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| Erling Rolfsrud kept neat scrapbooks and documents of his family history. |
We hope our relatives in Norway will enjoy reading this, along with others. It's a lengthy post, but we wanted to make a searchable public record of the life of this remarkable ancestor. If you Google "Nils Rolfsrud" this should now come up.
(Thanks, Kathleen, for typing it.)
Nils Halvorsen Rolfsrud -- 1878-1920
Nils Halvorsen Rolfsrud was born on the Rolfsrud "gaard" near Sigdal, Norway, on October 6, 1878. His parents were Halvor Eriksen Rolfsrud and Ragne Nilsdatter Blekeberg.
Shortly after his fifteenth birthday, Nils was confirmed by the district minister, Gustav Hartman. After further study in the Sigdal gymnasium (comparable to a high school), Nils went to Christiania (now Oslo) and studied at Otto Treider's commercial school. Completing this, he obtained a job as an office messenger boy.
Since wages were small for a messenger boy, he next took a job as a clerk for a merchant in the factory district of Drammen, Norway. He now earned wages as well as room and board. Of his work there, he later reported in Sigdalslaget "Nothing came already wrapped, but everything was in bulk. So it was to run from the flour barrel to the syrup can and from the syrup can to the sugar barrel. Everything had to be either measured or weighed.
"There came, for instance, a worker from the factory one day who wanted three herring a measure of coffee, and five liters of potatoes. And then the potatoes had to be of good size. If there were a large 'top' on the measure, then the woman smiled widely and gratuitously so that one could easily have eaten dry lefsa just by looking at her.
"The merchant himself was a querulous person, and he gave the poor helpers many unkind words for the wrong they did and for the wrong he expected they would be doing. So none remained with him for long."
Nils next earned a living by means of a lumberman's axe and a lumber raft. (He had doubtless learned how to handle these on the Rolfsrud gaard which even today includes an extensive tract of commercial forest.)
Then in the summer of 1900, Nils and his cousin Helge Lindbo emigrated to America. They disembarked from a train at Wendell, Grant County, Minnesota on an August evening. They sat with their luggage on the station platform through the night. They had neither friends or relatives here in the "Promised Land." They could not speak English.
When morning came, a Norwegian farmer came upon them and learning that the two young immigrants wanted work, he asked to see their hands. Lindbo's hands were calloused from working in the woods in Norway up until the time he left; Nils had been at home---and his home was upper class by Norwegian standards of that day---so his callouses had softened. He was, therefore, not hired.
Later, however, Nils found employment in the harvest fields. Harvest in those years was from sunup until sunset, and the pay was about $1.50 per day with board. Harvest hands slept in barn lofts or strawstacks.
Beginning in September, 1900, both Nils and Helge found employment with Mr. O. Pikep. Pikep had been a childhood chum of Nils' father. He was known as a "big" farmer, having four sections of land in one block about ten miles west of Elbow Lake, Grant County, Minnesota. He operated with a steam engine and thirty horses. He had come to America in 1868.
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| Hired man, Nils Rolfsrud, in Pikep parlor, 1900. Nils is the man without a tie. |
When winter came, Nils and Helge tended cattle for their food and lodging. One winter, Nils drove a school bus, and both Nils and Helge attended a night school so they could learn the English language.
From Minnesota, they later made their way into North Dakota. Helge Lindbo eventually homesteaded in McHenry County. While working at Grand Forks, North Dakota, Nils met his Rikka. Rebecca Johanna Heide was then working either as a house maid or as a hotel chambermaid or waitress. The two were betrothed.
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| Rebecca Heide |
In 1903, Nils and a friend, Alec Anderson, rented horses at Ray, North Dakota, crossed the Missouri River by ferry into McKenzie County. Here Nils established his homestead in the fall of 1903.
At this time, the law stated that a man and his wife could file on only 160 acres jointly. If they filed separately before marriage, each could obtain 160 acres. This is what Nils and Rikka decided to do.
While working together as hotel maids in Grand Forks and Minot, Rebecca Heide and Jennie Brevness (later to become Mrs. John Skaar) had become close friends. In 1904 they traveled from Minot to Ray by rail. They met Nils Rolfsrud, Pete Tanneberg, and Alec Anderson there. From Ray the five of them journeyed by wagon to McKenzie County, crossing the Missouri by ferry.
Rebecca and Jennie filed on adjacent claims. Since it was not required that a homesteader live the entire year, Rebecca and Jennie later returned to Minot to work, temporarily. Nils also worked as a farm laborer and particularly as a harvest hand.
After they were married in Minot by the Reverand Nicolay Nilsen, Rebecca and Nils set out for their homesteads in January of 1905. It was an open winter, with very little snow on the ground. But the Missouri River had frozen so they could drive across it with their wagon load of lumber. South of Ray they bought a cow, and led her behind their wagon.
Because there were no roads at the time, Nils and Rebecca four separate times had to unload their wagon, take it apart completely, then carry it piece by piece, put it together again, and load it in order to get across the river ravines and benches.
They headed for the vacant stone-built house on what had been the Manning horse ranch. Here they lived while Burt and Torsten Moe built a lumber shack on Rebecca's homestead. Meanwhile, her husband must also maintain his sodshack residence on his homestead just to the east.
