Oregon Historical Quarterly/Volume 60/Review: West of the Great Divide: Norwegian Migration to the Pacific Coast, 1847-1893
For the Pacific Northwest, West of the Great Divide is a particularly interesting addition both to the literature on Norwegian immigration to the United States and to that on migration to this region. While the book's field is 'the West,' and it begins with Norwegian participation in the California gold rush and Mormon immigration from Norway to Utah, relatively few Norwegians immigrated to this country until after the Civil War. And though some prospected and mined in the Rocky Mountain gold camps of the 1860s and 1870s, it was the 1880s that brought larger numbers of Norwegians and Scandinavians to the coast and Pacific Northwest, connected now to the rest of the country by direct transcontinental railroads.
The author makes plain the importance of the railroads (and their land grants), Scandinavian language newspapers and Scandinavian businessmen in the United States in publicizing and locating settlers in the Pacific Northwest. Those Norwegians who moved into the area in the eighties and early nineties were largely farmers and workers from the Middle West; they were already partly accustomed to the new country, and aware of and shaped by the advantages and disadvantages it could provide for them as well as the freedoms they sought. They had read a good deal about the Pacific Northwest in letters of their countrymen published in the growing Scandinavian press of the Middle West. In addition, the papers carried ads placed by the railroads, which were anxious to promote Scandinavian immigration, and provided special excursion trains and rates to transport settlers to railroad lands. Acting for the railroads were American Scandinavian travel agencies: the largest, A. E. Johnson and Company with home office at St. Paul, sold over 200,000 acres of Northern Pacific land in Washington alone.
There were some Norwegians, sailors, shipbuilders, fishermen and businessmen, who came by ship directly from Norway to the West Coast. But for the most part, as one Northern Pacific land commissioner complained, it was impossible to move settlers to railroad lands "direct from abroad, probably because nine-tenths of all immigrants who arrive, do not possess the means to buy lands, or settle on lands." (p. 399)
The book is especially useful in placing Norwegian immigrants in their new western background, and includes information on the social agencies, churches, schools and societies, which they began to develop. How well they fit in the Pacific Northwest and along the coast becomes apparent. Many who came found forests, streams, fish and seacoast much like Norway's; and it appears they were acclimated toward the era which produced the 'Oregon System' even before they arrived. As part of the changing currents in the United States, the Norwegian and Scandinavian immigrants made contributions from their dual experience and of their times to life in their new homes. Simon Benson, for example, is still remembered here for many things—log rafts, 'polytechnic' school, hotel and drinking fountains—but his logging days were just begun by 1893, when this volume draws to a close.
The depression of the nineties put an end to the first sizeable movement of Norwegians to the West, but it falls at the end of perhaps a third of the story of Norwegian immigration to the Pacific Northwest. One can hope that a second volume will cover the effects of the depression and the period of the largest Norwegian and Scandinavian migration to the Pacific Northwest, 1900–1910.
The book will not disturb the historian's view on the relative homogeneity of Oregon's population, for example, as compared to California and Washington, nor need it disturb the regional view of the Pacific Northwest. Yet it suggests some further fields of study. The Norwegians, especially up to 1893, were a small group among the foreign-born in the Pacific North-
west. Perhaps this excellent volume will encourage studies of other foreign born groups in the region-for example, of the two largest groups in Oregon between 1880 and 1900—the Chinese and the Germans.
PRISCILLA KNUTH