of criminals," Nelson, _Scandinavians in the United States_, II, 117.
[108] _History of Waukesha County, Wisconsin_, 749.
[109] Bremer, _Homes of the New World_, II, 214-217. Miss Bremer relates how Mrs. von Schneidau "had seen her first-born little one frozen to death in its bed," and how Mrs. Unonius "that gay, high-spirited girl, of whom I heard when she was married at Upsala to accompany her husband to the New World ... had laid four children to rest in foreign soil."
Frederika Bremer, the famous Swedish traveller, visited both the Norwegian and the Swedish settlements in Wisconsin in 1850, and has left a very graphic and sympathetic account of the Pine Lake colony where she spent a few days.[110] She found about a half dozen families of Swedes. "Nearly all live in log-houses, and seem to be in somewhat low circumstances. The most prosperous seemed to be that of the smith; he, I fancy, had been a smith in Sweden ...; he was a really good fellow, and had a nice young Norwegian for his wife; also a Mr. Bergman who had been a gentleman in Sweden, but who was here a clever, hard-working peasant farmer."[111] At one of the houses she met twenty-one Swedish settlers. The failure of the colony, to Miss Bremer's mind, was not altogether due to circumstances; the settlers at first "had taken with them the Swedish inclination for hospitality and a merry life, without sufficiently considering how long it could last. Each family built for itself a necessary abode, and then invited their neighbors to a feast. They had Christmas festivities and Midsummer dances."[112]
[111] _Ibid._, 225; Unonius, _Minnen_, II, 6 ff.
[112] Bremer, _Homes of the New World_, II, 214.
Notwithstanding the hard life of the first years at Pine Lake, the letters from well-educated and well-known men like Unonius, especially those published in the Swedish newspapers, helped to stimulate a desire for emigration in Sweden. A company of fifty, from Haurida in Smaaland, left in the autumn of 1844, part of them going to Wisconsin, and at least one family going to Brockton, Massachusetts, and beginning the considerable Swedish settlement in that city.[113] In the following year, five families were influenced by letters from a Pine Lake settler, to leave their homes in Östergötland, and to set out for Wisconsin. At New York, however, they were persuaded, probably by Pehr Dahlberg, to go to Iowa, then just admitted to the Union, where land was supposed to be better than at Pine Lake, and could be had at the same price. The route followed was an unusual one for Scandinavian immigrants,--from New York to Pittsburg, down the Ohio River, and up the Mississippi. The location finally chosen was in Jefferson County, Iowa, about forty-two miles west of Burlington; and the settlement was christened New Sweden. To it many immigrants from the parishes of Östergötland found their way in later years. The second rural settlement of the Swedes thus established was, quite in contrast to the first one, distinctly successful from the start.[114]