short_takes

It's carved in stone that my grandfather, Hans Shellum, was born on Dec. 19, 1869.

Right month. Right day. Wrong year.

If he had been born in 1869, the event would have happened in Minnesota, and Hans would have been cheated out of a three-month transatlantic journey that started when he was just 5 months old.

But he wasn't born in Minnesota. He was born on Dec. 19, 1868, in Norway, and did, indeed, make the trip. His name is in the church books in Vågå and in the emigrant protocols in Oslo, along with his parents and six brothers and sisters.

When I first noticed the mistake on his gravestone, I thought, aha, those clever Norwegians pretended that he was born in Minnesota so he would become an instant citizen. If you're born here, you're a citizen here. But if that was the right explanation, Hans and his parents would have recorded the wrong birth date throughout his life, and they didn't do that.

As far as I can tell, the 1869 birth date appears just once, on his gravestone at the Albion Lutheran Church cemetery in Brown County.

It's carved in stone, and it's wrong.

I knew when I was a kid that homemade dandelion wine would cause trouble some day.

The Running of the Bulls

There's one significant difference between me and the people who go to Pamplona, Spain, to run through the streets in front of snorting bulls.

They're volunteers.

I wasn't. Neither was my sister, Ruby, nor my brother, Jim.

But the three of us ran the gauntlet many times on our way home from school. (Yes, it was one and a half miles through rain, sleet and snow. Yes, it was uphill both coming and going.)

The bulls were at the Helling farm, in a lakeside pasture at about the mid-point in our daily trek. They usually showed no interest in us as we walked past on our way to school; perhaps they were still dozing, standing up.

The return trip was another matter. Ordinarily, we would stop at the top of the Helling hill for surveillance. Where in the meadow were the bulls grazing? How far were the bulls from the fence and the road? Should we run for it, or try to sneak past the bulls?

Sometimes I would climb onto the handlebars on Jim's bicycle, and we'd barrel past the bulls, using the downhill slope to build speed. Once I had been dropped off on the far side of the bulls, Jim would race back to get Ruby. Regardless of the tactic we chose, the bulls, upon spotting us, would charge the fence, which was made of barbed wire hanging loosely on rotting posts. Sometimes the bulls burst through.

Then it was a foot and hoof race along a narrow dirt road. But author Ernest Hemingway, the populizer of Pamplona, wasn't on hand to record the scene

More than fifty years later, in the summer of 1998, I could still recall these scary encounters vividly. So, as I reached for Richard Helling's hand at a veterans hall in St. James, I said, "There's something I've been meaning to talk to you about...It's those damn bulls."

Helling listened to my story, but was not impressed.

"That's nothin," he said. "We had a steer that was meaner'n those bulls. We'd tease the steer and the steer would come up behind us, put his nose between our legs and throw us over the fence. Then we'd crawl through the fence and do it all over again."

"That was one mean steer."

Okay, so I got no satisfaction on the question of marauding bulls.

A short time later, I received from Richard Helling and his wife an elegantly designed booklet containing the Helling genealogy, which informed me that the Hellings make up a substantial branch on the Shellum family tree. He is my second cousin, once removed.

If I had known that while growing up, I would have sawed off that branch and used it as a club against the bulls.

Erik Haugen, a cousin who farms near the Sjellom and Sandbusgarden farms, where my great-grandparents were born, in Vågå: "My grandfather went one kilometer to find a wife. My father had a bicycle. He went two kilometers to find a wife."

Violet Brudelie, a prairie dweller near St. James, MN, whose husband's ancestors immigrated from picturesque Romsdalen: "Our ancestors came from some of the most beautiful places in the world. They had mountains. They had the ocean. Why did they settle in a place like this?"

Catherine Genevieve Brudelie>Trammell, after examining old Norwegian names in the family tree: "Where did you get these names? From a book?"