To get mail (mostly letters from relatives in the "Old Country"), Nils would walk to the community of Banks (many miles to the west) and later to Berg, eight miles to the southeast.
To get coal, the homesteaders dug their own supply wherever there might be an outcropping. Once, Nils and his friend, Pete Tanneberg, set out to get a load of coal (at a mine two and a half miles east of the present Clear Creek Lutheran Church). The ground was frozen so the men dug under the surface layer of ground to get at the coal. Suddenly the ground above caved in upon them. Pete was completely covered and died there. Nils heard him yell for help, but he could not help his friend -- he himself was buried in coal and dirt up to his shoulders. He fell across a pick axe and a crow bar when the bank caved in. The tool handles squeezed his hip partly out of joint. One leg was broken so badly the bones protruded through the skin.
Fortunately for Nils, a neighbor, John Blegen, also came for coal and arrived shortly after the accident. Other neighbors then came and dug Nils and Pete out. John Blegen and Ole Ryan fashioned a splint for Nils' leg, laid him in a hay-filled wagon and took him to his wife's homestead.
They tried for four days to get a doctor for Nils. Finally, a doctor from Ray came down and he insisted that Nils be transported to Ray (forty miles to the north, across the Missouri). This so-called doctor studied a medical book, trying to learn how to get a hip back into joint. He would pull and pull on Nils' joint, succeeding only in worsening the condition. He did not expect that Nils could survive.
Pregnant Rikka took care of her husband in a single-walled leanto attached to the back of a saloon. They remained in Ray through the winter. While Nils' broken leg healed, the hip remained partly out of joint. For the remainder of his life, Nils had to wear one shoe with a built-up heel. He always walked with a cane.
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| Built-up shoe is exhibited in Watford City museum. |
Returned to her homestead, Rebecca gave birth to their first son, Halvor, on March 21, 1906. A neighbor woman from Banks served as midwife.
For several years, Nils worked as a land locater. In doing this, he helped people find land that had not yet been homesteaded. People would tell Nils what kind of land they would like, and he would direct them to such property. For this service he was paid five or ten dollars. It wasn't much income, but it was better than nothing. He could drive about in a wagon. Homesteaders who lacked cash for his fee would work on Nils' farm in payment.
To comply with homestead law, every homesteader had to have 12 acres of land plowed up. Very few homesteaders had equipment for plowing. So Nils went to his cousin, Helge Lindbo, at Deering, North Dakota, and bought four oxen. A friend helped Nils bring the oxen back to McKenzie County, a trip which took them an entire week. Nils hired a man to drive the oxen and handle a breaking plow. For about five years, until about 1911, Nils had a hired man working entire summers plowing fields for homesteaders. Two men that Nils hired for this job were Hans Lee and Gilbert Johnsrud.
In the spring of 1912, Nils hired William E. Van Dyke, a neighbor who had a large oil-pull Rumley tractor that could pull ten plows, to break up a large tract of land. Nils got the area disked, a lot of rocks hauled off, then seeded it to flax. That fall he had a bumper crop of flax.
When Nils had left Norway, he had a firm conviction that he would make big money in America and would return in three or four years. Out on the prairies, he had found life rather harsh. He yearned to return to the homeland and there buy a farm and live out his years.
Now with money from this bumper flax crop, Nils decided he would take his family to Norway. (His family now consisted of four children: Halvor, Agnes, Ragna, and Erling.) Rikka was eager to see her own people again.
So in 1913, after leasing his farm to Kittil Skavanger, Nils and his family left McKenzie County. An item in the McKenzie County Farmer informed readers: "Nils H. Rolfsrud and family left for Norway, Tuesday, July 29. They expected to sail from New York on Tuesday, August 5, on the Kristianiafjord, arriving at Bergen about eight days later. From Bergen they will travel by rail to their destination. A number of their friends gave them a surprise party on Saturday evening preceding their departure."
In Norway, the Rolfsrud family went first to the Sigdal area to visit relatives there. Later, Rebecca took the four children to Nordland where they stayed with the Heide kin, most of the time with Grandmother and Grandfather Heide on the island of Grytoi. Nils' father having died, Nils stayed with his mother during the winter. Land prices had risen in Norway, and Nils found himself unable to purchase a farm. He wrote to Rikka at Harstad that he felt they should return "to the fleshpots of Egypt" and Rikka then understood he was thinking they had better go back to America. Nils came north to Nordland, visited with Rikka's people for a while, and the family returned to America in 1914.
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| Erling (Stan's Dad) at left. |
Since Nils had leased his farm to Kittil Skavanger for three years, he decided to build a hotel in Watford City. It seemed an easier way for a cripple to make a living. Rebecca felt, too, that she could make money operating a restaurant in the hotel.
When the lease expired on the farm, the Rolfsrud family returned to it in the spring and lived there until fall. Winter months found the Rolfsrud children (now five) attending the school in Watford City.
From early times, the Rolfsrud home had become a stopping place for neighbors and landseekers. A pioneer Lutheran pastor, the Reverend J.I. Buckneberg, often held worship services in the Rolfsrud home, preaching in Norwegian.
He left his wife, Rebecca, 43 years of age; Halvor, 14; Agnes, 11; Rena, 10; Erling, 7; Hanna, 5.
