Watching as the snow glided slowly to the earth, I wondered if the swirling white flakes would have reminded Swan Olson of home.
He’d crossed the Atlantic from Sweden to eventually find himself in southeastern Allen County by way of Illinois, trading wind-swept mountains for endless open plains.
It was a gambit Olson and others like Peter Hawkinson were willing to take, rather than perish in the agonies of famine.
However they must have wondered if they were doomed regardless, whether God had uniquely selected them for persecution given what followed.
For just five years after digging in and building a life for themselves along the banks of Big Creek, a Biblical plague of locusts descended upon the land, consuming everything in sight.
Swarming black clouds of the ravenous insects rose up to block out the sky, and it’s said they even ate the brooms used for sweeping cabin floors.
IT WAS after the locusts crawled from their eggs to wing away that for many the wandering truly began, the sojourn through the proverbial desert.
Some of the settlement Swedes walked clear to Fort Scott to dig coal for a living, a distance significantly farther than that of hoofing it to Humboldt for mail.
And they went everywhere else on foot, too, oftentimes without shoes, including to church, where caravans of people would often cross great distances together in a shared physical rite.
Between the Swedish cemetery and Friends Lutheran Church, I dreamed them there, chatting in their native dialectic as they strolled in a group of about 30.
In their overalls and calico dresses their banter resembled German enough that I was able to parse the occasional familiar word or two.
Perhaps they perceived the endless walk as a penance, I thought, an atonement for sin.
For as snow swept across the prairie through their ghosts, burning my skin with cold, every step became a means of purification.
… Like scaling an exposed cliff face.
OR PERHAPS these spiritual wanderers were simply as fierce and stubborn as their legendary Viking ancestors.
Continuing to put one foot in front of the other was simply what must be done to survive.
The querulousness of the early Swedes, however, seemed to bubble to the surface often enough that even a casual observer might notice.