An Eye and an Ear for the Finer Things

While life on the farm was usually hard and dirty and often smelly, the pioneers and their offspring balanced the drudgery with an appreciation of the arts.

In Norwegian households, cooking was, of course, an art form, often intricate and laborious in design and exquisite to the taste.

My mother did it very well. In contemporary terms, her rosettes and scröller were to die for. I grew up believing that lefse, torsk, pickled herring, rosettes, scröller, fattigman and rømmegraut accounted for all of the basic food groups. The lefse, of course, had to have mashed potatos and cranberry relish rolled up inside.

Although my mother had only a third-grade education, she also read music and regularly played the classics on piano. On the piano bench she found relief from the incessant demands of cooking and cleaning in a house that had no running water or indoor toilet.

The music often brought relief to me as well - relief of a very different sort.

To an adult, even the craziest, peskiest rooster is not a problem. Just imagine the power line or tree branch is part of a goalpost, swing the foot, watch the feathers fly, and score three points.

To a boy of 4 or 5, dressed in shorts, however, a crazy rooster can be a menace, pecking furiously with a sharp beak that can tear up skin and draw blood from exposed legs. I don't remember a moment when we were free of crazed roosters. Sometimes they would chase me into the only available refuge, the outhouse, and then stand guard for hours at the door.

I would be trapped, but watchful for any flagging of attention among the roosters. If one or two wandered off even a few feet I would make a break for the house about 40 yards away. When I was safely inside, the soothing notes of Claire d'lun or other favorite pieces of my mother would wash over me.

It was while I was imprisoned by roosters that I began to appreciate that life can be most interesting when touched by absurdity.

This perspective served me well as a journalist. That was especially true when a sombre Indian medicine man suddenly appeared in South Dakota late in the 1968 Democratic presidential primary campaign, retreated to a mountain top near the huge Pine Ridge Indian reservation, and promptly had visions favorable to the prospects of Vice-President Hubert Humprhey. Having experienced absurdity in childhood, I was able to report that the medicine man was, in fact, an electrician who had been flown in from Los Angeles in an 11th hour effort to tip the political scales.

My great-granduncle, Frank Lee, revealed his aspirations more than his reality by naming his homestead Sylvan Borders, introducing a word that had not previously been in everyday, or even every year, usage in Lake Hanska. But then, many of the Lees were as handy with words as with a pitchfork.

This artistic bent finds its most enduring expression in some of the grave markers. Below, for instance, is the marker that Glenda Lee put up for her mother, my grandaunt Emma Lee, in the Lake Hanska Lutheran Church Cemetery.

Glenda, an only child, spoke with a lisp, was very shy because of it, and never married. But the marker she put up for her mother could not have spoken with more eloquence.

Mid-summer of 1857 brought an odd sight to Lake Hanska - two ox-drawn prairie schooners rolling slowly through the tall prairie grass from the east. One carried Torgrim Torgrimson, his wife Ingrid and daughter Sigrid, the other Thor Omsrud, his wife, his sister, and four children - Ole, Tideman, Guttorm and Iver.

Neighbors since childhood in Norway's Valdres Valley, they had started out weeks earlier from Rock Prairie, a Norwegian settlement in southern Wisconsin where they had lived for five years since immigrating by sailboat in 1852.

Since then, new Indian treaties had opened up lands west of the Mississippi River to settlement, and scouting parties had returned from Minnesota with glowing reports of the prospects. The Torgrimsons and Omsruds had decided to take the chance, as had many other Norwegian immigrants in Rock Prairie.

In a caravan of prairie schooners, accompanied by herds of cows, the pioneers headed northwest to Hudson, WI, where they crossed the St. Croix River and moved on to the Mississippi, where they stopped to rest at Gateway Park in Minneapolis. That's where the Great Northern Railroad depot would later stand.

While they rested, the party was offered an 80-acre, heavily wooded tract nearby for a modest sum. But the farmers had traveled to Minnesota to grow wheat, not to become city slickers, so they turned down the deal.

