[160] Gronberger, _Svenskarne i St. Croixdalen_, 3 ff.
[161] Sparks, _History of Winneshiek County, Iowa_, III.
In the rush of gold-seekers into California after 1848 were many Danes and Swedes, who gave that State in 1860 fifth rank as to the number of Scandinavians; by 1890 these numbered about 42,000, of whom the greater part were of the two nationalities just named. Another frontier region which gained from the Danish immigration between 1850 and 1860 was the Territory of Utah, for the Mormon missionaries seem to have been particularly successful in Denmark, and nearly every convert became an immigrant. Quite in advance of their invasion of Dakota, more than 2,000 Danes had settled in the Mormon Territory, and ten years later Utah counted nearly twice as many Scandinavians as Nebraska, seven-tenths being Danes.
The increasing density of this Scandinavian population in certain localities,--what might be called its vertical distribution--is strikingly illustrated in both urban and rural communities. Chicago had barely emerged from the Fort Dearborn stage when the first Scandinavians walked its streets. Yet within two generations there were found inside of her wide-stretching borders more than 100,000 Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes of foreign birth, and enough of the second generation to give her more than 190,000, so that the city at the head of Lake Michigan was next after Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Christiania,--the largest Scandinavian city in the world.[163] By a similar calculation, Minneapolis would rank sixth or seventh.
[163] _Svenska Folkets Tidning_, Jan. 1, 1896, estimated the totals as follows: Swedes, 100,000, Norwegians, 62,000, and Danes, 35,000!
Rockford, Illinois, received the first of its signally prosperous Swedish colony about 1853; by 1865 the city had 2,000 Swedes.[164] The census of 1910 credits Rockford with 10,000 foreign born Swedes, and a total of Swedish parentage reaching close to 19,000. One of the west-central counties of Minnesota, Otter Tail, counted (1900) more than half of its 45,000 population of pure Scandinavian blood of the first and second generation of immigrants. Polk county, newer and farther north in the same State, reveals almost sixty per-cent of the same sort of population in a total of 35,000. For some of the still newer and more sparsely settled counties even larger percentages might be obtained.