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In Westby, Norwegians take their love of tradition to extreme heights.
The high ridges and deep coulees south of La Crosse drew so many Norwegian immigrants in the 19th century that the area around Westby became known as "America's little Gudbrandsdal,'' after the valley in Norway.
The Norwegians had left their homes, but not their customs. Today, Norwegian flags fly from lampposts, and the visitors center is a stabbur, a top-heavy wood building used in Norway since the Middle Ages. In May, the trolls and folk costumes come out for the annual celebration of Syttende Mai, the Norwegian constitution day. Norwegian-Americans and even Norwegians from Norway seek out its imports store.
The Cornish have been good to Mineral Point.
In the 1830s, skilled tin miners from Cornwall, England, came to southwest Wisconsin, replacing the rough frontiersmen whose "badger'' digs gave the state a nickname but the town an unsavory atmosphere.
"They'd start fights just for entertainment,'' says Lisa Kreul, a tour guide at the historic site Pendarvis. "Not until the Cornish came in 1837 did the town start to settle down.''
It took plenty of sisu to settle Embarrass.
It's the consistently coldest spot in the Lower 48; arctic blasts blow up against the Laurentian Divide and pool over the township, which set a record of 64 below in 1996. The soil is poor, allowing farmers to do little more than grow potatoes and raise a few cows.
The very word Embarrass is French for obstacle, and comes from French voyageurs' opinion of the local river: curvy as a corkscrew and usually too low to navigate.
Even in a region rich in ethnicity, the Dutch stand out.
In a town square in Iowa, lacy white hats shaped like pyramids, horns and half-moons bob high atop women's heads. Men wear black caps, breeches or baggy trousers and narrow bands cross at their throats. Their wooden shoes click and clack as they dance.
"These are the weirdest people I've ever seen!'' shrieked a little boy watching from the sidelines.
In general, I like my heritage. It involves Vikings and trolls and populist politics. At festivals, tow-headed children dance
around in cute outfits.
But the food . . . not so much. When it comes to herring and lutefisk, I'd rather be Polish. Plump pierogi with sour cream and
sauteed onions — now, there's an ethnic food I can love.
Luckily, it's easy to piggyback on other cultures in the Upper Midwest. Yes, many of us came from Germany, Ireland and Norway. But we also came from Greece, Ghana, Switzerland, Iceland, Scotland, Ukraine — and there are festivals honoring those cultures and those of the Dakota, Ojibwe, Cree and Ho-Chunk, who already were here.
First, an elf sashayed down the street.
Behind him marched adults in bunads, the traditional Norwegian folk costume, and two shaggy little boys wearing the long noses, beards and tails of trolls.
Baton twirlers, roller-limbo skaters, polka dancers, folk dancers, fiddlers, buglers and queens of all kinds followed, lobbing torrents of Tootsie Rolls and hard candy to the crowd along the route. My children thought it was the best parade they'd ever seen.
On a beautiful summer day in Milwaukee, history's underdogs were having a ball.
They were listening to pianists play Chopin. They were dancing an exuberant style of polka. They were tucking into pierogi and paczki.
Call it payback time for Poles.
Once, people went through hell to get to Stockholm, Wis.
It's different nowadays. It's only a joy ride away from the Twin Cities, and the streets of this pretty hamlet on Lake Pepin are lined with sports cars and motorcycles on weekends. There are shops, galleries, inns, a pub; it's the place to go for a room with a view or vroom with a brew.
In 1854, this bit of land at the foot of the Mississippi bluffs was the destination of more than 200 emigrants from the impoverished village of Bjurtjärn, Sweden. Promised "paradise on earth," they instead endured cholera, deprivation and betrayal.
Walking around Lindström, it's not hard to guess where the area's first settlers came from.
If the multitude of umlauts don't give it away, the herds of Dala horses and straw goats will. Factor in the giant white coffee pot in the sky, and you can be pretty sure this is Swedish country.
In the 1850s, poor Swedes came pouring into the lakes country west of Taylors Falls. It wasn't the best farmland, but it was cheap, and it looked like Sweden — lots of water, lots of trees and, unfortunately, lots of rocks. Still, it seemed like heaven to the peasants, and the letters they sent home brought more Swedes.
In the Upper Midwest, the Swiss are insignificant — in numbers. Not many left the Old World. But the ones who did have had more success transplanting their traditions than nearly any other immigrant group.
In the southwest Wisconsin town of New Glarus, Germanic platitudes unfurl in Gothic script on the plaster of half-timbered chalets, over window boxes overflowing with geraniums. A little baker hangs over the doorway of the Bäckerei, where glass cases display almond-flavored brätzeli and anise springerle cookies. The sign over the town fire department reads "Feuerwehrhaus," and Railroad Street is Bahnhofstrasse.
In the 1840s, the Swiss canton of Glarus, southeast of Zurich, had been hit hard by the Industrial Revolution and recession, and it couldn't support all of its weavers and cloth printers. So it formed the Glarus Emigration Society and sent two trustees to buy land in the New World.
In the 17th century, when Europeans began to flee religious and economic oppression, the New World was not an untouched wilderness.
In the wooded forests beyond Lake Superior, the Dakota and Ojibwe tapped maple trees for sugar, harvested wild rice and hunted the abundant game. Many of them cultivated crops and lived in villages, like the Europeans. They were careful stewards of the land, reseeding rice beds and maintaining healthy soil through controlled burns, just as state agencies do today.
For the Dakota and Ojibwe, this already was the land of the free. (For differences between the tribes, see "Ojibwe or Chippewa,
Dakota or Sioux?'' below.)
In the 19th century, the rocky lands of Norway and Finland were a bad place to be poor.
Since the Middle Ages, Norway had been Denmark's doormat, a remote province whose own national identity, language and culture were suppressed during a time playwright Henrik Ibsen called the "400 years' night."
In 1814, Norway declared independence and adopted a democratic constitution, though it wasn't really independent until it shook off ties to Sweden in 1905. Meanwhile, its population was increasing, mostly squeezed onto the slivers of land that could be cultivated. Farm mechanization pushed out landless laborers, and a rigid social hierarchy gave them no chance to improve their lot.
It's hard to imagine life without the Germans.
When they crossed the ocean, they brought hot dogs, potato salad and beer gardens. Thanks to them, we have Christmas trees, kindergartens and fairy tales.
Their traditions now are woven into the fabric of Upper Midwest life. To paraphrase the words of John F. Kennedy, we are all Germans.