The importance of letters as a stimulus to emigration can hardly be given too much emphasis. There is a direct line from the first “pathfinders” who spread the rumor of America in books and letters to the “ordinary emi
grant” who, with more or less optimistic letters from America, attempts to entice family and friends to follow him.
A mill worker, Peter Nielsen, left his home in Køge, a town on the east coast of Zealand in the spring of 1884.20 In 1885, after a year in Iowa, he found work as a railroad worker in northwestern Missouri. He wrote letters to both his mother and his brother in Køge, and, while his letters to the former were brief and rather neutral in tone, he began a veritable campaign shortly after his arrival in the United States to convince his younger brother to emigrate to America. He sent the following direct invitation, one his brother Wilhelm could scarcely ignore, on January 6, 1886:
...You write that you are having a bad time at home, as I can well imagine, and I doubt that it will get much better. If I can find a good place for you over here, will you come over? And if so, send me your answer immediately. I think I can get you a job with the same man I work for. You can earn six kroner a day. You can save an average of 80 kroner a month, and you will live well... If you decide to come, you can just write to me and let me know when you will leave home and by which steamship line you will travel. Just think of such a journey as though it is a journey to Copenhagen, except that it takes somewhat longer, and if you come and don’t like it here, you can go home again; but I assure you that you will like America; it is a free country and a money country. You need never lack anything, as long as you are a bachelor...
Wilhelm Nielsen landed in America late in the summer of 1886. But the difference between the restless pathfinder, Peter, and the slower, “invited”
immigrant, Wilhelm, is apparent in the letters written by the two brothers
A page from the Copenhagen Police Emigration Records, 1886. At the top of the page there is an entry for Vilhelm [Wilhelm] Nielsen of Køge, 25 years old, a workman by profession.
to their mother in Køge. It soon became obvious that Wilhelm and Peter were to go separate ways in America. Wilhelm Nielsen tells his mother about his job in St. Joseph in this letter from February 15, 1891:
...I am a driver for a merchant here in town and drive almost all day and night... I am well, but have a lot to do because there is so much driving. I don’t have much time to do my work in. But it is a good position I have found: with livery and good vehicles, and everyone who knows me thinks that I am doing very well. It is certainly differ
ent from the tileworks: a funny thing for a farmer, and I think I will stay here for a while...
Wilhelm ends his letter with a telling characterization of his restless brother:
...Peter sends his regards, I have recently had a letter from him. He is in California in the town of San Francisco and is well. I did not hear from him for three months. I could have got him a job like mine; but he was afraid to take it because he doesn’t know anything about this kind of work, and, then too, he likes to be his own man. He doesn’t like to be tied down, and, true, that can often be unpleasant...
Danish emigration to North America culminated in the 1880s. Approxi
mately 80,000 Danes left their homeland during that decade, and one emigrant often drew another after him in a kind of chain reaction.
Lars Pedersen, the 17-year-old son of a smallholder, left his home in the village of Hellested on east Zealand in 1886 with a group of other young people.21 Their goal was Nebraska where many from the same area of Denmark had settled in the 1870s. Like Peter Nielsen, Lars used his liter
ary talents to tempt other family members to cross the Atlantic. Lars sent the following letter to his parents in Hellested from Minden in southwest
ern Nebraska on April 15, 1887:
...I can see from your letter that my uncle plans to marry, so I guess now he will never come to America, even though I think he has always wanted to. He has not had the courage to make a quick and definite decision to leave right away. It is not so wild and difficult in America as you may think back home. It is just as easy to meet honest people here as it is at home...
Fortunately, there were other members of Lars’ family who wanted to emigrate, for example, his younger brother, Hans:
...You wrote that you think Hans is too young to make the journey over here next spring. But he will be almost as old then as I was when I came over here, and if Rasmus and Ane leave in the spring, then he
This picture of Christian Feddersen’s farm in Nebraska told people back home just how successful he was in his new homeland.
could come with them right to where I am, I will do everything I can to help him.
I can understand how hard it must be for you to lose him; but we are not dead to you because we are over here. You will always hear from us, and when we are here, you can also expect that we will be able to help you from time to time. We couldn’t do that in Den
mark...
Over the next year and a half, Lars scarcely writes a letter without including a more or less clear invitation to his brother to emigrate. In the fall of 1888, his parents and Hans begin to give in to this constant pressure, and it must be admitted that Lars’ arguments are convincing. He comes closest to the central issue for Danish smallholders in a letter to his brother sent from Lincoln, Nebraska, on December 18, 1888. It was written in reply to his brother’s description of a harvest celebration back home:
.. .Yes, it is a wonderful time when you are young and have no one but yourself to think about - and don’t have to worry about the annual wage disappearing too quickly, so you have to tighten your belt for
the rest of the year. There is no question of being able to save any
thing, that I know only too well; but youth doesn’t last forever, and what to do when it comes time to marry? Now take, for example, all the young people you wrote about who got married back home last summer, what will happen to them? It is necessary, of course, for most to marry, but how shall they now support a wife and perhaps soon a whole family. Maybe they can find a house to rent and get work on the big estate, where they must work from early morning to late at night six days a week, and on the seventh there is enough to do at home. Maybe they can live that way for a few years, that is, if the husband can earn enough so that they have food from one day to the next; but that can’t go on forever. The husband will grow old and won’t be able to do his work, and what is he to do then: Yes, the Poor House, of course. That will be the best for him, they say. And, under ordinary circumstances, it is difficult for someone like us to avoid that back home. No matter how hard-working and economical he has been, he will have to have help from the parish at the end. I have not written this to tempt you to come over here...
Lars Pedersen provided here an unusually precise description of the condi
tion of the smallholder in Denmark, and brother Hans came to America six months later. Lars’ letter is also a good illustration of how emigrant letters can be a good source of information when compiling the history of Den
mark. The bias of the letter writer is perfectly clear, but this does not detract from the value of his information about the smallholders’ view of their own situation as the 1800s drew to a close.