The Nicollet Hotel would later be built on the site.

As the caravan traveled on to St. Peter, some of the pioneers took their leave, steering their schooners toward previously chosen destinations. The Helling family, for instance, had its sights on Alamakee, IA. Travel over land was relatively easy because a severe drought had dried up many of the sloughs and ponds.

The Torgrimsons and Omsruds moved on to Lake Hanska, where the two families became the first

Norwegian settlers. The Homestead Act had not yet been enacted, so they staked out land claims on the shore of what would become Omsrud Lake.

Over the next few years, Torgrimson had a few encounters with Dakota Sioux Indians, whose reservation was not far away.

"The Indians were no problem to the Torgrimsons," their granddaughter, Venus Synsteby Simundson, wrote. "Grandma used to give them salt, pork and fresh bread when she had some. One time she refused to give the Indians some mush she had cooked, as it was all she had for her family. To show their indignation, the Indians took a pig as they left the place."

Once, while checking a trap line that ran almost to New Ulm, Torgrimson found an Indian woman with the carcass of a muskrat she had taken from one of his traps. She had carefully left the pelt where he would find it, and motioned that her family needed the muskrat meat.

He consented.

Another time, Torgrimson saved an Indian brave whose canoe had been capsized by floating ice on Omsrud Lake, a fortuitous act as things turned out.

When the Sioux uprising began in August of 1862, the Torgrimsons once again harnessed their oxen, Spot and Bright, put their two young children in their wagon and, with Thord Omsrud and his children, headed east. Omsrud's wife refused to go with them, and survived the uprising unscathed.

Those who fled had traveled only a few miles, to Linden Twp., when the oxen smelled the blood of a settler named John Armstrong, who had just been killed, and bolted. Amidst the tumult, a son was born to Ingrid Torgrimson, who would be named Martin. The families found refuge at the Ole Sorbel home on the shore of Linden Lake.

But provisions soon were running out, and Torgrimson recalled that he had left a barrel of flour as they were fleeing their Lake Hanska farm. He went back to get it.

"Reaching the house, he went upstairs to see if he could see his cattle, which were roaming wild on the prairie," his daughter, Gurine, later wrote. "He did not see any cattle, but in place saw a troop of Indians with war paint and feathers coming from Fort Hill."

"He thought it was of no use to flee. They had seen his oxen and wagon and would overtake him anyway, so he resigned himself to fate."

The lead Indian handed his gun to a companion, walked up to Torgrimson, grabbed him by the hair, and said, "pakke gee, pakke gee." Torgrimson took that to mean that he should leave, or he would be scalped.

Looking closely at the Indian, Torgrimson discovered that it was the one he had saved from freezing to death in Lake Omsrud, and had taken home and nursed back to health. The brave had since become a chief.

The brief confrontation over, the Indians left, and so did Torgrimson, who returned to his family in Linden.

Twenty-four years later, Martin Torgrimson married my grandaunt Kari Shellum, who had immigrated directly from Norway to the Lake Hanska area with her parents and six brothers and sisters in 1869. They

farmed for 20 years, then moved to Hanska, where he worked as an engineer for the public school. Later, they

retired to Spicer, a resort town on Green Lake in west-central Minnesota, where they ran a popcorn stand in the early 1930s.

From there, they reversed the journey of his parents, traveling to Wittenberg, WI, where they spent their last years in a nursing home. Both Martin and Kari were in their 80s when they died in the 1940s.

Because they didn't stay put, older members of the family have referred to them as "the wanderers."

Martin's older brother, John, also grew restless. Just two years old when he and his family narrowly escaped massacre by the Sioux, John eventually married Anna Brude, my first cousin twice removed, and farmed in Lake Hanska. In 1918, however, he and his wife decided they would rather grow oranges in California. So that's what they did.

In the summer of 1938, both died in the most mundane manner, in an auto accident in Los Angeles.